Some More News - SMN: Our New Suburban Surveillance State

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

Hi. In today's video, we discuss Ring Doorbells, The Nextdoor app, and how we've unwittingly created our own Big Brother. Please fill out our SURVEY: HTTP://kastmedia.com/survey/ We now have a MERCH STORE! Check it out here: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news Stop overpaying for shipping with HTTP://Stamps.com. Sign up with promo code MORENEWS for a special offer that includes a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Ready to give your brain some TLC? Download Best Fiends FREE today on the App Store or Google Play. That's friends, without the r—Best Fiends. Scribd is offering our listeners 2 months of Scribd for only ninety-nine cents. Go to https://try.scribd.com/morenews/ to get your first two months for less than $1. Source List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HXzDot327ptWGSA0XEcHtxwlXvxfxhGXxqGo9r0hKs8/edit?usp=sharing    Support the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Um, hello? Did somebody put a doorbell on my office door and also a lock? Who is it? Jesus, like, Warmbo, what did you do? There's like six cameras out here, too. Oh, hi, Mr. Cody. While you were out, Warmbo installed a fancy high-tech security system to protect Mr. Cody because Warmbo loves Mr. Cody and wants to protect Mr. Cody's face and pants and face and shoes and skin and... Oh wow, Mr. Cody just broke the door in half. Yeah, I got one of those police battering rams

literally for this occasion. It's just one of many fail safes I've installed since you knocked me out and tied me to a chair. Wormbo, where did you get all of this tech? Wormbo ordered a Ring doorbell security system on Amazon. Ring? Seriously? And you installed it and a bunch of cameras in my hallway? And some other places.

Wormbo was worried that someone could just come into Mr. Cody's home without Mr. Cody wanting them to come in, silly girl. Oh, yeah. You know, we wouldn't want someone coming into my house all of the time unannounced. Did you say other places? No. Okay, Warmbo, I buried a prize in the yard. Why don't you go dig it up?

Oh wow, Warmbo loves digging and burying stuff. So, hey everyone. Sorry I had to see all that, but I guess we can start the news now. You know, before I sweep my home for cameras. And hey, speaking of that, here's a news quiz for you news kids. Did you know that as of 2020,

an estimated 20 million US households had a doorbell camera? Wasn't really a quiz actually, sorry. It was more like a statement I framed as a question. But anywho, according to a study conducted by Strategy Analytics, the Amazon Ring brand accounts for 40% of those 20 million, which is... Eight million cameras, while Google's Nest brand accounts for another 24%.

This includes apparently George Orwell's old house, nice. The basic premise of these products is pretty simple. A smart Wi-Fi connected doorbell not only rings like the brand, yeah? A bell when pressed, but also provides live audio and video feeds. The companies that sell them market their products by emphasizing features like a two-way audio connection. So you can talk to the people who come to your door. Live remote check-ins via the connected app that allow you to monitor deliveries and even talk to the delivery people without having to actually be home,

and permanent video evidence saved directly to the cloud in case anything does actually go wrong. In theory, these devices are supposed to lead to safer communities, more secure homes, and less overall crime, acting as both a deterrent and a way to apprehend perpetrators after the fact. In theory. The reality, however, despite whatever podcast ad

you might've heard lazily and mockingly read by handsome voice news fellows, is that these doorbell cameras are, you know, bad. And I'm not just talking about when a puppet sneaks a bunch into your house. This new trend is bad in a lot of different and exciting ways, which we're going to walk you through right now.

No, wait. Now. Ring doorbell sucks actually. Hi again, it's me. So just for starters, that stated goal of these doorbell services helping to make you more secure, as in the primary reason for them to exist, is probably a lie.

We'll just get that out of the way immediately. Ring claims its cameras drastically reduce crime, but the data behind that claim is shaky and secretive at best, and completely wrong at worst. In early 2015, Ring founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff approached the non-profit Wilshire Park Association in Los Angeles, and offered to give hundreds of neighborhood residents a free Ring doorbell. But since the company was brand new at the time and I want to attach a camera that is always on

to your front door is a creepy thing to say, not many residents took the deal. And so Ring only ended up installing around 40 cameras, which is less than hundreds. Nevertheless, in March 2016, the company proudly announced their definitely scientific results. In Los Angeles, police revealing

a six-month pilot program using the tool helped reduce burglaries in one neighborhood by more than 50%. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for being here. Compared to the same time the previous year, that particular neighborhood had a significant reduction in burglaries, approximately 55%.

Okay, first of all, mix your fucking audio better. It's not hard. Probably, do we sound okay? It's a new space, I don't know. But heckers, a 50% reduction is pretty good, right? I mean, just look at that very official graph. The big arrow, it's pointing down, you see, proving that crime is down.

