Amazon’s Ring: Surveillance as a Slippery Slope Service

Abstract

Amazon’s Ring video doorbells allow users to easily see and talk with people in camera range over their phones, record and save camera footage to the cloud, and share videos of suspicious activity (Molla, 2020). Although Amazon markets the home security surveillance system and related Ring products (e.g. Neighbors social media app, home security cameras, mailbox sensor, and home surveillance drone) as consumer-friendly, smart home tools for deterring and reporting burglars and package thieves, the technology has been widely criticized. Most of the condemnation comes from privacy and civil rights activists. However, some academics and tech-company workers also have been critical. The strongest position is Ring doorbell cameras should be abolished. Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, declares that ‘products like Ring’ are ‘fundamentally incompatible with basic human rights and democracy’ (Ongweso, 2020). Surveillance scholar Chris Gilliard insists that some ‘technologies are incompatible with a free and equitable society,’ including Ring doorbell cameras (Oremus, 2020). An Amazon software engineer even claims, ‘The deployment of connected home security cameras that allow footage to be queried centrally are simply not compatible with a free society’ (Peterson, 2020). In the Science and Technology Studies (STS) tradition of the ‘modest scholar activist’ who is ‘openly partisan’ and intending to ‘stimulate social action’ (Woodhouse et al., 2002, p. 301), our goal is to document activist criticism and provide further conceptual justification for the research trajectory of what Frank Pasquale (2019) calls the ‘second wave of algorithmic accountability’. The reformist first wave approach focuses on improving technological