Ring Is Back and Scarier Than Ever

14:55Joseph:What was... So Evie, our social media, Evie Kuang, our social media person, edited this together and did an incredible job, in my opinion. She did a very, very good job. But what was y 'all's experience of reading the ad? Did it feel super bully? Emmanuel?

15:16Jason:No, definitely not. But I mean, good reason to upgrade my setup for sure. I don't know if people notice or if you've mentioned it already, but as you can tell, if you're watching the video of the podcast, Joe is making very friendly eye contact with the viewer while he's doing the pod. And I think Jason is as well. Or maybe he... Maybe his... What is it? The telepactor? teleprompters? What is it called?

15:49Joseph:Yeah, we have teleprompters. This is the media business, baby.

15:54Jason:Right. So I need one of those. I need a better camera. I mean, I think our fans in the Midwest will forgive it for now. But I feel like now that we did it once, surely we will have to one-up it next year. I don't know how we're going to do that. But I need better equipment for it. Maybe we should have our own alternative Super Bowl halftime show. Oh, yeah. Like it could be... Like next year, it could be like, whatever, Bad Bunny. And then there's the Turning Point USA. And then there's us. We'll have our own halftime show. I had several friends text me and be like, I didn't know it was that easy to do it.

16:30Jason:Maybe next year, I'll do it. So I'm hoping next year, maybe just like so many completely... Just like ad buys for no reason. Just random people. It's just a deluge of terrible, terrible efforts all across the country during the Super Bowl. That'd be sick. Exactly. I did actually think it might not get in the air because I imagine because, I mean, it's going out over the airwaves, I suppose. So I thought there would be like FCC something. They're like, this ad is too stupid to like feed to the American people. You can't put this out. It ran after a lotto ad. like

17:07Joseph:yeah it was the Iowa lottery so I mean that was the other thing we did the call out last week for Otumwa Iowa but we wanted it in real time and I feel like Sam and I were like semi serious about going to Otumwa to view this

17:26Jason:I was gonna say before we could take it once again maybe I can get Jason to fly to Otumwa and then stand him up

17:31Joseph:I feel like if I had one more day like if you had said a one day earlier, I would have bought tickets. I think we were playing chicken about it for sure.

17:39Jason:It was like if one of us had shown a ticket receipt, we were going to Iowa for sure that weekend. But yeah.

17:46Joseph:But like, I think a hundred people probably signaled me or emailed me saying that they had a connection to Ottumwa, which is super interesting for a town of 25 ,000 people. But only I think like three people were actually there at the moment. But I do feel bad because a lot of people were like, assuming this was for some very high journalistic purpose, like you need me to go investigate something for you or there's like a horrible surveillance situation happening or something like that. But I was like, no, we need someone to film our Super Bowl ad. But people seem to think that it was like quite cool in the end.

18:29Joseph:So I think it went over very well. a few places wrote about it like I think Inc. Magazine or was it Fortune wrote about it

18:38Jason:Neiman Lab I think as well yeah yes it is goofy yes it's something of a stunt I still I think learned sort of what Emmanuel touched on you know the FCC stuff there we had to be careful about what exactly do we put in this advert and footage and all of that sort of thing and just the fact that it's possible I don't know. It's one of those fun experiments that you get to learn about something you wouldn't in any other way. And then your readers and your listeners get to as well like, huh, that's possible? Sure. Okay. So yeah, I don't know. It was totally worth it. It was fun.

19:18Joseph:Yeah, I also, to Emmanuel's point, I was expecting the station to be like, it has to be in this specific format with this specific resolution and this type of file. and it has to be delivered on some weird server and things like that. But I actually just emailed them an MP4 file that I think probably came off of Evie's phone. That's crazy. And they were like, looks good. I was like, okay, that's good. Thank you.

