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mollibroccoli.bsky.social
mdb 🍉
@mollibroccoli.bsky.social
110 followers 780 following 3 posts
digital rights & first amendment person / musician / garden & craft gremlin
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jwherrman.bsky.social
The success of Ring is just an incredibly American story: Individualism expressed through consumer habits resulting in the voluntary creation of a national surveillance network. Add home security cameras to the list with guns, cars
In Ring's case, customers largely saw themselves as on the same side as Amazon in a fight against porch piracy and for convenience, if they thought of their purchase in such terms at all. The privacy-based case against buying a Ring camera wasn't terribly persuasive from the perspective of potential customers, because they were the ones doing the surveillance, from their property, protecting their stuff and homes. Ring cameras invited users to adopt an Amazonian logic of their own, in which total stoop awareness is, clearly, a good and desirable thing. Barely a decade after Ring's doorbell-camera pitch first aired on Shark Tank, though, Amazon and millions of its customers have haphazardly and perhaps not entirely consciously teamed up to build something strange, unprecedented, and very Amazon: a crowd-sourced, nationwide, neighborhood surveillance network to which the government now has a set of keys.
October 27, 2025 at 6:21 PM