i don’t wanna live in a ring world

06 Sep, 2024

Ring cameras freak me out. Whenever I am unfortunate enough to see their ads, they seem dystopian to me. What I am fortunate in is not being in a country that is seemingly dominated by them, at least not yet.

It was already enough that entering people’s home increasingly meant being comfortable with Alexa and others, or that being in public meant you could either be in the background or the unkowing main topic of some TikTok video. I guess we are now increasingly entering an era where being outside means being filmed by a private person’s camera somewhere, or that you’ll even be recorded while visiting someone inside their home.

Now, I will say, I feel sympathy for the people using these in genuinely rough areas, or having survived some horrible break-ins. It hasn’t ever happened to me, but it must be terribly traumatizing.

In my anecdotal experience though, it seems like many Ring users or aspiring Ring owners live in good areas, are affluent and have not had these experiences and their fear scenarios are highly unlikely. It seems to be entirely preventative. Which isn’t necessarily wrong; locking your door despite never having intruders is preventative too and something you should absolutely do. But is this level of intrusion and surveillance of even unsuspecting and nonconsenting people really worth trying to prevent that or generate a (sometimes false) sense of security?

If I learned one thing from my ex girlfriend’s family, it is that cameras and alarms make you terribly anxious and can take over your life. They owned a small farm in the middle of nowhere with no neighbors, and they had cameras and alarms everywhere. I have been there and can genuinely say, no one will find this place if you haven’t already been there before. Whenever they visited us, they checked their phones every 20 minutes or so to see through the cameras. The alarms went off often and then they panicked, sending a family friend to check. Each time, it was a false alarm triggered likely by an insect or rodent moving through the sensor.

If the cameras didn’t cause this level of anxiety and paranoia, they at least enabled it and worsened it.

I hate that Ring makes money off of anxiety and fear which is in turn often just generated through outlier horror scenarios spread far and wide online and the fact that we see more of it now because of being so connected. Most crime stories you consume nowadays would not even show up in your local newspaper because it doesn’t affect your area at all.

I hate that they attempt to somewhat hide this marketing strategy by feel good scenarios that it could help find missing people or pets (sure, this will happen all the time!), or the notion that wanting to check on your pet every few minutes warrants giving up yours and everyone’s privacy even more to Amazon and whoever chooses to buy data from them, as if we didn’t already have enough overreach by them ¹. I hate that it leads to obsessive people posting Ring snippets of random people and cars online, trying to doxx or shame them because, gasp, they jogged past that home the same time each day and that’s suspicious! I hate that it gives nosey neighbors even better tools to keep tabs on other neighbors comings and goings.

All that, for supposed security? It’s neither a deterrent nor is the footage always admissible in court or helpfully identifying anyone that’s masked, therefore not even meaningfully solving cases. It’s giving the police surveillance footage while bypassing checks or oversight. I guess it’s nice for insurance purposes, but I still hate that trade-off.

To me it’s just something that’s actually terrible for society but we think that we’re doing something good for us and “our community”.

Published 06 Sep, 2024, edited 13 minutes ago

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