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Many more American homes will have surveillance devices after this year's Amazon Prime Day sale.
During the 36 hours of its Prime store, the online commerce giant has sold its Ring video doorbell and other Ring monitoring products at very advantageous prices – about 50% off, depending on the packaging. After the first day of Prime sales, Amazon's Ring Ring was a bestseller among Amazon's devices and electronics at what has always been the company's biggest selling day.
Much like the way Amazon Prime Day premium deals on Echo smart speakers have encouraged people to install at home more than 100 million artificially intelligent Alexa devices, the company's willingness to selling Ring devices could lead to a broader adoption of what I've talked about as social media based on fear.
Ring and his neighboring app, Neighbors, allow the inhabitants of a given community to report crimes and share footage of these crimes (often people stealing Amazon parcels) that they collect via their Amazon video cameras Ring. In practice, this means a lot of reports about brown "suspicious" people on porches and a general perception that the world is a scary place than it is.
At Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference on Monday, Ring's founder, Jamie Siminoff, responded to criticism that his products spread racism and paranoia, touting "the moderators of society with advanced training" and community directives banning racial profiling and discrimination.
Even after being bought in 2018 by Amazon, he thinks these practices work. "I think we are adapting well to that," he said.
However, Ring's "crime" videos still appear disproportionately in Ring's videos. Racist statements describing suspected criminals are commonplace, especially in comments on the Neighbors application. Ring users and neighbors are also encouraged to share videos with the forces of order, a practice that can exacerbate dangerous interactions with police between people of color.
As Steven Renderos, Senior Campaign Director at the Center for Media Justice, put it: "These apps are not the definitive guide to crime in a neighborhood. They simply reflect the prejudices of people, who criminalize people of color, the unoccupied. and other marginalized communities. "
It's also bad for the mental health of device owners.
Since these apps focus on nearby crime, you may feel that the danger is more imminent than it really is. Indeed, Americans perceive crime as increasing even as the national statistics of the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that crime rates are down.
Earlier this month, Vice announced a public relations stunt Amazon, in which the company had collaborated with law enforcement agencies to set up unnecessary sting operations aimed at intercepting people who stole merchandise from them. # 39; Amazon.
In the end, it really did help Amazon.
"If customers are afraid of their neighbors and afraid to steal a package, they are less likely to get angry with Amazon if they do not get the package they ordered," wrote Caroline Haskins. "They are also more likely to buy a Ring Ring Ring Camera owned by Amazon, which is marketed as a way to monitor your insurance for parcel deliveries and parcel thieves."
But that did not stop social media based on fear becoming very popular.
The Ring Neighbors application, with Citizen – an application that works like a police scanner and encourages people to film and share crime scenes nearby – and Nextdoor – a social network headquarters where the People can sell property, ask for local recommendations, or discuss neighborhood crime. – are hits on app stores, according to data from data provider and App Annie mobile data badysis. Note in the following table that Ring is clbadified as a social media application, while Nextdoor has moved from the social media category to the news category in May and that Citizen considers itself a news item. The social category is much more competitive, according to App Annie, because it also includes users such as Facebook, Snap and Instagram, which count millions, even billions of users.
Before the first day, Neighbors was the 23rd most downloaded social app on iOS.
Amazon has been relying heavily on surveillance technology for some time, but as Medium's Will Oremus recently wrote, the company is "simultaneously relinquishing responsibility for the use of its technology and the concerns expressed by academics, media, politicians and its own employees.
Earlier this year, at the Recode Code conference, Amazon Web Services director Andy Jbady compared the company's controversial facial recognition technology, Rekognition, to any other tool, such as a knife, which could be used against diseases. (A Ring spokesman told Recode that he did not use facial recognition technology or recognition.)
"It's not because the technology could be misused that we should ban it and condemn it," Jbady said.
Similarly, Ring products can be used for better or for worse. After the First Day, we will have many more options for both.
Recode and Vox have joined forces to discover and explain how our digital world is changing – and changing us. Subscribe to Recode podcasts to hear Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka lead the tough discussions that the technology industry needs today.
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