That's why the pie chart, which I guess represents crime levels, is more orange, because orange is the universal color for less crime. And you know how whenever we show a reduction over time, we use pie charts? And yet amazingly, despite this clearly scientific chart labeled last year, comma, crime, Ring refused to supply any actual data

backing up that remarkable claim when asked about it. However, when the LAPD carried out further analysis of the Wilshire Park project, they found only a 21% decrease in crime compared to the year before. Even after normalizing the data with fancy statistical analysis like long division and witchcraft to account for the surrounding area experiencing an increase in burglaries over the same time, they still only found a 42% reduction compared with other neighborhoods, which I'm pretty sure it's not 55%. So while Ring claims their product has a positive impact on crime rates, the data supporting

them is dubious and vague, and the company is suspiciously tight-lipped when it comes to providing any more information. Not only that, but even if we grant that Ring's 55% figure is totally true, the effects don't seem to last. In 2017, Wilshire Park suffered more burglaries than in any of the previous seven years. And this is all the evidence we have that these devices now in 20 million households do the thing that they claim to do. I say devices because I'm not just talking about Ring,

even though I'm definitely going to be singling out Ring cameras specifically. But everything I'm saying here is pretty much applicable to Google's Nest Cam and any other off-brand video doorbell you can find. The episode's title might be, like, Ring Doorbell Sucks Actually, but that's just so we can get those sweet, sweet branded SEO clicks, baby. Come on!

But also, Ring specifically does suck, and boy, we will be talking about why that is right now? Yeah, right now? Yeah, right now. For example, on top of making the cameras that don't actually work very well, Ring works directly with hundreds of police departments across the country. And if at this point you still need me to explain

why that isn't such a hunky dory thing to do, you might be watching the wrong show. Despite marketing themselves as a private security system meant to help citizens protect themselves, the company has partnered with over 1800 police departments since 2018 and counting. That's a lot. Too many, one could say.

And when police partner with Ring, they are required to promote its products and to allow Ring to approve everything they say about the company. In exchange, they get access to promote its products and to allow Ring to approve everything they say about the company. In exchange, they get access to Ring's Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, an interactive map that allows police to request camera footage directly from residents

without obtaining a warrant. Conversely, the company has helped organize police package theft sting operations, coached police on how to obtain footage without a warrant, and allowed them access to anything being posted on their neighbor's app, which we will be talking about right... Not actually now, a little later. It's so bad that in 2020, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform wrote a letter to

the Ring's parent company, otherwise known as fucking Amazon, demanding answers. The letter reads, The subcommittee is seeking more information regarding why cities and law enforcement agencies enter into these agreements before immediately answering its own question. Continuing, the answer appears to be that Ring gives them access to a much wider system of surveillance than they could build themselves. And Ring allows law enforcement access to a network of surveillance cameras on private property without the expense to taxpayers of having to purchase,

install and monitor those cameras. Because we did it for them. You see, it's like 1984 dystopian state that everyone got to help make. Big Brother is us? Seems pretty fucking obvious that cops would absolutely love their own private security network built from private citizens' home security systems. It's been said before, but it's pretty fucking wild that in 15 years, we went from that scene

in The Dark Knight where Wayne the Bruce Batman destroys his secret phone tap machine because it's too powerful to ever be used by anyone, even him, to just everyone agreeing to do exactly that, but nationwide and with cops, the lesser form of Batman. And not only does Ring work with these shitty bat folk, but like with the crime stats, it's suspiciously conservative with how much information it gives to the public. In fact, in documents sent to the police in Illinois,

Ring specifically instructed agencies not to tell the public how the information is shared. sent to the police in Illinois, Ring specifically instructed agencies not to tell the public how the information is shared. According to the company, the user has to agree to share surveillance footage with police, and police never have direct access to your device. However, their privacy policy states that Ring may provide personal information without notice

in connection with an investigation of suspected or actual illegal activity. So the opposite of the other thing they said. And also to establish, exercise, or defend the company's legal rights. And also when they believe disclosure is necessary or appropriate to prevent physical or other harm or financial loss. And yes, amazingly, they do define personal information as including content and related information that is captured and recorded when using our products and services such as video or audio recordings, live video or audio streams, images, comments, and data our products collect from their surrounding environments to perform their functions, such as motion,

events, temperature, and ambient light. In other words, any footage. So who's allowed to see what, with whose permission, seems up in the air at absolute best. What we do know though, is not great. One investigation into Ring's relationship with law enforcement found that for over a year, the company provided police with a map showing

where its video doorbells were installed down to the fucking street. So not technically providing specific addresses of users to cops, but pretty damn close. Kind of like how if your neighbor took a shit on your roof, it isn't technically the same as them shitting in your house, but you would still be mad about it. You know, like if it slid down your gutter on the driveway,

owning a home would be cool though. Ring eventually disabled this feature or at least heavily cut back its specificity, but not until it had partnered with at least 335 police departments, which is, you know, 335 too many police departments to know exactly where you live.

In emails to a California police department in August 2018, Ring described a potential feature that would use calls to 911 to automatically activate their video cameras as something that could exist in the not-so-distant future. Unsurprisingly, the company received a fair share of pushback due to the aforementioned egregious violations of privacy and personal liberties in service of creating a state-sanctioned surveillance network

within residential neighborhoods, which, you know, gross. Driveway shit levels of gross. In response to these criticisms, Ring released a control center for its app in January 2020 that theoretically allows users to opt out of receiving video requests from local police departments. Of course, this only kind of does what it's supposed to.

And in that letter from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform we mentioned earlier, lawmakers actually noted that the feature doesn't prevent police departments from obtaining videos from people's doorbells with a warrant, which seems pretty bad since getting warrants to violate your rights is one of cops' favorite things to do. Can't get enough of those rights violations, cops.

