Link: https://www.404media.co/leaked-email-suggests-ring-plans-to-expand-search-party-surveillance-beyond-dogs/

Ring’s controversial, AI-powered “Search Party” feature isn’t intended to always be limited only to dogs, the company’s founder, Jamie Siminoff, told Ring employees in an internal email obtained by 404 Media.

In October, Ring launched Search Party, an on-by-default feature that links together Ring cameras in a neighborhood and uses AI to search for specific lost dogs, essentially creating a networked, automated surveillance system. The feature got some attention at the time, but faced extreme backlash after Ring and Siminoff promoted Search Party during a Super Bowl ad. 404 Media obtained an email that Siminoff sent to all Ring employees in early October, soon after the feature’s launch, which said the feature was introduced “first for finding dogs,” but that it or features like it would be expanded to “zero out crime in neighborhoods.”

“This is by far the most innovation that we have launched in the history of Ring. And it is not only the quantity, but quality,” Siminoff wrote. “I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission. You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there but for the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started.”

Archive: http://archive.today/xKxOd

I’m shocked! Shocked, I tell you.

Ok…
I’m not shocked at all.

No way! It seemed so authentic when they said they’d search for dogs.

No shit

Fucking scumbags.

CREEE PEEEE!

Imagine spending millions on an ad to alert people to your evil scheme.

Proof that you don’t have to be smart to be rich and powerful.

Wait… what?!

They mean to cats too, right?!?

The proof for that is abundant.

They lied?!

It shows you how insular these people must be. That ad was the result of meeting after meeting, plan after plan. They had convinced themselves that the public would eat it up. We would be like "Holy shit that's amazing, let's give you ALL our data and video and privacy!". They actually thought we would go for it. lol.

FYI -

• Ring and Alexa are Amazon
• Nest is Google

You know.. here's the thing..

Years ago, I'd be on Reddit and reading the usual rants and raves about the government, and how the public should be wary of it and we are heading into a security state.. and I always positied that the real threat actors WRT privacy and security were going to be companies like facebook and google and the businesses that made internet-connected devices.

Compared to them, as far as data colleciton and surveillance of people - the government was filled with rank amateurs.

I'd consistently get downvoted or pooh-poohed for being "naive."

God fucking dammit.. on this.. I am absolutely pissed off that I was calling this one - and have been - for over a decade.

FML, I hate this SOOOOOO much.

Oh, thank god, I was worried if there might not be a worldwide surveillance dragnet for in case I lost a pet iguana.

To be fair, I'm actually pleasantly surprised that people didn't go for it.

It's not like majority of people seemed to give a shit about privacy not too long ago...

The whole "find lost dogs" thing was likely the result of a single meeting with the agenda item "how do we sell this thing we are already doing as anything other than mass surveillance for state actors?" They probably ended it early.

And they can ONLY Achieve this MONUMENTAL and IMPORTANT Task of Global Surveillance if we give THEM Tax Breaks! How EXCITING!

-American Politicians!

And in other "no shit" headlines...

pikachu_face.jpg

Duhhhhhhhhh

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

Same.

I was sure the emotional manipulation tactic would be extremely effective. Guess it was a little too blatant, even for the general public.

My 12 year old was sold on the idea. But she's 12 and may love dogs more than people.

Between Ring and Jeffrey Epstein, it's surprising how explicit criminals are about their criminal intentions.

Sounds like naked people in a cage wondering about which is more dangerous: the leopard or the lion.

No Duh?!

It's certainly frustrating pointing out obvious end results and seeing all the fanboys and normies call you a conspiracy theorist or just dunk on you.

There's no such thing as privacy anymore. People still believe it exists, but it's dead and gone.

Boycott ring

When a criminals moves into the palace, the nation changes into mob turf.

Why anyone would have non-locally hosted video surveillance in and around their home is beyond me.

You're basically begging corporations/governments to spy on you.

I'm in my 30s and I like most dogs more than most people.

Yep, 99% of dogs beat 99.99999% of people. And 99% of cats do the same.

This is what the data centers are for. And also why all hard drive capacity for 2026 has already been sold. Video takes up a massive amount of space.

