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“I can, faintly, hear a privacy ethicist weeping somewhere far away.”
When Amazon announced the Ring Always Home Cam, an indoor camera drone for your house, tech critics’ instant reaction was to decry it as a terrifying spy tool. (I took it seriously as a consumer surveillance gadget in my own Pattern Matching column on Saturday.) But in Debugger this week, drone researcher Faine Greenwood offers a different way of looking at it. Delving into the Always Home Cam’s technical limitations — some of them intentional on Ring’s part — they explain why it would amount to a “remarkably convoluted way to creep on people.” If you want to freak out about it, Greenwood argues, consider the more plausible scenario that Amazon might be using it primarily to map your home, for purposes of selling you stuff. In other words, the people being creeped on here might be the ones gullible enough to buy it.
Read Greenwood’s insightful and surprisingly funny take on the device here:
