alt Hacker NewsSuper Bowl Ad for Ring Cameras Touted AI Surveillance Network
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Ring’s marketing is almost comically wholesome, but as soon as ICE learns that such a thing is possible they will for sure want to use it.
This interview with Forbes from a few months ago provides some extra details: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2025/12/05/how-sear...
1. Apparently what happens is that the AI scans the videos of surrounding cameras and pings the owner to ask if they can share the footage. So no video is shared unless the owner chooses.
2. Ring is indeed working on being able to detect people.
The answer is that most people don't care if it benefits them. My Tesla has 6 cameras recording full time when driving and parked, but it benefits me so I enable it. It saved me $1000+ (my deductible and possible rise in insurance rates) when someone hit my car while parked at Costco (they drove off but Sentry Mode caught them).
Most people don't care if they feel it helps solve crimes. I doubt it does 90% of the time though.
I'm actually probably going to start asking new friends if, when they invite me over, if they have a ring doorbell. I'm getting fed up with being recorded without consent just because I want to go visit someone. Fuck that.
I didn't see the commercial but had it described to me -- it seemed like a brilliant bit of whitewashing the "oopsie we just added more surveillance state!"
The proposed solution is lovely. And having the tools of the surveillance state available for things like a lost child or tracking a porch pirate or whathaveyou should be nice things we should be able to have.
But we won't get those nice things, but Big Brother will whether we like that or not.
No one at my party understood my horror. "But think of the dogs!?"
Unironically the most terrifying thing I've ever seen on TV. The use of dogs to convince people this is a good idea is so blatant.
For a while, someone in our neighborhood was going around and stabbing people's packages at our mailbox area on our street. Some of the neighbors wanted us to put a surveillance cam on our property because our place is right in front of the mailboxes. We told them all to fuck off, but promised we'd be on the lookout.
Turns out this deviant package stabber, surely a scruffy disgruntled man in his 40s who was likely on six types of meth, cloaked and operating in the shroud of darkness, was actually a mischievous raven. I'm glad we didn't expand the surveillance hell hole that has the US has absentmindedly embraced just to find the infamous package stabber was a raven. The neighbors, many of whom were screaming for blood, were incredibly let down when we shared what had actually happened.
Not super relevant, but funny. Also, fuck Ring.
Having safe neighborhoods is such an important factor to people's quality of life. If Ri by cameras can help achieve that it will be a benefit for society.
Fun fact: Lockheed Martin advertises the F-35 during football games, because even though most of the audience isn't in the market for massive government contracts, the people who are are watching.
I suspect the Ring mass surveillance ads are the same thing.