The Dark Knight was released in 2008. In that movie, Batman hijacks citizens' cellphones to track down the Joker, and it's presented as a major moral and ethical dilemma as part of the movie's overall themes. The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.
Crazy to think that less than two decades later, an even more powerful surveillance technology is being advertised at the Super Bowl as a great and wonderful thing and you should totally volunteer to upload your Ring footage so it can be analyzed for tracking down the Jok... I mean illegal imm... I mean lost pets.
Pulled from IMDB, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox voices the consternation perfectly:
> Batman: [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it?
> Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone.
> Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver.
> Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong.
> Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius.
> Lucius Fox: At what cost?
> Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person.
> Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person.
> Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it.
> Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.
That system is nothing compared to the geolocation databases curated by Apple and Google, with GPS sensors combined with Wi-Fi wardriving, IMEI tracking, cell tower handoffs, and the rest of the insane amount of telemetry they collect collect in real time. And that’s before even considering BLE and the Find My network. Imagine the “God mode” dashboards they could have in Cupertino (or more likely, in Mountain View).
Unfortunately a very realistic depiction of how many of the brands advertising their security the strongest often have the most ridiculously broken security (flock)
There are performance concerns with base64. Hardware-assisted null-key encryption offers security that's a non-strict superset of base64 encryption and with superior performance.
> The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.
A key part of that is when he tells Alfred that he did not even trust himself with that level of surveillance and coded it to only grant access to Alfred. Further, Alfred agrees to aid Batman by accessing the data but simultaneously tenders his resignation.
I doubt Amazon has anyone like Alfred in charge of this thing. Because if they did, the resignation would already have been submitted.
It's hard to not become disillusioned with our industry when most of it is just the manifesting of that Torment Nexus tweet. It's like no one in the tech world actually understands any piece of fiction that they have ever consumed.
I knew plenty of people growing up who thought Fight Club was just a fun movie about guys who like to fight and make a club to do so and it gets a little crazy, then cut to credits. They then theorized making their own such club. This to say, yeah, I think sometimes the audience can be overestimated in their ability to understand deeper meaning in art.
It's said that Starship Troopers failed to do as well in USA because people thought it was pro-fascist propaganda ... it doesn't seem possible that could genuinely be the case.
And some extreemist are using fight clubs to gather followers, emulating the movie in the other direction. So-called "active clubs" are springing up using "fitness" to gather young angry males to the cause. Most join without realizing. Even gym owners are surprised to discover thier facilities have become clubhouses.
its far simpler than that; not caring about what they've built if the check is big enough. because they've taught us that "if i don't build it, they'll just hire someone else. might as well be me that gets the money." but if there was solidarity or more regulation it'd be much less of a guarantee that these things would be built.
This is a bit orthogonal to the article, but Christopher Nolan gives me the willies. Almost all his films have this kind authoritarian apologia in them.
Is that the same willies as something like 1984 or Black Mirror? All they are doing is taking some idea present now, and just taking it too the darker places of it while society is currently only seeing the rosy side of things. It's stories like this that might be first time someone might actually consider other implications of ideas.
I think they take issue with how it was ultimately okay to do to catch the Joker as long as Batman didn't use it and gave power to Luscious who resigned, instead of just calling it out as terrible and not doing it. That's how I read their comment anyway. "apologia"
Batman is a vigilante using brutal violence to pursue his goals outside of any legal system. The whole concept of the comics, movies, etc. is predicated on him being a virtuous guy that you can trust will always do the right thing (mostly, I'm sure he's a villain or anti-hero in some of them). The surveillance system really isn't anything different and it was ridiculous that Luscious had a problem with it in the first place.
Most (all?) of Batman is based on the idea that sometimes you need a good guy who operates outside of the law. Given that Batman isn't real but the problems he encounters often are real, the natural conclusion is that we should make up for our low Batman levels by letting law enforcement off the chain.
But this is hardly unique to Nolan. Probably 90% of Hollywood movies that involve crime have this message in some form.
The fact that Batman is an ultra wealthy 1 % which dishes out justice with his expensive toys while hiding from most of the authorities is also quite a message.
There's real media illiteracy in watching a character in a film do a thing and assume that means the filmmaker is endorsing that thing. This has the same vibe as the Hays Code[1] which mandated that the bad guys in film must always get their comeuppance.
> All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience, or the audience must at least be aware that such behavior is wrong, usually through "compensating moral value".