19:45Jason:I think something we find out all the time is like a theme in the things that we do is just like, you can just do stuff. You can just do that. It's not actually... It does not actually involve expensive experts in the advertising industry to do this. It does not involve... I don't know. I mean, I feel like that's a common denominator in a lot of things that we do. Just do stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Now that I think about it, two things that we should try and actually blog about is... I just got so tired. Times Square. Times Square ad. right what's the biggest space we can get and then I mean we have to ring the bell at the stock exchange right like when we go public

20:35Joseph:when we go public mmhmm

20:38Jason:okay

20:41Joseph:Times Square is definitely on the list we need to be in Times Square for sure

20:47Jason:well you've looked into it and

20:49Joseph:it's not that expensive we were going to do it a few months ago

20:53Jason:Yeah, and this came up recently because the Golden Globes was having its Podcast of the Year awards, like kind of pseudo awards, right? And who's that guy? Daily Wire, anyway, whatever, on the right, trying to get the nomination and then eventually win that. And they bought out Times Square for hundreds of thousands of dollars or something like that. So you can just rock up and do it. But they did it, yes, in a much more expensive, obviously much more expensive way than we would ever do. But I do remember Jason exploring that at some point. And I would say, I think this TV ad, yes, obviously it was a small market.

21:34Jason:And more people, I think it was Inc pointed this out, that more people saw the ad on Instagram when we uploaded it there than probably saw it actually on TV, which is a very funny thing to point out as well. That said, apparently, somebody asked me on Blue Sky saying, Hey, I just found your podcast because of the ad. So if you're that person, I can't remember your username, but if you're that person and you're listening to the podcast now, congratulations on being the single most expensive 404 Media podcast listener where we had to die out for the Super Bowl to get one podcast listener. So really, really appreciate that.

22:15Joseph:Yeah, it is funny. I don't know if this was worth it on a dollar per user acquisition level. But if you did learn about us through that podcast ad only, you've never heard about us before, or that Super Bowl ad only, I think let us know. I did get an email immediately following it. One email from one guy who was like, I'm in a Tumwa and I saw your ad. So that's good. It did work. We've got one podcast listener and one emailer from this.

22:54Jason:Yeah, very good. Well, we'll leave that there. We'll see what happens next year. When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about another Super Bowl ad. But the American consumerism surveillance state that it has reintroduced. We'll be right back after this.

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27:57Jason:All right, and we are back. The headline of this piece, again by Jason. With Ring, American consumers built a surveillance dragnet. So I'm sure many listeners will have seen or heard about this other Super Bowl ad from the surveillance camera company Ring. Jason, before we get into sort of the article and the thesis behind it, can you describe this advert the Ring had during the Super Bowl?

28:28Joseph:Yeah, I think we should play part of that here as well since it's short. This is Milo. Pets are family. But every year, 10 million go missing. And the way we look for them hasn't changed in years. Until now.

28:44Jason:One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now. Join the neighborhood at ring.com.

29:03Joseph:Our ad was not the worst Super Bowl ad because this was the worst Super Bowl ad, I think. Like there were a lot of quite bad ones, but I think this is maybe the most damaging one. Sam had a post about it saying, this is going to be taught in advertising classes someday, which we can get into. But basically, Ring is the doorbell camera company. I'm sure everyone's familiar with Ring. And they have launched this new feature called Search Party. And what Search Party is, according to the Super Bowl ad, and they actually announced this a few weeks ago, but this is like where it got the most attention is like, if you lose your dog, you will be able to upload a photo of your dog to a form on ring and it will activate all of the ring cameras in your neighborhood to look for this dog using artificial intelligence.

30:00Joseph:So basically it is like, I mean, it's not facial recognition because it's a fucking dog, but it's like the same technology that facial recognition uses. It's like image matching and things like that. And it turns all of the ring cameras into this networked spy apparatus and then alerts you if the dog is found.

30:29Jason:Yeah. As you say, not facial recognition in a literal human sense, dog recognition. it's almost like it's almost the thing between object recognition like identifying a weapon, identifying a vehicle and facial recognition it's like this in between which is like this is a unique living creature and the cameras are going to identify it in the local proximity it's almost like the next step up it's strange

30:57Joseph:but let me just say before we get more into it that alongside of this and not in the Super Bowl ad but at the same time, Ring announced a product called Familiar Faces, which is just literally facial recognition, where you tell the Ring camera who your friends and family are so that when they show up to your house, it says their name. When you get a little push notification, like, so-and-so is at your house. I could upload a photo of you, Joseph. And if I had a Ring camera and you showed up at my house, it would say, Joseph is here. So they are just straight up doing facial recognition now, which as we'll get into, is something that they claimed that they were not going to do for a really long time.