Anyone remember "Police Blotter" reports in local papers? Some were funny.

Someone called in with concerns about a neighborhood cat that is "continuously at large."

But they mostly gave people a very dark view of the world outside. This led to metal bars on doors and windows, sale of pricey security systems, and folks walking around scared of their shadow. That all moved over to apps like NextDoor, Citizen, and Ring's Neighbors.

Fear is a primal driver. People on those apps are constantly reporting "odd looking people" in their neighborhood. Not surprisingly, the pet "Search Party" feature goes through Neighbors. Those same users are primed to see bad people everywhere. They will happily accept any feature that promises "zero crime neighborhoods."

ANY feature.

Proof that you don’t have to be smart to be rich and powerful.

Have you seen the grammar used in emails to & from Trump & Epstein?

BOLO: Leftist dissenter. Apprehend at all costs.

Uploading to search party for facial match.......

No kidding? Next thing you will be telling us that chatcontrol and age checks on the internet will be used for more than just protecting kids from pedophiles and be extended to crushing dissent and opposition and democracy itself, and building social scores on us with all information including these cameras that will be used secretly against us in a way we cannot know or challenge to determine our jobs, background checks, police scrutiny, how courts and government treats you, how business treats you, the prices you are offered online and in digital price tag stores (coming soon,) and even what search results you are shown. All calculated by the antichrist's company, for said pedophile or pedophile adjacent politicians deciding which of us are undesirable, and given a way to slip names of people into the bad score list themselves, always a selling perk under the table to leaders.

It's always just a trojan horse to get in the walls. It will never end with finding pets, with stopping child abuse, what have you. They find the instance that no one can disagree with then accuse people of helping child abusers, maybe you are a child abuser yourself! It's not subtle. All done by people that are mostly on the epstein's redacted and unreleased pages for actually fucking children.

There’s a technical reason for all the equal signs, but you’re right in general that they seem stupid.

I wonder, like how vulnerable are these data centers to say natural disasters. LIke electricity surges, electromagnetic pulses, what else, if their cooling centers went down? Just worried for their sake, is why I ask obviously, like what would the best way to try to protect them from destruction I wonder?

The western gangster king. The eastern gangster king being putin.

They are megalomaniacs, the owners and ceo's that were chosen by those owners' and their board members. They surround themselves with yes men, anyone telling them they are wrong will be removed from their lives, as they fashion themselves after the president and other leaders above them that do the same.

Blatantly ripping off the chatcontrol and age checks reasoning, and the masterbaitorbase. To protect the children, and stop pedophiles, we need to id every account, and every ip, connected to your likeness and government id, in the hands of private interests to verify at that, and record everything you say, look at , and do, combining all information on you, private from data brokers to this and government, to run ai threat assessment and social scores to secretly determine winners and losers, run by the antichrist's company, the guy that said he wants to spray his critics with fentanyl from drones.

Who could argue against surrendering every and all information to the worst companies in the world to use their dystopian new technology on if it's for the kids? I mean they know the dangers to the kids as the antichrist was a great eptein pal. It's transparent.

You can bet none of those people that argued with you and ridiculed your predictions will admit it now. That personality never will. How far back are we talking about with those predictions though out of curiousity?

Yeah, we all saw that coming and it's exactly why everyone's freaking out about it.

Birds?

Sorry, I only have a YouTube link for this: https://youtu.be/ROFblZ_-9q4

If you haven't seen it, Wyse (Ring competitor) released a pretty funny ad about this.

Yeah it's called tracking everything that's happening and feeding it to AI so AI can predict and alert the owners of whatever we they decided is important to know about and predict, like threats to their power and ambitions by the stupid masses who should just accept they're slaves.

c/noshitsherlock

FWIW, Ring announced they were canceling their partnership with Flock a few days ago following the Superbowl ad where they were universally dragged.
https://blog.ring.com/about-ring/ring-and-flock-cancel-partnership/

Do I think Ring is still running some sort of analytics on video feeds? Probably.
Should you put anything from Amazon directly in the trash? Absolutely.

Silver lining I guess is that public pressure still works at least a little when companies try to go straight dystopian.

I'm.... flabbergasted. Unbelievable. Who would've thought?