Modern cinema and cinematic critique has been so flattened by the constant accusations of filmmakers supporting some "-ism" or another by failing to have their characters directly speak out against it. It's ridiculous.
No, it's more like the militarism in a Heinlein novel. It is, at best, an unexamined assumption and, at worst, a celebration, or sometimes a passive acceptance, of violence to enforce the status quo.
In the context of the Dark Knight/surveillance example, it comes across to me as more of a recognition that the arguments in favor of these things can easily be made compelling if you evaluate them with no tradeoffs (don't you want to catch the bad guys??).
Then again, I guess the film ends up doing the same thing by only demonstrating concrete benefits alongside theoretical, but unrealized, harms...
The whole idea about any superhero media is a special dude going on a violent spree because the authorities (in their eyes) can't do their job properly. The whole concept is anti-government and society as a whole.
Do not mistake Nolan's ability to call out the failures of both absolute freedom and absolute control and their interaction with him advocating for any of them.
Don't get the willies from the warning, learn from it.
His brother and the writer, Jonathan Nolan, is the greatest prophet of our era.
The Dark Knight Rises (the batman movie with Bane) seemed especially notable in this way - almost directly caricaturing the Occupy Wall St protests that were relevant at the time.
Person of Interest is really good. Unfortunately I learned too much about the lead's IRL behavior, and it's on my shelf of shows I'll enjoy once the involved parties aren't collecting royalties anymore.
It absolutely takes people on a police procedural that drags viewers unwittingly into watching a science fiction show, and I'm totally here for all of it.
The Dark Knight was released in the summer of 2008. This was almost 7 years after 9/11.
Many aspects of that film were deliberately done to explore post 9/11 America. This includes the methods Harvey Dent uses, the things the Joker says, and the surveillance scenes and more.
These discussions surrounding surveillance have been around long before 2008.
Of course. The use of mass surveillance in the movie is not-so-subtly referencing the PATRIOT Act. But again, it's presented as a moral dilemma, and multiple protagonists acknowledge that it's far too powerful to exist, and its use is a last resort. It falls into the larger theme of Joker pushing Batman to violate his ethics for the greater good.
One could argue that because it was successfully used to catch Joker, the movie concludes that mass surveillance is sometimes necessary to stop evil, but it's at least presented as a dilemma. A massive corporation coming out and saying "mass surveillance is awesome because you can find lost pets" is a crazy escalation of the surveillance state.
I mean the message in The Dark Knight is really messy. The characters believe it’s immoral, but they use it anyway, and it saves lives and stops the Joker.
Yeah, as I say in a sibling comment, it's a fair reading of the movie that it's ultimately pro-surveillance because it shows that despite being immoral, unethical mass surveillance catches the bad guy. But "surveillance is unethical but necessary when battling the forces of evil" is worlds away from "surveillance is totally awesome and everyone should buy a Ring camera."
Even more concerning is that Ring is partnering with Flock [1], which has been the subject of quite a bit of controversy recently [2][3][4], with the CEO lashing out at critics with inflammatory language [5][6].
There would be less backlash to the Ring ad if the ad was honest about how people actually use it. Show us porch pirates, burglars and stupid neighbor who backs into your car being caught on camera.
But instead, they have to come up with something "wholesome" like finding your lost doggo. The wholesomeness is so forced and cringe that it makes you think they have something to hide. It almost feels like the people who wrote this ad and the people who greenlit it knew something was wrong so they have to come up with a cover story. But like a child smiling at you with his biggest smile while anxiously keeping his hands behind his back, it only makes them more suspicious especially in a time when big tech feels more and more like an adversary than a friend.
Isn't the whole point of the ad that they have a new feature and they want people to know about it? They're not making up the idea of finding lost dogs. They have a new feature where you upload a photo of your lost dog and it automatically looks for the dog in camera feeds.
In China, kids are accustomed to face recognition early.[1] The kids are checking into school via fare gates with face recognition.
Here's an ad for Hikvision surveillance systems showing the whole system.[2]
Hikvision has a whole series of videos presenting their concept of a kindly, gentler Big Brother. This is probably the most amusing.[3]
Amazon's concept is in some ways more powerful. They don't need full coverage. Just sparse, but widespread coverage. Anything that moves around will pass through the view of cameras at some point.
Suspicious behavior can be detected in the back end cloud processing, which improves over time.
Flock has the same concept. Flock coverage is sparse in terms of area, but widespread.
