I Can't Stand to See You Crime

A growing surveillance network owned by Amazon. What could go wrong?

A man steps onto a porch and it is marked as Crime. A woman steps onto a porch, stopping to ring the doorbell, and it is marked as Crime. Two kids hurdle over a bush and quickly move out of frame. It looks like they are on a run. It is marked as Crime.

This is Neighbors, the companion app to Ring, Amazon’s camera-equipped doorbell system designed to “protect your everyday” through round-the-clock monitoring of the front porch and environs. Neighbors is the social network of choice for the propertied classes. It is where your most paranoid neighbors come together to share homemade surveillance footage and teach other the invaluable, distinctly suburban lesson that crime is everywhere around us, if only you have the eyes to see.

Here’s how it works: whenever the Ring doorbell detects motion, it begins capturing video and provides a notification to the user, who can review the footage and optionally share it to the Neighbors app. From there, other users can comment on the post in real time as well as, interestingly enough, share it externally to other social media platforms. Every post to the app is required to appear under one of five categorical tags: Safety (for “general environmental awareness”), Unexpected Activity (which used to be called “Suspicious Activity”), Crime, Lost Pet, or Neighborly Moment.

In my eighteen months or so of lurking in the Neighbors app—I don’t own a Ring doorbell, but you can join the app for free—I have never come across a Neighborly Moment post. No one shoveling snow for the elderly couple, no one recovering someone’s wind-thrown trash can from the street, no child saluting the flag, august and unwitting, believing for all the world that they are alone. None of that. People don’t come to this godforsaken app to feel good about or find the best in others. They come here to simulate the rush of calling the police on strangers.

Which is not to say that the crime that happens before Ring doorbells is not real. Sure it is. Plenty of videos in the Neighbors app depict thefts that you can imagine have real and, if not harmful, per se, at least burdensome effects. Most of the time it’s recently delivered Amazon packages getting stolen, but it’s also bikes, baby strollers, the odd umbrella, things like that. You have to imagine (it’s hard not to!) that it’s not a very good feeling to watch your own belongings being carried away without regard to your attachment to them. It probably sucks! You can almost—almost—begin to understand why a person might want to have one of these doorbells from Amazon around to keep an eye on things.

Here’s the thing, though: the Ring doorbell does nothing to deter crime, much less stop it in its tracks, as its marketers have promised it will. It does not help police—who, through a network of highly suspect partnerships with Amazon, can request information and receive reports from the community through the Neighbors app—actually solve the crimes that are caught on camera. In fact, a number of departments report being burdened with false reports sent in by users of Neighbors who (much like the police themselves) interpret even the most innocuous movements as criminal in intent.

You know what—I was going to write a whole thing about this, but you really don’t need me to tell you the implications of a growing infrastructure of privately owned surveillance cameras feeding directly into both the police state and one of the largest, shiftiest, most vicious corporations on Earth. You also don’t need me to tell you that the state legislature would be pretty hesitant right now to regulate, much less take away, police access to the Ring network, or that this poses some significant threats to Fourth Amendment protections. At this point you might just be wondering what you can do to promote privacy and protect the civil liberties of your community today. Well, let me tell you what you won’t do. You will NOT, under ANY circumstances, locate the Ring doorbells in your neighborhood, approach these doorbells with your face concealed, and damage or disable them in anyway. You will not do it with a hammer ($11.98 on Amazon with free Prime shipping), you will do not do it with a laser pointer ($12.99 with free Prime shipping), you will not do it at all. You won’t, I’m telling you! Don’t!