31:43Joseph:Or at least when people were talking about fears of facial recognition, Ring would say, oh, we do object recognition, which is different because they would be like, oh, like a raccoon has come up near your house or like a person or like a car, but not this person or this car or this dog. And that is the thing that is different now.

32:07Jason:Another thing they've launched or introduced is Firewatch, which I need to look into a little bit more, but it's when there's wildfires and the cameras can detect if there are fires nearby, that sort of thing. But yes, it's sort of this suite of new products which are turning Ring from sort of a passive surveillance collection technology into a much more active one where it is looking for specific people, specific animals, and specific situations. Before this, I was double-checking, you know, is it opt-in? Is it opt-out? And users were reporting, like, again, I don't use Ring, so I don't have, like, the app to go check myself.

32:50Jason:I was seeing what users were experiencing. And it looked like it was enabled by default. And people were teaching one another, well, I don't want to be part of this search party feature, actually. How do I turn it off? And they had to go into the settings and figure that out and all of that sort of thing. So I think it's one thing to introduce the feature, and that is the focus. It's another to turn it on by default. And of course, Ring would prefer that because the tool is going to be a lot more effective if everybody is opted in by default. So before we just get into the background of Ring and how we got here, Jason, what were people's reactions to the Super Bowl ad?

33:36Jason:I mean, maybe not representative, but a lot of people didn't seem to like it.

33:40Joseph:Yeah, I mean, it's a little hard to say just because YouTube comments and social media is really loud. but kind of like uniformly online, people like this super dystopian. People correctly were like, I don't think this is for dogs. You know, the initial feature is for dogs, but it's like a very small step from there for it to be used for, I don't know, like quote unquote suspicious people or suspect of a crime or, you know, all of the things that people have been using ring cameras for for a long time. but the ways that it has been used in the past have been a lot more manual and a lot more like ad hoc and like we've talked about with things like uh flock and with fusis which is the these ai enabled uh smart cameras that are networked it's like once you add ai to these surveillance systems as you said they go from being something that's like passive that you can go say like I need to check this camera at this time or whatever.

34:44Joseph:And they become like these really proactive, you know, like surveillance tools.

34:51Jason:Yeah. So Ring does that, has that ad. It seems like a lot of people are annoyed. But this article is more about, well, it's a couple of things. It's like a reminder of, hey, remember Ring? They're back. because they kind of had something of a rebrand. And then you talk about how we got hit. Can you just talk about that rebrand briefly? Because it does feel like, as you write, Ring kind of went quiet for a while. What was the deal with that?

35:21Joseph:Yeah, so back at Vice, there was maybe like a two-year period between like 2018 and 2020-ish where the way that we're writing about Flock now, we were writing about Ring. We were filing so many public records requests. We were writing so many articles about Ring. And it was a very similar story to Flock in that Ring kind of went city by city. And they signed cops up to this partnership program that they had. And then they used the cops to sell Ring cameras to the communities. and then sell the theory of Ring and the concept of Ring to other police departments. And so we wrote about them probably first when they had a couple dozen partnerships with cops, which I'll get into what those are in a second.

36:18Joseph:But by the end of this period of reporting, they had several thousand and it happened really, really quickly. And so what these partnerships were, where they were footage sharing partnerships with police. And so basically, if you were a police department and you had this partnership, Ring would create a portal where you could request footage from Ring camera owners in your community. And you didn't need a warrant for this. And so basically, Ring users were able to directly send footage to the cops using this. And the ways that Ring went about signing up cops was really wild, in my opinion.

37:03Jason:Giving them free stuff, parties, that sort of thing?