Every technology has pros and cons. Are you insuating Flock is bad and evil (with your reference to 1984?)
I don't think Flock is this Big EviL coMpaNy you are making them out to be.
SFPD reported a 125% homicide clearance rate in 2025 (solving more cases than occurred that year), citing license plate readers (read: Flock) and drones as key factors in providing digital evidence.
Not who you are replying to, but I think mass surveillance is bad and evil, period. So, any person or company contributing toward mass surveillance is bad.
Most bad things have some good part you can point to. Mass surveillance and all of the other police and government aiding technologies usually point to improved conviction rates or something similar. But making police more efficient at convicting people isn't the only goal of society. That's only one part of what makes up a country and it's society. And, as the saying goes: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
That's beside the point? Gaining security by losing freedom was always on the table. What's interesting is the cultural shift toward not caring about losing freedom.
It was some attempt at reductio ad absurdum. If you are concerned about letting Alexa into your home, you must be as irrational as Chris Hemsworth. Edit: I'm misusing reductio ad absurdum, but somebody will please tell me what the fallacy here is called.
There’s no need to fear the construction of mass surveillance anymore. It’s already here. We built it one convenience at a time [0]. When I see all my friends with Alexa devices at home, ring cameras, and a million food apps on their phones, it feels like it’s already too late.
Even if it can and will only be used to track dogs, that means if I have a photo of someone's dog I can track it and learn that the owner is (likely) away from their house.
It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it. Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful, and the contravening forces are weak and largely unorganized. Do we punish politicians or businesses for bad behavior? No? Then they'll engage in whatever behavior advances their interests.
You could purge the world of every single person with evil intentions, and things would maybe get better for a little while, but without fundamentally changing the underlying rules of the system the same thing would play out again with different actors.
I like your take. I see this same thing playing out across many parts of the world.
Dont hate the player hate the game
It is about incentives and rules of the "game" that drive things. Sure, there are a few evil people but the vast majority of it is normal people responding to broken rules/incentives. Probably you and I both fall in this category :)
> Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful
It's also desired by consumers. Parents love tracking their children, spouses track each other. Everyone wants to get a camera to catch porch pirates. Let's not pretend this is something being forced on us by some external evil. The evil is coming from inside the house.
this is entirely misses the point about exactly what makes it dangerous
there's nothing bad with having a camera to spot porch pirates, as long as the data stays private
it becomes problematic when everyone's hooked up to one central place (plus the "AI")
same as the common talking points about CCTV, which always miss the distinction that there's minimal risk if it's only going to some video recorder in the back of the store
it only becomes dangerous when every shop and house are fed back to one central location
and the general public do not understand the difference
> It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it.
Sorry, but people who do things they normally wouldn't because they are rewarded are not good people. They may be 'normal' in a distribution sense, but that doesn't mean the behavior becomes acceptable through it becoming commonplace.
The idea is compelling to consider though - I just saw a clip of comedian Romesh Ranganathan saying that a reason he hasn't cheated on his wife is lack of opportunity; another side of the same idea.
Perhaps we would all be shit-head billionaires if given the opportunity.
Most of us stay within our ethical lane, but then we don't have the money to afford a private island to abuse people on; we don't have to resist the temptation to incite an insurrection, or to shift gold markets by threatening a war ... perhaps we'd be tempted?
> Perhaps we would all be shit-head billionaires if given the opportunity.
Statistically, if we were living in WWII Germany, most of us would not become freedom fighters. We'd keep our head down and support the regime. I think most people like to think of themselves as the exception but that's just "cope".
I think Nancy Guthrie and the release of the doorbell video by scouring Google’s caches has done far, far more to make people want video cameras and cloud storage than any ad.
I thought Ring was already sending data to law enforcement agencies (that paid Amazon for it). Also, I thought the EULA included language that basically said, "All your data are belong to us", so they could already do whatever surveillance they want.
Yeah in a world where if you post a Ring video of someone taking a crowbar to your mailbox which gets a strike in your neighborhood group and the video down for "hate", yeah, as useful as it is, the mass surveillance stuff is pretty alarming.
The fears of mass surveillance are some of the funniest things I can think of. Do you think a tree grows a leaf and then says I don’t care what you do leaf.
That ad gave me a visceral shudder of revulsion, not so much for the specific functionality on display as for the timing, which absolutely could not have been accidental. They might as well have just put 'and we're working on automatic alerts for ICE!' in the ad.
