Tech Goes Full-On Creepy
WC Fields warned never to work with kids and animals – advice Ring founder Jamie Siminoff should have heeded.
Ring , the surveillance camera that monitors your doorstep, produced what was supposed to be a warm and fuzzy Superbowl ad, showing the device using neighborhood surveillance to locate a missing family pet. Milo found! Be a hero and add to the unbridled neighborhood surveillance! Ok, so that’s not what they said, but that was the viewing public’s takeaway.
“Many viewers on both the right and left were disturbed by the privacy implications of the advertised “Search Party” feature. This AI tool is designed to reunite lost dogs with their owners, and the Super Bowl ad claims that one lost pet is found every day thanks to the technology,” reports Mashable. “Here’s how Search Party works: When a dog is lost, pet owners can upload a picture of their pet, at which point their neighbors’ Ring video doorbells and security cameras will start looking for the lost pup. Of course, as viewers quickly realized, if Ring can do this for lost dogs, there’s no reason it couldn’t identify a human face just as easily.”