Nilay Patel

And you think the AI will just sort of accelerate the process of we're working together?

We'll be right back.

This is where we get to Flock Safety, which Ring announced a partnership with last October.

Flock primarily makes cameras and systems to search video for the cops.

You've probably seen Flock's devices where you live.

They're those little solar-powered cameras and tracking devices affixed to streetlights or placed in the center of parking lots.

They vacuum up huge amounts of data that the company claims is anonymized before it's made available to partners, which in most cases is local law enforcement.

However, according to in-depth reporting from the excellent 404 Media, Block's data has often found its way to ICE, the FBI, the Secret Service, and other law enforcement agencies without the use of a warrant,

because that data is willingly provided by local police.

Last month, under intense scrutiny about what working with Flock would mean, Ring said its Flock partnership was not yet live, and that, quote, Ring has no partnership with ICE, does not give ICE videos feeds or backend access, and does not share video with them.

For its part, Flock says the same thing, that it doesn't actually work with ICE, but rather local law enforcement, and it's those local agencies that work with ICE.

This is the complication that I mentioned earlier, and if you're a Decoder listener, you know where it's going.

I asked Jamie about all those databases, who owns them, and what it means to connect them all up with AI.

But when you connect a bunch of those databases, right, when you connect particularly to facial recognition, there's a turn in the privacy conversation where the stakes ratchet up really high.

Where maybe it's gone forever.

How are you thinking about that kind of decision making?

Okay, we have a lot of intelligence in the AI.

It's trivial for the AI to go connect to another store of information.

That's a thing you can do with AI, especially at a big company like Amazon where you have lots of other stores of information.

There's a line.