Amazon marketing broke a fundamental rule about consumer tech: Don't remind users about how much Big Tech knows about you.
Your various devices track everywhere you go, who you communicate with, what you search for, what you buy, what audio you listen to, what videos you watch, what games you play, who your family is, all your pictures and video you take, who comes and goes from your house, when you sleep, your health data, and much more.
And as a fundamental part of Big Tech's business they accumulate, aggregate and analyze all that information in various ways to increase profits. They don't keep this a secret, but wisely they normally don't brag about it to the general public.
Consumers have shown that are totally willing to give up privacy for convenience. Just don't remind them of it.
Ring has experienced backlash before when they allowed police departments to browse the imagery without any kind of oversight or warrant. And has changed their policies as a result (in the most minimal way but ok)
And these are pretty high profile people whose job it is to represent the people who will also have concerns but don't all contact the verge about it :)
By the way i use ring cameras too but I've already mitigated them a lot. Installed telephoto lenses that can only see the specific area I want them to see, and I removed the microphones so they can't hear what I'm saying. I got some free with my ring alarm so I didn't really want to waste the hardware either.
Everyone I’ve talked to about the Super Bowl ads has mentioned that one and said that it is creepy af. The backlash is mostly word of mouth in my experience.
Exactly. There are certainly more than 9 of us who value privacy and understand where this is going, but in comparison to millions of normies we aren't even a screeching voice of minority[1].
I found out that on Reddit people go there and ask things like this (someone asked recently): "My girlfriend and I are looking for something to do. Are there any protests going on today we can go to?"
Can you imagine people actually searching things out like that? These "people voicing concerns" are like that. Someone has to find something to be enraged about for the sake of finding something to do.
Part of the problem here is that people who love it are affecting people who do not. If you want to put cameras to record inside your home, fine, but this is people recording their neighbors without consent. The sales pitch is finding Fido, but I doubt that is the end game here.
Thank you for that. But please consider taking down the camera, too; it's just as much of a problem without a subscription, because you are the service being sold, not just the customer. Get one that stores and processes video entirely locally instead.
The Dark Knight was released in 2008. In that movie, Batman hijacks citizens' cellphones to track down the Joker, and it's presented as a major moral and ethical dilemma as part of the movie's overall themes. The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.
Crazy to think that less than two decades later, an even more powerful surveillance technology is being advertised at the Super Bowl as a great and wonderful thing and you should totally volunteer to upload your Ring footage so it can be analyzed for tracking down the Jok... I mean illegal imm... I mean lost pets.
Pulled from IMDB, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox voices the consternation perfectly:
> Batman: [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it?
> Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone.
> Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver.
> Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong.
> Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius.
> Lucius Fox: At what cost?
> Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person.
> Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person.
> Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it.
> Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.
That system is nothing compared to the geolocation databases curated by Apple and Google, with GPS sensors combined with Wi-Fi wardriving, IMEI tracking, cell tower handoffs, and the rest of the insane amount of telemetry they collect collect in real time. And that’s before even considering BLE and the Find My network. Imagine the “God mode” dashboards they could have in Cupertino (or more likely, in Mountain View).
Lmao did they really say it's null-key encrypted?
Unfortunately a very realistic depiction of how many of the brands advertising their security the strongest often have the most ridiculously broken security (flock)
I rewatched recently. That's what he says all right.
The Nolan Batman movies are absolutely risible in retrospect. It's hard to believe how seriously everyone took them back then.
They should have used base64 encryption.
There are performance concerns with base64. Hardware-assisted null-key encryption offers security that's a non-strict superset of base64 encryption and with superior performance.
I mean it is technobabble but in some way it is also poetic.
Lmao did they really say it's null-key encrypted?
You know movies aren't real life, don't you?
> The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.
A key part of that is when he tells Alfred that he did not even trust himself with that level of surveillance and coded it to only grant access to Alfred. Further, Alfred agrees to aid Batman by accessing the data but simultaneously tenders his resignation.
I doubt Amazon has anyone like Alfred in charge of this thing. Because if they did, the resignation would already have been submitted.
> Alfred
Wasn't it Lucius Fox?
It was :) Morgan Freeman not Michael Caine.
same difference
It's hard to not become disillusioned with our industry when most of it is just the manifesting of that Torment Nexus tweet. It's like no one in the tech world actually understands any piece of fiction that they have ever consumed.
