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Chapter 1: What innovative feature does Ring offer to help find lost pets?
Pets are family. But every year, 10 million go missing. And the way we look for them hasn't changed in years. Until now. 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.
AI to search for your lost pet. I've heard it all. It might be very useful, though. You never know. That was an ad which aired during the Super Bowl back in February of this year for a new feature on Amazon's Ring doorbell. The product launch was met with lots of condemnation online, with people referring to it as a clear case of dystopian surveillance.
Ring doorbells have been embroiled in a few controversies since their inception, both in the US and here in Europe. So the question remains, do the pros outweigh the cons when it comes to these devices? To discuss this, I'm joined from the RTE Business Desk by Adam O'Guire. Morning, Adam. Morning, how are you?
It's proved a bit controversial, didn't it? It has a bit, yeah. This is Search Party, which you heard the ad for. It was unveiled during the Super Bowl in February. That was when they ran that ad. And as it says, as you heard, it's a way of finding lost pets. So you find out your dog has gotten out of the house.
Rather than putting up your missing posters or putting it up on the WhatsApp group, you upload it to the Ring app, a picture and a description. And then it starts, it automatically sends that out to all the other Ring doorbells in the area or beyond. And they start automatically scanning for something that fits the description.
And then they let you know if something is found so you can be reunited. And that was Jamie Siminoff, who was the founder of Ring. He left the company.
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Chapter 2: What controversies have surrounded Ring doorbells since their launch?
It was acquired by Amazon, I think, about seven years ago. He left. He's now back as the head of Ring. And as I said, he kindly announced... The feature was free. You don't even need to be a premium subscriber to the Ring service to get access to this. But as you say, it has proved to be a little bit controversial.
Okay, so how many cameras are potentially available to look for Fido who's gone?
Well, we don't know exactly how many ring doorbells have been sold either in the US alone or globally. And even if we did have total sales figures, you know, they've been out a long time. You might have people who have bought a second generation or people who bought one and then stopped using it. So it wouldn't give us really an accurate figure.
But there is some survey data that we can kind of maybe take as an indication. One survey in the US suggested around a third of US households have some form of a doorbell camera. And of those, Ring is the most popular. Around 40% of people who said they had a smart doorbell had a Ring branded one.
So if you do the sums on that and you take it as kind of representative, you're probably talking about 14 to 15% of homes in the US having a Ring doorbell, which is probably in the region of about 20 million homes. There are a few caveats in that because one is that these kinds of doorbells are more popular in urban areas than they are in rural areas.
So you might have one neighbourhood where there's a much higher percentage of households using them and then others and other entire swathes of America where they're very, very rare. Also worth pointing out that it's while we know of them as a smart doorbell company, they do make other kinds of cameras like the more traditional security cameras you kind of put high up outside your house.
They also do indoor cameras that people can use to monitor a specific room or indeed to keep an eye on their pet while they're out of the house and see if they're okay and talk to them. They use the indoor cameras to do that. And you can see him scarfing out the open doors.
So, search parties. So, potentially of use to tens of millions of people, but... I think it's fair to say it didn't get the reaction they were hoping for.
No, very, very quickly, the online discourse around Search Party turned negative.
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Chapter 3: How does the Search Party feature work for pet recovery?
People accusing the company of literally putting a cuddly front and a face on something that had potentially a far more serious and darker purpose. Because if Search Party was capable of quietly activating a Ring camera and automatically searching for something like a dog, probably without the owner of the camera even realising that their device was doing this,
then it wasn't much of a stretch to imagine that it would use the same technology to search for something else or someone else, like a person, for example. You know, critics arguing that launch party was kind of a gentle way to acclimatise users to something that, you know, would otherwise be off-putting. You know, pets were a way to do that because it dehumanises it, obviously, for a start.
We're also, you know, we're probably less concerned about a dog's privacy than a human's privacy, which is fair enough. But at the same time, pets tend to be a bit of a weakness to many of us. You know, we're likely to do something if it's going to keep them healthy and happy. So, you know, something like this seems like a no brainer. And it might seem cynical to think this way.
People's mistrust of Amazon's motives wasn't entirely unjustified. The announcement around search party came out just a few months after they had announced a partnership with a company called Flock. which specialises in cameras for law enforcement and the likes of licence plate scanners.
That partnership was supposed to allow flock users, so essentially police departments in the US, to request footage from Ring users and make it easier for those users to share it if they chose to do so. And of course, all that was happening against the backdrop of the White House's immigration crackdown, all the controversies around the tactics being used by ICE.
So it fed into this unease around US law enforcement and what people would think of private data and how they might use that. And in the end, actually, just days after that Super Bowl ad aired about search party, Amazon announced that they and Flock had mutually agreed to cancel that planned partnership.
They said it hadn't actually begun, so no stage data was being shared between the two platforms. Search party, though, still very much available in the US. But, we should say, not available in Europe. No, not at the moment. It's only available to US users.
Unlikely it'll see the light of day in Europe soon, if ever, because the EU, of course, has far more onerous rules and regulations around people's data than you tend to see in the US. People no doubt have heard of GDPR over the past years, often because big tech companies are complaining about how restrictive it is. But that places a far higher standard on what companies can do with users' data.
There's very little they can do without the express consent of the user. They have to be very transparent about the data that they hold on an individual. But the rules also effectively prohibit untargeted surveillance, you know, the kind that might involve lots of cameras constantly watching just in case something of interest comes into view.
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