37:06Joseph:They were giving cops free stuff. They were throwing them parties with Shaquille O 'Neal. They were doing these weird incentive programs. So basically, they would give cops free ring cameras and then tell the cops to throw a party for their community and then raffle off those cameras to people. they gave discount codes to cops. So basically, if you were a cop in a small town, you could be like, use my code and you can save 20 % off ring in the community. And then they also gamified the sending of information to cops. They talked about, at least based on emails that we had back in the day, they were like, you could get free ring swag if you sent footage to cops, things like that.

37:54And then I think the other thing is that Ring was always sold as a surveillance product to people.

38:02Joseph:It was like, stop package thieves. It was famously bought by Amazon to prevent package thefts. Um, but Ring also did a lot to sort of, um, like incentivize people to, uh, like film viral moments, more or less like delivery driver and things like that, which I guess I'll get into in a second, but like this origin story in the early days, they were like really focused on crime. They were super focused on crime and they're super focused on like public safety and things like that. And there was a lot of fear-mongering in the early days of Ring to be like, stop suspicious people in your neighborhoods and things like that.

38:49Jason:Yeah, it very squarely starts with the cop stuff, those partnerships, all of that sort of thing. I can't remember the exact timeline. It's in the article for people who want to see that. But the CEO, or rather the creator, does leave for a short period. And then it's around about this time. I feel like Ring goes quite quiet and it does this slight rebrand or pivot to what you describe, which is that, oh, ha ha ha, we're just filming funny moments of delivery drivers or really wholesome moments and that sort of thing. And then they get posted on social media or people are encouraged to share them in part by Ring the company itself, but also the social media clout and retweets and likes you'll get from posting that sort of thing.

39:35Jason:Of course, ignoring the fact that this person being filmed has not asked or potentially consented to have their everyday interaction just filmed and put on the internet for your viewing pleasure. Can you talk about that a little bit? What was the deal there? I guess we don't really know why they did that pivot. But what did you make sense?

39:58Joseph:I think it's because they were getting a lot of scrutiny. It was not just us writing about it, but there was tons and tons of really high-profile articles about Ring and its partnerships with cops. And they were getting heat from the EFF and the ACLU and people just saying, this is really dystopian, this is really scary. And I think there was this idea that it was surveillance tech. And I think that maybe alongside of that, this is just me speculating, but alongside of that, there were also these people posting these viral videos of delivery drivers falling down, of promposals. I've seen so many promposals shot through ring cameras where it's like...

40:41Joseph:Sorry, why is that? A high schooler asking someone else to prom through a ring camera in some sort of viral way. You show up at a girl's house with a guitar and you play a song for her on the porch or whatever, and it's filmed. This was an entire genre of viral ring video for a while. And then there's people dancing on porches and things like that. It became the subject of this very short-lived Ring Nation TV show. But I think maybe Ring started to pitch itself more as this goofy gadget, kind of. And around that time, Jamie Siminoff, who is the founder of Ring, which it should be said, was originally pitched on Shark Tank.

41:30Joseph:That's another super critical part of Ring's origin story. But he leaves Amazon. He decides that he's going to go. And so I think that maybe it's like the founder is gone. We're going to try to be more of a consumer product versus this thing that's targeted at police. So then what happens is last summer, Siminoff came back to Ring. He came back to Amazon and he's overseeing Ring again. And from the get-go, he's like, police partnerships are back. We're doing them again. And AI is our new thing. We are going to just mask off, foot on the gas. We are doing surveillance again. We're leaning back into public safety.

42:19Joseph:And that has been... A lot of people have reported on that over the last year. We haven't really done much on Ring just because we've been super busy. But I have always, especially because of our early reporting on this, like advice thought like ring is a super important surveillance company to keep tabs on and i think that this super bowl ad and just the fact that people are paying attention to it and the flock partnership that we'll talk about in a second uh just sort of signals that this is not a company that we can forget about this is not a company that we can ignore and this is i mean it's it's the biggest consumer surveillance tech company that I can think of.

43:00Joseph:And I think to spoiler alert your podcast document here, you have what is luxury surveillance and how does it tie in here? I did an interview with Chris Gilliard a few months ago about this concept of luxury surveillance, which is surveillance that rich people buy to surveil both themselves, but also to surveil people in their neighborhoods. And this is Exhibit 1A of what luxury surveillance is. It's like Ring is bought by homeowners for the most part to surveil their neighborhoods. A lot of them are buying it because of explicit fear mongering about the safety of American cities and American suburbs and things like that.