I've had a startling number of conversations exactly like this:
"Oh, you read as well? What do your read?"
"[this book], [that book]"
"Those are all non-fiction, any fiction?"
"I don't read fiction. If I'm not going to learn anything, it's a waste of time."
"..."
Oh man, have I gotten to read a lot of history recently.
And also fiction.
Frequently at the same time.
I knew plenty of people growing up who thought Fight Club was just a fun movie about guys who like to fight and make a club to do so and it gets a little crazy, then cut to credits. They then theorized making their own such club. This to say, yeah, I think sometimes the audience can be overestimated in their ability to understand deeper meaning in art.
And Scarface was an inspiring rags-to-riches story.
It's said that Starship Troopers failed to do as well in USA because people thought it was pro-fascist propaganda ... it doesn't seem possible that could genuinely be the case.
And some extreemist are using fight clubs to gather followers, emulating the movie in the other direction. So-called "active clubs" are springing up using "fitness" to gather young angry males to the cause. Most join without realizing. Even gym owners are surprised to discover thier facilities have become clubhouses.
https://www.jfed.net/antisemitismtoolsandresources/neo-nazi-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Clubs
its far simpler than that; not caring about what they've built if the check is big enough. because they've taught us that "if i don't build it, they'll just hire someone else. might as well be me that gets the money." but if there was solidarity or more regulation it'd be much less of a guarantee that these things would be built.
Never doubt they understand, there's just too much money to be made making the Torment Nexus
This is a bit orthogonal to the article, but Christopher Nolan gives me the willies. Almost all his films have this kind authoritarian apologia in them.
Is that the same willies as something like 1984 or Black Mirror? All they are doing is taking some idea present now, and just taking it too the darker places of it while society is currently only seeing the rosy side of things. It's stories like this that might be first time someone might actually consider other implications of ideas.
I think they take issue with how it was ultimately okay to do to catch the Joker as long as Batman didn't use it and gave power to Luscious who resigned, instead of just calling it out as terrible and not doing it. That's how I read their comment anyway. "apologia"
Batman is a vigilante using brutal violence to pursue his goals outside of any legal system. The whole concept of the comics, movies, etc. is predicated on him being a virtuous guy that you can trust will always do the right thing (mostly, I'm sure he's a villain or anti-hero in some of them). The surveillance system really isn't anything different and it was ridiculous that Luscious had a problem with it in the first place.
Most (all?) of Batman is based on the idea that sometimes you need a good guy who operates outside of the law. Given that Batman isn't real but the problems he encounters often are real, the natural conclusion is that we should make up for our low Batman levels by letting law enforcement off the chain.
But this is hardly unique to Nolan. Probably 90% of Hollywood movies that involve crime have this message in some form.
The fact that Batman is an ultra wealthy 1 % which dishes out justice with his expensive toys while hiding from most of the authorities is also quite a message.
There's real media illiteracy in watching a character in a film do a thing and assume that means the filmmaker is endorsing that thing. This has the same vibe as the Hays Code[1] which mandated that the bad guys in film must always get their comeuppance.
> All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience, or the audience must at least be aware that such behavior is wrong, usually through "compensating moral value".
Modern cinema and cinematic critique has been so flattened by the constant accusations of filmmakers supporting some "-ism" or another by failing to have their characters directly speak out against it. It's ridiculous.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code
No, it's more like the militarism in a Heinlein novel. It is, at best, an unexamined assumption and, at worst, a celebration, or sometimes a passive acceptance, of violence to enforce the status quo.
In the context of the Dark Knight/surveillance example, it comes across to me as more of a recognition that the arguments in favor of these things can easily be made compelling if you evaluate them with no tradeoffs (don't you want to catch the bad guys??).
Then again, I guess the film ends up doing the same thing by only demonstrating concrete benefits alongside theoretical, but unrealized, harms...
To be fair that's more than a little bit present in most superhero media.
The whole idea about any superhero media is a special dude going on a violent spree because the authorities (in their eyes) can't do their job properly. The whole concept is anti-government and society as a whole.
Do not mistake Nolan's ability to call out the failures of both absolute freedom and absolute control and their interaction with him advocating for any of them.
Don't get the willies from the warning, learn from it.
His brother and the writer, Jonathan Nolan, is the greatest prophet of our era.
The Dark Knight Rises (the batman movie with Bane) seemed especially notable in this way - almost directly caricaturing the Occupy Wall St protests that were relevant at the time.