Like if you know a cop, get them some human rights violations for their birthday. They'll love it. So wow, this is just like the start of the video. Just the initial problems that come with sticking a camera on everyone's front door. There's still so much more video somehow. Aren't you excited? Just the initial problems that come with sticking a camera on everyone's front door. There is still so much more video somehow.

Aren't you excited? But before we continue, we must do our own little dystopian process of pushing these ads on you all. Watch them quick before my yard is completely dug up. Hey bucko, do you run a small business? Perhaps you have a day job, but run a hustle on the side making Shrek.

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Right! We were talking about Ring. And perhaps you were wondering how a spunky little video camera company got tied up in all of these police shenanigans. Or maybe you weren't. I'm still going to explain it to you and you will listen to my words. Ring's story begins in the far yesteryear of 2012 when previously mentioned CEO, Jamie Simonoff,

created Doorbot, a doorbell that rang directly to your phone. Simonoff claims he started in a humble garage, but whether or not that's true or just a cheap grab with a tech company rags to riches cliche is unclear. It seems unlikely that every new invention could have been created in a garage. For one, where are all these empty garages?

Do you people not have cars? But in the grand scheme of things, it's a pretty small detail. And besides, I hear Tony Stark built his new invention in a cave with a box of scraps! So I guess anything's possible. Elon Musk invented taking credit for other people's inventions in a cave with a box of scraps. So I guess anything's possible. Elon Musk invented taking credit for other people's inventions in a garage.

But regardless of its tenuous adjacency to a garage, Doorbot was not a very good product. Reviews through August 2014 were pretty terrible, citing things like poor video quality, inconsistent audio, and a shitty hold to talk function. Things were not looking too good for Simonov and his revolutionary new maybe garage built idea. And by 2013, he and his company were out of money.

But then everything changed when the fire nation, I mean, when they went on Shark Tank in 2013 to pitch the idea, it went, join me and the next time you hear, it'll be. Now who wants me first to ring my bell? Not great, bad actually. Simonov's pitch suffered from all of the various flaws

and failings of his product, as well as being unable to decide whether to market Doorbot as a revolutionary, disruptive new piece of tech, or as something that could easily be sold in an infomercial. The aforementioned sharks pointed out that the product seemed to exist in this purgatory between expensive and hardwired security systems and a hackable commercial gimmick.

However, while he walked off the show without taking an offer, it didn't really matter, since the real benefit of going on Shark Tank is the exposure that comes with being on gimmicky network television. Just ask our last president. Yuck, yuck, yuck, fascism. Hi-ya, hi-ya.

And so one month after the episode aired, Doorbot raised $1 million in seed funding from five venture capital firms, plus another 4.5 million more in 2014, giving it the capital and staying power to rebrand as Ring. Writing for Vice in the first of a three-part series we're about to reference a lot, tech journalist Carolyn Haskins describes how

when Doorbot became Ring, the tone of the advertisements shifted dramatically. Specifically, the focus shifted from convenience and connecting people to dramatic burglary reactions starring stock photo robbers and CGI glass shatter effects. They want you to think this is what a home burglary looks like, but over 95% of break-ins actually occur in broad daylight, which is why I invented the Ring

video doorbell. Who is the they that want you to think this is what burglaries look like, Jamie? Big burglary? All of the Hollywood execs in the pocket of ADT? The only they is literally you right now in this ad. As Haskins puts it, Ring's mission changed for one core reason.

DoorBot sold disruption in the package of a doorbell, but fear is more powerful than the optimism of disruption. Damn, someone should really make a comprehensive and incredibly funny and sexy video essay about why fear of crime politics are terrible for everyone. That would be neato. So Ring quickly began to lean into using fear of crime as a marketing tactic,

using that half-assed Wilshire Park case study in official promotional materials and selling their dubious crime data as hard evidence in order to worm their way into the law enforcement industry. In August, 2016, for example, Ring joined Washington DC's Private Security Camera Incentive Program, which allowed residents to get 200 to $500 rebates

on security cameras purchased after a particular date. Suddenly the company realized there was an untapped, rapidly growing market of tech services aimed at police. And so to most effectively capitalize on people's fear of crime, they'd need to cozy up to the group that people associate most closely with crime. You know, besides criminals,

which actually I would argue cops also are. So I was right the first time. All right, and cozy up they did. In 2018, Ring hosted a private party for police at the 2018 International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference in Orlando, with highlights including an open bar, free Ring cameras, live music, and an appearance by Shaquille O'Neal,

best known for playing the crime fighter, Steele. And gosh, oh golly, fuckasorios, the party and Shaq absolutely worked as intended. It's almost like cops don't need much convincing to use invasive tactics or equipment. In an email to Ring after the 2018 party, a Havermill Mass police officer told the company how his buddies went to the Shaq party

and asked where they could get more free Ring swag. From there, the partnership between law enforcement and Ring continued to grow into the monstrosity we've already described. A gross, symbiotic relationship that gave cops access to incredibly detailed information in return for them shilling for their product. Either implicitly, like in the case of the company quietly copy editing city official statements on Ring to remove the words surveillance and security cameras cameras or explicitly, like Ring's agreement with several departments requiring police to encourage adoption of Ring cameras

and maybe even more importantly, Ring's free app Neighbors. And actually that's a big depressing segue into the next big depressing section of this story because while we've now talked at length about why giving police officers unfettered access to your home security system is maybe kind of not so great, and in fact, terrible, we haven't touched on the other, and perhaps even more insidious effects

that surveillance tech and fear of crime culture can have on a community. The second crucial ingredient, an unholy coupling like ketchup and ice cream, or eating pickles by dipping them into a jar of human cum. Or any cum, really. Pretty gross and unnecessary stuff, me, from a moment ago. Come on.

