Amazon's Home Surveillance Chief Declared War on “Dirtbag Criminals”
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
From what I’ve witnessed, these services have indeed aided residents to cooperate against “dirtbag” criminals as well as supply imagery to police as evidence and has led to arrests and convictions (in my neighborhood, at least). It gives all types of residents some comfort that the perps will get caught rather than the police saying “sorry, we don’t have evidence, and don’t have time to follow up on non violent crime”.
Residents are going to deploy this. That’s a given. At this time owners control access. If there comes a time when one loses control over this content unilaterally, then it will be a problem.
This is a disturbing trend. It seems that, as tech companies get larger, they are giving themselves over to the surveillance state with ever more enthusiasm.
If curious get on one of the mentioned neighborhood apps, see how people use these devices: package theft, suspicious people/cars, vagrants/unstable folks, public disturbance (skaboarders scratching cars, etc.,) early hours canvassing by thieves, etc...
Show me one place where package theft is even mentioned on Ring's website or in their doc. Is isn't.
It naive to think that Amazon is worried about package theft and that's why they bought Ring. Too many other tech companies have signed up for the surveillance economy for that to be true.
What's the real reason?
As for why I would guess wanting better rates from turning bits to cash.
Shoppers do not care about package theft
Ultimately, the consumer only cares about what product he is getting and what price he has to pay. How the company juggles its losses or where they come from is of no interest to the product purchaser.
Package theft is a drop in the bucket for Amazon and can't amount to more than the equivalent losses from shoplifting if they ran retail stores.
There are also those genuinely concerned over $STATE$ security and working towards that as a goal.
I'm not condoning or supporting or rejecting for that matter any of the above. But it really doesn't take too much to see several reasons why this stuff happens.
As to the losses in relation to retail stores... retail stores generally have higher margins, and they still hire security staff and put up cameras.
It's also a moral outrage, when a subset of the population blatantly preys on others, and perpetrating the vast majority of thefts while constituting a tiny proportion of the population. There needs to be a strong response to these types of people for the safety of everyone else.