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.”

Note that the Search Party is an on-by-default feature that links together Ring cameras in a neighborhood creating a networked, automated surveillance system, speaking of warm and fuzzy.

“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.” Top of Form

“Chris Gilliard, a privacy expert and author of the upcoming book Luxury Surveillance, told 404 Media these features and its Super Bowl ad are “a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement and other equally invasive surveillance companies,” says Era Of Light.

There’s crime, and there are criminals, and who’s to say that criminals couldn’t hack into the same system. At this point, we all know that there are two sides to every technology.

“Amazon owns Ring and they want to use all these devices to make a mesh network for Amazon sidewalk,” an X user wrote. “You can already be seen in your home through WiFi signals. The American consumer got a Trojan horse packaged as home security. You need to start decoupling from the cloud,” reports Yahoo!News.

But the times, they are a-changing. It seems that people have reached the unwarranted (literally) tech surveillance tipping point.

“Flock Safety, the controversial Atlanta-based surveillance company, just wants to build a network of cameras that allows it to track every single person’s movements at all times, and for some reason, people seem to have a problem with that,” Jalopnik writes.  “Mainly, they focus on license plate readers that allow authorities to track your driving habits, but they’re always looking to expand. Sadly, though, Flock’s dreams of building a horrifying surveillance state could be in danger now that tech journalist Brian Merchant reports people keep destroying Flock’s surveillance cameras. The horror!

“Why these vigilantes won’t simply accept an all-powerful surveillance state that tracks their every movement, no one can really say, but in La Mesa, California, two Flock cameras were just destroyed by hooligans using two different methods — one was disabled when someone removed a necessary part, while the second was disabled with a sophisticated percussion attack that left the camera inoperable, most likely due to the use of an advanced, military-grade weapon known as a “blunt object.”

This practice is spreading nationally.

As for those camera-enabled Meta Ray-Bans, “Meta Considers Timed Face Recognition Launch to Exploit Distracted Society,” notes Reclaim the Net. “Meta’s own document treats the civil liberties backlash not as a reason to reconsider, but as a calendar event to schedule around.”

And the push back begins: “This App Tells You When a Person Nearby is Wearing Smart Glasses,” writes Peta Pixel.

“Yves Jeanrenaud, the app developer and sociologist, tells 404 that he made the app in response to media coverage about how certain people, sometimes labeled ‘glassholes’, have been utilizing smart glasses.

“I consider it to be a tiny part of resistance against surveillance tech,” Jeanrenaud says “This is a tech solution to a social problem exaggerated by tech. I do not want to promote techsolutionism nor do I want people to feel falsely secure. It’s still imperfect.”

“We’re building products that help millions of people connect and enrich their lives,” Meta said in a statement about the Meta Ray Bans – and where have we heard that before. “… we’re still thinking through options and will take a thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out,” repots the Reclaim the Net piece.

Of course, with Meta, thoughtful’ means how do they avoid lawsuits or Congressional oversight.

While Google Glass, which was a much earlier version of Meta’s Ray Bans and never quite gained in popularity, its wearers having been labeled ‘Glassholes,’ wearers were physically attacked or the devices ripped from their faces, yea, even in those early days (2014). As the woman who said she was attacked at a San Francisco punk club for wearing Google Glass said at the time, “I never expected such hate and venom for merely having a computer cell phone on my head,” CBS News reported.

She was also recording people without their permission.

Tech is reportedly here to solve problems, not create new ones, and as we reported last week, Apple is set to release its own suite of surveillancewear, as we’re now calling the category.

It’s time that founders started thinking more than 20 minutes into the future, meaning about possible negative applications/consequences produced by their creations, in terms of their users, of course, and the collateral damage they may be causing in light of the blowback to the surveillance devices despite their being released in the name of ‘safety,’ and ‘helping millions of people connect.’ What about expectation of privacy?

There’s no doubt that Meta, Apple and the likes are behemoths. As we’ve noted before, no one stays on top forever. Take heed!

With all these surveillance devices out there and more surveillancewear coming soon, the question is: what are these companies going to do with all these captured images? Create or facilitate deep fakes? Wonder when spoofware will enter the lexicon, and where does it stop? And let’s not forget that data collection is alive and well and expanding.

Or does it, considering this just in: “Meta patents AI that could continue posting on social media on behalf of deceased users,” Techspot reports. “The patent could also potentially enable the simulation of video and audio calls with the deceased user. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the patent but emphasized that the company does not plan to use the technology to post messages or create content on behalf of deceased social media users (and) added that filing patents allows the company to secure ownership of new concepts, but it does not imply that the technologies will be implemented commercially.”

Not that any of this might be fodder for scammers at all.

When did tech decide to go all in on the creep factor? We can only wonder if the early founders of the space who envisioned that their creations might eventually bring great advancements to the world must be turning in their graves. Although it seems that soon enough, we’ll be able to ask them to answer that questions themselves. Onward and forward.