43:49Joseph:And so it's tied into consumerism. It's tied into just our media ecosystem. The fact that for a long time now, there's been this idea that our neighborhoods are getting a lot more dangerous, even though the crime stats don't back that up. It's tied to things like Nextdoor, which is a hyper-local social media network. And it's tied to Neighbors, which brings explicit social media app where you can just post footage on the social media app. And so this is a surveillance dragnet that we have built ourselves with the pressures of capitalism and all that. But this is something that the American consumer has bought.

44:31Joseph:And it is now turned into this nationwide surveillance dragnet that is being networked together and AI is being added to it. And I don't think it's going to end well for us.

44:43Jason:Yeah, it's dogs right now, but we'll see later. I think that's a really good way to put it. You mentioned this Flock partnership. So look, there's frankly a lot of misinformation about this. Not going to go super into that, but people are conflating our reporting about Flock, which shows that local cops were doing lookups and license plate readers made by Flock for ICE. They're then conflating that with Flock's partnership with Ring and saying, oh, that means ICE has like direct access to ring cameras. There's absolutely no evidence of that. Maybe that'll turn out to be the case later. Maybe they will go and do that, inspired by all of this misinformation.

45:22Jason:But that is not what's happening right now. What is happening is that Flock actually has like a lot of different products. It has like it's, you know, all-in-one crime fighting tool that brings together license plate readers and then maybe body cam footage as well. It's drones as well that it makes. And it brings all of that together. And the idea is to bring ring footage into that so police can request from ring camera owners more easily, efficiently access to footage recorded by those cameras. It's basically what they were doing before, but now it's done in an even more efficient way if those cops have bought Flock and that overarching system.

46:04Jason:A lot of surveillance companies are doing this. They call it a single pane of glass product because a cop doesn't want to be jumping between different surveillance products. They want to see they're all in one big monitor in their control room in front of them. But, you know, as you say in the article, Jason, people making that leap from, oh, Ring and Flock working together, that means ICE is going to access Ring cameras. You can see why they would make that leap because they're scared of that and concerned about that. Like, is that fair, you think?

46:36Joseph:I mean, it's kind of tricky because I do think that this is something to be very concerned about. And it's something that could happen. And so I don't want to say like, oh, it's not going to happen. That ICE is not going to access ring camera footage. It very well may happen. But it's not clear from what has already been reported what the vector for this would be. And I would say that it is inaccurate at the moment to say that ICE has access to ring footage. And it's like the way that this would work is like conflating a few different stories that we have reported and other people have reported over the last year in a way that I think is kind of dangerous.

47:21Joseph:Because basically like the vector is, well, Flock is used by local police. And local police sometimes perform lookups for ICE of the Flock automated license plate reader system. and Ring has a partnership with Flock. Therefore, ICE has access to Ring. And it's like, that's too much. You're taking too many leaps there. And that's not to say that this won't happen. It's just to say that we don't have reporting to say that. And it's not just... It's good to speculate about this sort of thing and to warn about this sort of thing. And I think very often when a... capability exists, it ends up getting used.

48:08Joseph:But that's different from saying that it is being used now because we don't know that. And I think that the specifics matter. And then the other thing I'll say is that these companies are super litigious. And some of these posts are really, really viral. And so I don't know. It's like, we're very careful about what we say and what we do with regard to surveillance companies. We're not going to pull punches. But at the same time, we need to make sure that what we report is correct.

48:39Jason:Yeah, absolutely. All right. We'll leave that there. But we'll definitely keep a close eye on Ring. If any listeners do have tips about that, of course, always feel free to reach out. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you are a paying 404 Media subscriber, we're going to talk about Apple's lockdown mode and how it stopped the FBI. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co. As a reminder, 404media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to 404media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.co.

49:18Jason:You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad-free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope and Alyssa Midcalf. Another way to support us is by leaving a five-star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really helps us out. This has been 404 Media. We'll see you again next week.

49:57Joseph:time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great.