My read is that it's immoral because it's a surveillance hijack without the knowledge of the users, as opposed to an opt-in.
In the series Person of Interest, there's a scene where you can see racks of servers which allows to track everyone in a city (New York?).
When I first saw the scene I said: "This amount of servers is not remotely enough to pull something like this".
When I think of the scene now: "These amount of servers can do much more than the scene portrays".
I mean, most of the tech presented in the series is almost standard operations procedure via mundane equipment now.
Scary.
I believe they also pull this off with a fleet of PS3s, at one point.
Subsequently in PoI we see two imperfect super-intelligent AIs let loose in the real world fight each other for domination and their objectives.
For me, it’s a question of when, not if this happens in real life.
Person of Interest is really good. Unfortunately I learned too much about the lead's IRL behavior, and it's on my shelf of shows I'll enjoy once the involved parties aren't collecting royalties anymore.
It absolutely takes people on a police procedural that drags viewers unwittingly into watching a science fiction show, and I'm totally here for all of it.
The Dark Knight was released in the summer of 2008. This was almost 7 years after 9/11.
Many aspects of that film were deliberately done to explore post 9/11 America. This includes the methods Harvey Dent uses, the things the Joker says, and the surveillance scenes and more.
These discussions surrounding surveillance have been around long before 2008.
Of course. The use of mass surveillance in the movie is not-so-subtly referencing the PATRIOT Act. But again, it's presented as a moral dilemma, and multiple protagonists acknowledge that it's far too powerful to exist, and its use is a last resort. It falls into the larger theme of Joker pushing Batman to violate his ethics for the greater good.
One could argue that because it was successfully used to catch Joker, the movie concludes that mass surveillance is sometimes necessary to stop evil, but it's at least presented as a dilemma. A massive corporation coming out and saying "mass surveillance is awesome because you can find lost pets" is a crazy escalation of the surveillance state.
I mean the message in The Dark Knight is really messy. The characters believe it’s immoral, but they use it anyway, and it saves lives and stops the Joker.
Yeah, as I say in a sibling comment, it's a fair reading of the movie that it's ultimately pro-surveillance because it shows that despite being immoral, unethical mass surveillance catches the bad guy. But "surveillance is unethical but necessary when battling the forces of evil" is worlds away from "surveillance is totally awesome and everyone should buy a Ring camera."
That kind of change in morality seems possible for an 18 year timespan? If anything the slope is closer to typical than to the maximum recorded.
The moral norms of societies, in many aspects, changed even more from 1928 to 1946.
Even more concerning is that Ring is partnering with Flock [1], which has been the subject of quite a bit of controversy recently [2][3][4], with the CEO lashing out at critics with inflammatory language [5][6].
[1] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-and-ring-partn...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-roundup
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/10/ice-school-c...
[4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/effs-investigations-ex...
[5] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-...
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46903556
There would be less backlash to the Ring ad if the ad was honest about how people actually use it. Show us porch pirates, burglars and stupid neighbor who backs into your car being caught on camera.
But instead, they have to come up with something "wholesome" like finding your lost doggo. The wholesomeness is so forced and cringe that it makes you think they have something to hide. It almost feels like the people who wrote this ad and the people who greenlit it knew something was wrong so they have to come up with a cover story. But like a child smiling at you with his biggest smile while anxiously keeping his hands behind his back, it only makes them more suspicious especially in a time when big tech feels more and more like an adversary than a friend.
Isn't the whole point of the ad that they have a new feature and they want people to know about it? They're not making up the idea of finding lost dogs. They have a new feature where you upload a photo of your lost dog and it automatically looks for the dog in camera feeds.
They don't have a lost-kid feature?
In China, kids are accustomed to face recognition early.[1] The kids are checking into school via fare gates with face recognition. Here's an ad for Hikvision surveillance systems showing the whole system.[2] Hikvision has a whole series of videos presenting their concept of a kindly, gentler Big Brother. This is probably the most amusing.[3]
Amazon's concept is in some ways more powerful. They don't need full coverage. Just sparse, but widespread coverage. Anything that moves around will pass through the view of cameras at some point. Suspicious behavior can be detected in the back end cloud processing, which improves over time.
Flock has the same concept. Flock coverage is sparse in terms of area, but widespread.
"1984" was so last cen.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SMKG8aLTJ38
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnHFJz-u85A
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otAuH6FDhgw
Every technology has pros and cons. Are you insuating Flock is bad and evil (with your reference to 1984?)