All right, but not as gross as this. Apps like Neighbors and Nextdoor also suck, actually. Ah, yes. Neighbors is Ring's free crime-focused social media app that, in contrast to the law enforcement neighborhood portal, which is only allowed to be used by the very goodest boys in blue, is open to the public and allows users

to anonymously discuss crime and public safety issues within their local community. Again, like with video doorbells themselves, this is a concept that could theoretically sound like a good thing if it was proposed in a vacuum by someone who didn't know anything about American history, politics, or what a human is. But when talked about by literally anyone

who knows literally anything about anything, it becomes immediately problematic in some pretty serious ways. And once more, it's taking all of the terrifying aspects of a paranoid and dystopian future and outsourcing it to the bafflingly willing public. For one, Neigh, neighbors and other similar non-ring affiliated apps like Nextdoor and Citizen

implicitly encourage users to spy and snitch on their neighbors, which can lead to exactly the opposite of the intended effect of making communities feel safer. I put intended in big sarcastic air quotes there because of course, as we've already discussed, the companies making these products have no real investment in making people feel safer.

And in fact, are banking on their users being paranoid about crime to boost sales. And hey, would you look at that? That's exactly what these products do. Despite violent crime and property crime having the lowest rates they've had in decades, Americans seem to think crime is getting worse, according to data from both Gallup and Pew Research Center.

And the download analytics for these apps reflect these fears. Nextdoor was the ninth most downloaded lifestyle app in the US on iPhones at the end of April 2019, while Ring's Neighbors is the 36th most downloaded social app around the same time, up from number 115 at launch the year before. Meanwhile, Citizen was the seventh most downloaded news app

on iOS the same year. And yes, I said news app, as in the app that allows you to check who has been shanked in your immediate vicinity calls itself news. You know, kind of like how a dating app is horny news, I guess. Seems like we shouldn't be counting Citizen as news. You know, kind of like how a dating app is horny news, I guess. Seems like we shouldn't be counting Citizen as news,

is my point, but of course, that's part of the problem. The rise of social media and smart technology in general has absolutely contributed to this attitude of isolation and suspicion. But it's also been compounded by the decline of local actual news, not murder news. Cuts to and closings of local newspapers over the past few decades have led to news deserts

throughout the country, which are areas that no longer have reporters to cover goings on that aren't on a national scale. With no locally sourced journalism to rely on and only the failing New York Times to provide national news coverage, social media has stepped in to fill the void and amplify defensive fear-based responses

in a way that professional ethical local journalism wouldn't, hopefully. It's almost as if local news isn't something that should be outsourced to randos in an app and was actually something that should have been protected despite whether or not it makes a profit and maybe not everything should be valued based on how much money it makes, but you know.

Anywho, not only do all of these neighborhood watch apps encourage paranoia and suspicion, in some cases going so far as to actively encourage its users to try to report crimes in return for rewards. And oh look, it's Ring again. Wow, seems like they're uniquely bad. Now to give credit to Ring and a totally fair balanced TM, maybe even CR, but just the tip,

the specific marketing campaign being talked about in that article was discontinued the same year it rolled out you know, because it was fucked up. And still Ring continues to encourage its users to band together to help stop crime, which I would argue it was fucked up. And still Ring continues to encourage its users to band together to help stop crime, which I would argue is also fucked up because of course we haven't even gotten to one of the worst ways surveillance tech

and neighborhood watch culture can affect communities. Yeah, sure, partnering with cops to provide immoral and legally dubious access to private video feeds is bad. And yeah, sure, encouraging a culture of fear and isolation towards your neighbors and community members is also bad, but this is America. And America wouldn't be complete without that secret sauce that makes everything about our stupid little country

just a little bit worse. You know, like dipping a pickle, nevermind. Racism! There it is, that's the sauce. As some of you probably guessed, studies have shown that the paranoia these apps instigate feed into existing biases and racism and largely reinforce stereotypes around skin color.

You know, due to the fact that our cultural attitudes surrounding crime are inextricably tied to race because of the racism and such. According to David Waldson, a professor of media and information at Michigan State University, there's very deep research saying, if we hear about or read a crime story, we're much more likely to identify a black person than a white person as the perpetrator.

One recent Motherboard article found that the majority of people posted as suspicious on neighbors in a gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood were people of color. Citizen is also full of comments speculating on the race of people in 911 alerts, and on Nextdoor, things have gotten so bad that the app developers have implemented an anti-racism feature that notifies users if they try to post something racist. It's kind of like Clippy.

If Clippy cared a lot about systemic racism and unjust policing instead of the so-called grammar mistakes in my poem diary, their poems, Clippy! Get a life. However, many anti-racism activists feel that apps like Nextdoor still aren't doing enough. Shakira Porter, a member of the advocacy group Neighbors for Racial Justice said in 2017

that she doesn't think Nextdoor's anti-racism measures, which include woke Clippy, as well as requiring users to describe suspicious individuals with two attributes so as to avoid focusing only on race is enough. She also just doesn't believe their current data, which the app has used in the past to prove that their existing measures are already making a difference.

