How Ring & Rekognition Set the Stage for Consumer Generated Mass Surveillance

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: February 17, 2019 at 9:17:21 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] How Ring & Rekognition Set the Stage for Consumer Generated Mass Surveillance
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Steve Schear.  DLH]
>
> How Ring & Rekognition Set the Stage for Consumer Generated Mass Surveillance
> By Jevan Hutson
> Jan 28 2019
> <https://wjlta.com/2019/01/28/how-ring-rekognition-set-the-stage-for-consumer-generated-mass-surveillance/>
>
> If every home on a street, in a neighborhood, or in a town had a Ring surveillance system, the individual cameras, 
> taken together, could construct an extremely intimate picture of daily public life. By integrating facial recognition 
> and contractingwith local and federal law enforcement agencies, Amazon supercharges the potential for its massive 
> network of surveillant consumers to comprehensively track the movements of individuals over time, even when the 
> individual has not broken any law. Fully realized, these technologies set the stage for consumer generated mass 
> surveillance.
>
> Amazon’s Ring surveillance system dominates the growing video doorbell market. Ring, acquired by Amazon last April, 
> is a system of home surveillance doorbell cameras which operate on an integrated social media platform, Neighbors. 
> Neighbors allows users to share camera footage with other users and law enforcement agencies, as well as report 
> safety issues, strangers, or suspicious activities. The platform aggregates user-generated reports and video data 
> into a local activity maps and watchlists. Similar community platforms where neighbors can report suspicious persons 
> or activity, such as NextDoor, are notorious for racial biasand profiling. This problem will surely be made worse by 
> Amazon’s desire to automatically classify persons as “suspicious” through sentiment analysis and other biometric data 
> collection.
>
> A recent patent application shows that Amazon will integrate their facial recognition product Rekognition into the 
> Ring system, while also collecting and analyzing a litany of other biometric information. Many raise serious concerns 
> about the integration of facial recognition to our contemporary digital ecosystem. Indeed, a unique consensus among 
> researchers, lawmakers, advocates, and technology companies that facial recognition technology amplifies bias, 
> intensifies mass surveillance and ought be subject to stringent regulation. [For more WJLTA coverage on algorithmic 
> bias, see here.]
>
> A centralized social network of private facial recognition cameras expands and streamlines traditional surveillance 
> infrastructure by creating more data that is easily searchable. Hundreds of thousands of home security cameras will 
> certainly generate massive amounts of data, but the integration of a social networking platform and facial 
> recognition analytics cuts though the problem of irrelevant data. The Neighbors platform allows users and Amazon to 
> identify and aggregate relevant data, while Rekognition can sift through both stored data and live visual feeds to 
> locate and track individuals and groups.
>
> This dystopic infrastructure is not only physical, it is cultural. Consumer surveillance technologies entrench 
> surveillance as an essential duty of citizenship. Beyond offloading the costs and pressures of physical 
> infrastructure from the state to consumers—creating new avenues for surveillance and data collection with less 
> restrictions—these technologies inculcate surveillance as a social and communal obligation and engender public 
> support and acceptance of ever more pervasive and invasive surveillance.
>
> By reorienting the surveillance relationship between individual and the state to the individual versus the 
> individual, the Ring system fragments accountability and deprives the individual of the ability to challenge or 
> escape data collection. It becomes harder to challenge a larger, consolidated surveillance apparatus because it is 
> built consensually by private parties. Our neighbors have the right to watch and protect their private property, 
> despite the objections of others. A diffused network of cameras reduces freedom of choice in how individuals protect 
> their privacy because they are up against an architecture of fragmented private parties, rather than just the state.
>
> [snip]
>
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> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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