My Thoughts on the Amazon Ring-Flock Safety Partnership

A flock over the Amazon.

Amazon didn’t get a lot of good news today, and there was another negative news item that people focused on the AWS outage probably missed.

Anthony Kimery of Biometric Update wrote an article entitled “Ring’s partnership with Flock raises privacy alarms.” I offered the following commentary on LinkedIn’s Bredemarket Identity Firm Services page.

Perhaps I’m industry-embedded, but this seems fine to me. Consent appears to be honored everywhere.

“Under the deal, agencies that use Flock’s Nova or FlockOS investigative platforms will soon be able to post Community Requests through Ring’s Neighbors app, asking nearby residents to share doorbell footage relevant to an investigation.

“Each request includes a case ID, time window, and map of the affected area. Ring says participation is voluntary and that residents can choose whether to respond, and agencies cannot see who declines. Users can also disable the feature entirely in their account settings.”

On the other hand, Senator Ron Wyden doesn’t trust Flock at all and says that “abuse of Flock cameras is inevitable.”

Heck, abuse of citizens by the U.S. Senate is inevitable, but citizens aren’t demanding that the Senate cease operations.

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