While Nextdoor in particular does seem to have taken more drastic steps than most to address this issue, maybe it's not a problem that can be fixed with a few terms of service tweaks, so much as one that's tied intrinsically to like society, and therefore the concepts of private surveillance. For what it's worth, Porter and Neighbors for Racial Justice

have gone out of their way to say that they don't think the world would be better off without Nextdoor altogether, that the app is a valuable resource for local communities, and that unfortunately, the way our society often figures out how to help people who are marginalized is by deciding what's best for them, rather than letting them decide for themselves.

These are all important things to keep in mind, and in fact, it may well be the case that the good next door and citizen, even neighbors, provide is too important to be worth just throwing out entirely. However, it seems obvious that the steps these companies are currently taking to address the issues present in their products are entirely insufficient,

and that the work left to be done may come at the expense of business interests, which is a huge problem, given that we live under an economic system that prioritizes the profit motive above all else, despite the knowledge that market forces on their own are completely unable to address issues like systemic racism.

And snap, you know, speaking of profit motive, the chip in my brain designed to tell me that it's time for ads just sent the message to my balls, which is where I requested the message to be sent. So enjoy these ads as you would a light electric charge sent to your genitals. Listen, no one likes reading, but sadly it is still a thing we need to do to pass the time or I guess to like learn cooking instructions. One day we will finally defeat the concept of reading.

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you're curious, Scribd is S-C-R-I-B-D dot com slash more news. Oh boy, those sure were ads, I guess. At least I hope. Did we remember to film the ads? We probably did. We film ads after the main show, so remember to film the ads, Cody!

Okay, back to the racism. Yay! Before that ball-tingling ad break, we were talking about how Ring, its companion app Neighbors, and other apps like it, including Citizen and Nextdoor, contribute to an environment of paranoia that leads to behaviors like racial profiling and exclusion. I really can't stress enough how much of a problem this is. In the third and final part of her three-part Vice series on Ring, Carolyn Haskins describes how neighbors posting options implicitly encourage posting about people you don't trust,

which in practice ends up being racist more often than not. "'Ring' markets neighbors as a digital neighborhood watch," Haskins says, but it also encourages people to think about who belongs and who is an outsider. In this way, neighborsbors is not just a digital neighborhood watch, it's a digital gated community.

Security cameras, she explains, carry an aesthetic of suspicion and fear, since security footage is usually shared in the context of crime on local news, and human beings have small and delicious monkey brains that can only handle one association at a time. Since local and online news tends to over-represent crimes committed by people of color,

people of color captured on security cameras are at an especially high risk of appearing to be suspicious. One person appearing suspicious combined with another person feeling especially paranoid leads to the suspicious person having the cops called on them. And given the well-documented irrefutable fact

that our criminal justice system is chock-a-block with racial bias, that's not an outcome that ends up so great for people of color. And even when you don't involve the shooty boys, or girls, in blue, in general, the Nextdoor app has not been a particularly welcoming place for non-white people, going so far as black users being silenced

by community moderators when calling out racist posts. As one woman told The Verge, "'I don't feel safe at all using it next door for anything. "'I'm always terrified, thinking, "'Oh my God, I already know what so-and-so thinks of us. "'This is a very horrible situation to be in.'" So basically, you get all the racism of any online community,

but with the added knowledge that these people are living right next door, how fun. It's like a game of werewolf, but with racists, or mafia with racists, or zombie bite with racists, whichever version of that kind of game you're familiar with, with racists. And that's not even getting into all of the other weird, bad things that go on with all of these apps

that aren't racist or police related, but are still, you know, jizz pickly. Like how in a recent poll, 30% of home sellers admitted to using a hidden camera to drop in on buyers when their home was on the market. To be clear, these sellers weren't installing the cameras with this specific purpose in mind. In most cases, the sellers reported

having previously installed them for other reasons, like, well, fear of crime. But since they already had them, they decided to drop in on showings to find out what buyers did or didn't like about the house, or even to collect information to use in negotiations. Hey, gross. Another not explicitly racist,

but still weird and bad example comes from one of the original intended uses of these cameras, which was to prevent and record package thieves, which can end up leading to bizarre instant karma loops that have homeowners going out of their way to try and lure package thieves so they can trick them on camera to get local news and social media coverage, which of course they get. I just leave multiple bait boxes full of trash and junk and even my dogs contribute. That's right, he rigs boxes filled with dog feces, oil and trash. Then there are the bait boxes attached to a fishing line and air horn. If you see the videos, it's funny to see how the people get scared and maybe it might make them think twice about, you know, maybe this might not be such a good idea. Bart says he doesn't even get real packages delivered to his home anymore, but on the rare occasion he does,

he uses those bait packages as distractions so thieves don't go after the real package. This just in, local man needs a better hobby since his divorce. In a lot of ways, what we're seeing is the real-life equivalent of the obsession with dunking on people online. Because of course, why wouldn't we take the social dynamics of Twitter

and apply them to our own neighborhoods? Doesn't that sound... Swell? You know how the internet is just a great place for discourse? And it really seems like apps like Nextdoor are designed to take all of the worst online habits we have and apply them to our literal neighbors,

even at the lowest stakes possible. Like let's do a hypothetical for a section, a totally hypothetical situation involving the Nextdoor app that we'll call Totally Hypothetical Storytime with Cody L. Johnston. That's me. So let's say there's this woman on Nextdoor, let's call her Shay because that's her name, hypothetically.

And Shay decides to post on Nextdoor about how her rescued pet squirrel of 14 years has recently passed away, and that she's in the market for a new squirrel with a similar rescue backstory. The backstory is crucial when it comes to choosing a pet squirrel. Not many people know about this, but that is squirrel law. A few days later, a different lady, let's call her Joelle,

which is of course her name, of course, hypothetically, okay, posts about finding an injured baby squirrel asking for advice. I, as in the royal I, not me specifically, immediately think about Shay and her quest for a new pet squirrel and go to connect them only to find that several people have already gotten there before me or before whomever. Now, at this point you might be thinking, but wait, isn't it illegal to own a squirrel as a pet in California? That is the hypothetical state this takes place in, you see.

Well, don't you worry your teeny, tiny, itty bitty little head about that for even one more second. Dave H is on the case, doing the one thing a random dude on the internet does best, randomly butting into other people's business. Dave, which is what we're hypothetically calling this guy because it's his name, decides to go out of his way to point out

to as many people as possible that it's illegal to own squirrels. At no point does he indicate that he knows Shay or Joelle or literally anyone involved. He doesn't seem to be an animal expert or a vet or a squirrel rights activist. He's just some guy named Dave, who desperately needs to make sure everyone knows

that he knows that it's against the law to own squirrels, a thing that feels both intuitive and also who gives a fuck. It's squirrels, you know? This again, in this hypothetical situation I have screen grabs of, reaches the point that other people notice Dave's behavior and start to make jokes about it in the comment thread,

like, oh, better not let Dave see this, to which Dave responds very normally by comparing the crime of taking care of an injured squirrel with the crimes of riding bikes on sidewalks and homeless trespassing. Really showing your weird ass with that last one, huh Dave? You made up person, you. When someone else decides to chime in of their own accord

to also point out that it's against the law to own a squirrel, Dave steps in immediately to warn him about the evil cancel culture mob who believe they're above the law and can do whatever they want. And of course, the piece de resistance. In response to someone telling him to shut the fuck up and leave Shay and Joelle alone

to do their squirrely business, Dave responds with, okay, boomer, a move so unbelievably lacking in self-awareness, I don't even have a joke to make about it. Look, I know this is just a silly, meaningless, and totally hypothetical story about squirrels and some guy named Dave, and it doesn't have any of the weight or impact or systemic injustices of the rest of the stuff we've been talking about. But boy, it feels like a perfect example of the kind of mentality these

apps and platforms can foster. A mindset where everyone feels entitled to everyone else's business, where the slightest misstep becomes an unforgivable transgression, and problems that could be resolved quickly and easily in person get blown out of proportion into huge inter-community conflicts that make everyone the villain and nobody ends up happy. Anyway, that was totally hypothetical,

whatever with Cody something. Look, you all know this is a real thing that happened to me and I guess it's my fault for being on the stupid app, but I don't care, I was curious, only God can judge me. Okay, great. Glad we stopped the show for that story. Also, I wasn't sure if I was gonna reveal this or not, but the baby squirrel unfortunately didn't make it, so. Fuck you, guy named Dave.

So our last example, and maybe the most clear example of the ways Ring and other video doorbells can make people act like premium grade dicks is this story that blew up a few months back about TikTokers demanding the Amazon workers delivering their packages dance for them via their Ring cameras. And while really any story involving TikTok trends

is harrowing in itself, this dynamic made it so drivers felt pressured to do whatever the customer said, lest they receive a bad review or complaint or a night in the box. Even if that means dancing like an asshole and then having the video posted online without your consent, often to the delight of millions. And boy, imagine having to deliver packages all fucking day in the hot sun

and being asked to do a fucking jig. Heck, unless your job specifically involves dancing, it should be against the law to pressure anyone in any job to do so much as the hokey goddamn pokey. But also, this is Ring, which again is owned by Amazon. Meaning that this cute little act of corporate synergy is actually just the same big money demon literally compelling their employees

to dance for their amusement. After pissing in bottles. But the other reason I bring up Amazon is because this makes Ring not just a camera company, but a node in Amazon's network of Alexa-enabled smart home devices. And so, since acquiring Ring in 2018, Amazon has opened up a whole host

of new privacy concerns for the company, because of course it has. It's Amazon, the company that mass marketed listening devices in your home. So despite Ring being explicitly marketed as a tool to make people feel safer in their own homes, a survey conducted by the Zebra found that 87% of Americans don't know how their doorbell camera data is being used.

And 93% say they wouldn't buy a doorbell camera if it collected and sold data about their family. Despite these misgivings, Ring is actively sharing its data with at least five third-party companies other than Amazon, despite listing only one of those companies in its privacy notice. According to a report released

by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in January, 2020, Ring sells users' time zone, device model, screen resolution, and unique device identifier to Facebook, a yet-to-be-determined amount of consumer data to Google, sensor data related to the magnetometer, gyroscope, and accelerometer on users' phones to AppsFlyer, a marketing and analytics company, multiple unique identifiers, IP addresses, device model, and screen resolutions to Branch,

a deep-linking company that specializes in letting different apps talk to each other, and users' full names, email addresses, device information, and app settings to Mixpanel, another analytics company. Only that last one is mentioned anywhere and rings terms and conditions, and those are only the five EFF could find out about. There could be even more, even secretier ones we haven't discovered yet. If you need to pause the video for a second to scream, or I don't know, hug your mom or something, I don't blame you.

Your mom is extremely hot after all. Also, that's some real bummer turds I just laid out. And it's just a very, very shallow end of the metaphorical pool of what Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. In the introduction to her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, you know, the thing I just said

with the age of in front of it, Zuboff outlines a sociological shift away from industrial capitalism and towards a new information-centric mode of economic production. Zuboff compares this shift, which she identifies as beginning in the early 2010s, to the similar shift toward managerial capitalism that occurred a century earlier

thanks to Henry Ford. To put it simply, surveillance capitalism is a mode of production that instead of producing products from raw material like industrial capitalism, sees its product as behavioral futures stripped from the raw data of human experience. It's close to what they say about sites like Facebook in that if the product is free, you are the actual product,

or more specifically, your behavior. Zuboff begins the book by talking about the Aware Home, an experimental smart home designed by a group of computer scientists and engineers at Georgia Tech in 2000 that looks both cutting edge and quaintly dated. So this is our app for controlling the home. And currently we have installed in the bedroom, actually, a window air conditioner, several blinds, about five automated blinds in the living room and kitchen area,

cameras around the home, garage door opener down in the basement, lights controllable through both smart switches and IP-based bulbs, and smart water heater down in the basement. An automated garage door, you say? But I kid, I'm a kidder. The project was imagined to be a human home symbiosis with smart tech context aware sensors and wearable computers constantly adjusting various outputs

to optimize user experience. Crucially, however, the engineering plan for the project emphasized trust and personal privacy, treating the home as an inviolable private domain, like some kind of, I don't know, house, I guess. This was important because even at the time, the scientists working on the project understood that the work they were doing was going to produce

an entirely new kind of knowledge. And they worked hard to ensure that the experiment was designed such that that new knowledge and the power to use it to improve the occupant's life would belong exclusively to the occupants. The aware home was imagined as a simple closed loop controlled entirely by the users with no access to outside systems.

Adorable. Because of course the assumptions of privacy and individual sovereignty that the project championed have completely disappeared as tech firms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon totally skipped over the ethics board and closed loop experiments phase and push their smart tech directly to market, launching us into a new mode of economic production

without much warning or fanfare. Didn't stop to think if they should, et cetera, Jeff Goldblum and so forth. It works like this. Pretty much any piece of smart technology also collects usage data originally meant to analyze those interactions so as to improve the user experience. Users use the product, which is why we call them users,

and then behavioral data is collected and analyzed. Improvements are made and the cycle goes around again. Neat, clean, sexy, and cyclical. But somewhere along the line, Google and the other tech companies realized that all that excess data, what's labeled as data exhaust, still had value. Even if it couldn't be used to improve the product directly,

it told the data collector a huge amount of information about the users, information that could be used in other ways, like for example, to improve the specificity and profitability of ads directed toward the users. Personalized ads have become so commonplace that it's wild to think about a time when our data wasn't being used this way.

But this realization that excess behavioral data could be used in this manner was revolutionary and fundamentally shifted tech companies' relationships with their customers. Suddenly, the primary purpose of collecting that data in the first place changed. Companies like Google no longer wanted to mine behavioral data to improve service for users,

but to read individual users' minds and tailor their advertising specifically for them. Suddenly, these apps and devices were optimized specifically with the goal of collecting better data at the forefront rather than improving user experience. You might enjoy the fact that Facebook now has more reactions beyond a simple like button, but in reality, it also allows Facebook to collect

far more specific data each time a user reacts to a post. We've essentially allowed ourselves to all be part of one big marketing focus group, but without consent or the benefit of getting paid for it. And as Zuboff says, that this no longer seems astonishing to us is evidence of the profound psychic numbing that has inured us to a bold and unprecedented shift

in capitalist methods. But here's where it ties back to Ring and Nextdoor and the devices we all have in our pockets. Because it of course doesn't just stop at crafting personalized ads for hot sauce or dental dams or hot sauce dental dams. Along with using this data to make behavioral predictions, these companies are also trying

to affect your behavior directly. It works like this. In the morning, Google+, everyone's favorite social media platform, prioritizes showing you a post that makes you sad and puts you in that sullen chalupa craving mood. Around midday, Google shows you a few coupon ads for Taco Bell. Then later that night, Google Maps just happens to put you on a route that takes you past that glowing white sign. A merciful pink bell cutting through the fog of your chalupa-less day.

Suddenly, you're living moss and didn't even carese, all without any direct human oversight or decision making. Just an algorithm trying to optimize its profits by quietly controlling your actions. In other words, instead of just the data, we're now the things being automated. Zuboff calls this shift instrumentarianism and describes it as a power that shapes human behavior towards others others ends through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of smart networked devices, things, and spaces. And boy, this wouldn't just have to apply to eateries

as I'm sure you can imagine, but all sorts of things like, geez, I don't know, political elections. In a lot of ways, we're pretty lucky that all they want is our money, except for the fact that things like paranoia and fear absolutely sell. Specifically, they sell Amazon's Ring cameras,

because again, once Amazon acquired Ring, they gained access to all the behavioral surplus data that comes with attaching an always-on camera to your front door, and even more importantly, that comes with owning a social media app that encourages its users to constantly talk about the day-to-day activities of themselves and their neighbors in hyper-specific paranoid detail.

Since Ring and neighbors are part of the Amazon Smart Hub network, they're connected to Alexa and your Amazon Prime account, and even your Kindle, if you're the kind of nerd who still reads books in 2022, and all that data gets fed into the same algorithm, which spits out predictive futures that companies use to quietly control what you do.

It's like, I don't know, the matrix, except they didn't have to build a big, stupid virtual world and just use the big, stupid one we already had. It's hard to even know what to do about all of this. As Zuboff argues, one of the dangers of surveillance capitalism is that because it's so new and so different from what came before,

it can be hard to fully grasp the enormity of the situation at hand. When Henry Ford invented the assembly line and started to pay his workers $5 a day so that they could afford to buy the products he was having them make, he upended the standard American lifestyle in a way that would have been impossible

to predict beforehand simply because there would have been impossible to predict beforehand simply because there would have been no frame of reference. "'Surveillance capitalism works the same way,' Zuboff says, "'meaning that while concepts like monopolies "'and privacy concerns absolutely apply "'to companies like Amazon, they very much fall short "'in identifying the entire scope

"'of the shift we're now facing. "'So much like the internet as a whole, "'these changes are very new and unregulated. No doubt the 2000s and beyond will be historically seen as both an exciting and tumultuous time on this planet due to the technological advances we have made in such a short period. That's not inherently bad or good.

I mean, just look at this show and the fact that it could never exist in this form just 20 years ago. It would have to be a zine or at best a series of poorly animated gifs set to loop Sean Connery quotes or some horse shit like that. Surveillance capitalism is bad, dog! So there may not be a consensus on what to do about surveillance capitalism or ring or next door, but the fact that people are talking about it, that we're making this video for an audience on youtube.com, be sure to subscribe and like and share, is a start. But more importantly, we need to recognize that the internet is still very much volatile

and unregulated, and perhaps therefore, shouldn't be applied to the more sensitive areas of our lives, no matter how convenient it seems. In other words, hey, don't buy a goddamn internet video doorbell, or if you've already fucked that one up, get rid of your internet video doorbell. Even if we set aside the mind-numbing existential threat

posed by surveillance capitalism, all that other stuff we talked about at the beginning of the video is bad on its own too. Remember the racism and the working closely with cops and stuff? There's almost no evidence video doorbells do the thing they purport to do, but a lot of evidence about obvious,

provably bad side effects. So like, just use a normal fucking doorbell or text your friend when you're outside and then stand at an awkward middle distance between the driveway and the door because you're not sure how close is too close to be when they open the door, like a normal person. Also, maybe make friends with your neighbors.

I know, very gross and scary thing to do. I mean, what if you end up with a Dave H-type situation on your hands? But, and you're gonna have to trust me here, it's worth the risk. As Carolyn Haskins points out, it's impossible to talk about Ring in a vacuum, as if Ring is the only home surveillance company

selling fear and promising security in return. Ring is the symptom of a worldview in which crime is an existential threat and data capturing technology is the solution. For people who subscribe to this worldview, it doesn't matter that crime rates are actually going down nationwide. The only thing that matters is that they believe crime is a threat. Haskins quotes Evan Greer, the deputy director of digital activist group Fight for the Future, who says that Ring is a product that's incompatible with a functioning community. That's a fundamental idea that ties communities together.

Neighbors trust each other and protect each other and take care of each other. Ring and products like it rely on a culture of fear, paranoia and isolation to sell themselves. A culture that has only worsened since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the deterioration of local communities due to factors like the internet, division,

and a cost of living that continues to rise at a frightening rate. The only antidote to that is to be familiar with your physical reality, as opposed to relying on some terrifying, uncaring app. So go outside, touch some grass, pet stranger dogs, meet your neighbors, have a socially distanced potluck or something. Are potlucks still hip?

I don't know. I've been stuck in this little blue room for what feels like years now. Oh God, how long has it been? What year is it? Nah, who cares? What I'm saying here is that if you really want to communicate with your neighbors and keep an eye on your community,

you have to actually do those things in real life if you want to do that. Wormbo's back! Because maybe you value your privacy. Hi, Wormbo, did you find the prize? Wormbo found all sorts of prizes and pipes and wires, buried in Mr. Cody's yard and other yards, and everyone watched and cheered or screamed

and then a bunch of cars with lights followed Wombo and so Wombo came back here. Great, thanks. Let me just, uh... Yep. Nothing but posts about a sock demon tearing up the street and... Did you eat a squirrel? Wombo eats many squirrels, silly goat. Okay,

well, Dave H. is gonna have a lot to say about this, which I will discuss with him in person! Can Wormbo come? Actually, yeah. I think Wormbo's new friend, Dave H., is gonna really love to meet ya.

Wow, okay, so there are so many cops outside my place right now. Like, way more than normal. So, like, a few. Hey, everybody, short and sweet. Thanks for watching. Make sure to like and subscribe. It's the end of the video. We appreciate you watching it until the very end,

which is this part. We got a patreon.com slash some more news. We've got a podcast called even more news. We got another podcast called some more news, which is this show, but just an audio form. If you really like Wormbo's voice, but don't like his beautiful face, I don't know. Furthermore, merch is available at links

that you can click on. And that's just so the end of this video.