I don't think Flock is this Big EviL coMpaNy you are making them out to be.
SFPD reported a 125% homicide clearance rate in 2025 (solving more cases than occurred that year), citing license plate readers (read: Flock) and drones as key factors in providing digital evidence.
Not who you are replying to, but I think mass surveillance is bad and evil, period. So, any person or company contributing toward mass surveillance is bad.
Most bad things have some good part you can point to. Mass surveillance and all of the other police and government aiding technologies usually point to improved conviction rates or something similar. But making police more efficient at convicting people isn't the only goal of society. That's only one part of what makes up a country and it's society. And, as the saying goes: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
That's beside the point? Gaining security by losing freedom was always on the table. What's interesting is the cultural shift toward not caring about losing freedom.
Everything I want to do in public I can still do.
What "freedom" is lost? I gain security and lose no freedoms (unless you are doing something illegal).
When property crime is up 53%.. plenty of people are willing to lose "freedom" whatever you are referring to, in exchange for safety.
The WeRateDogs guy broke character and put out a video attacking that ad
https://bsky.app/profile/weratedogs.com/post/3mejrtyvkyc2o
The weratedogs guy has been posting political messages for as long as I can remember. This is completely in character for him.
"They aren't good politicians, Bront."
A mobile phone is the surveillance dictators' wet dream.
What are my subjects doing...tap tap tap...ah there they are. Oh him, he needs to be cancelled, he isn't where I wanted him to be.
The Circle (2017) is by no means a perfect movie, based on a 2013 book which I’m told is only marginally better.
But it did do a surprisingly accurate job of depicting pretty much this exact scenario, 9 (13) years in advance.
As in: sleek FAANG holds a grand showcase of mass surveillance using its ubiquitous user-installed smart cameras, under the guise of a good cause.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mro9RCAhvE4
(The fictional story is slightly more blunt about it, the good cause being finding wanted persons, rather than lost dogs).
Amazon also had the ad about Alexa killing you. Not sure what they were thinking exactly.
It was some attempt at reductio ad absurdum. If you are concerned about letting Alexa into your home, you must be as irrational as Chris Hemsworth. Edit: I'm misusing reductio ad absurdum, but somebody will please tell me what the fallacy here is called.
Straw man?
That ad was great. I'm not sure how it sells Alexa products, but it was hilarious.
There’s no need to fear the construction of mass surveillance anymore. It’s already here. We built it one convenience at a time [0]. When I see all my friends with Alexa devices at home, ring cameras, and a million food apps on their phones, it feels like it’s already too late.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/we-have-all-we-need-for-mass-survei...
Fears of mass surveillance? It's already mass surveillance
This nitpick in language adds nothing to the conversation and is fundamentally incorrect. "Fears of" does not imply the thing feared doesn't exist.
Fear of bears in the woods? We already had bears.
Even if it can and will only be used to track dogs, that means if I have a photo of someone's dog I can track it and learn that the owner is (likely) away from their house.
that advert is just so horribly manipulative it's borderline evil
how can normal people go to work and produce this output?
(I suppose everyone that is prepared to work at Amazon corporate is... a certain type of person)
It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it. Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful, and the contravening forces are weak and largely unorganized. Do we punish politicians or businesses for bad behavior? No? Then they'll engage in whatever behavior advances their interests.
You could purge the world of every single person with evil intentions, and things would maybe get better for a little while, but without fundamentally changing the underlying rules of the system the same thing would play out again with different actors.
I like your take. I see this same thing playing out across many parts of the world.
Dont hate the player hate the game
It is about incentives and rules of the "game" that drive things. Sure, there are a few evil people but the vast majority of it is normal people responding to broken rules/incentives. Probably you and I both fall in this category :)
> Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful
It's also desired by consumers. Parents love tracking their children, spouses track each other. Everyone wants to get a camera to catch porch pirates. Let's not pretend this is something being forced on us by some external evil. The evil is coming from inside the house.
this is entirely misses the point about exactly what makes it dangerous
there's nothing bad with having a camera to spot porch pirates, as long as the data stays private
it becomes problematic when everyone's hooked up to one central place (plus the "AI")
same as the common talking points about CCTV, which always miss the distinction that there's minimal risk if it's only going to some video recorder in the back of the store
it only becomes dangerous when every shop and house are fed back to one central location
and the general public do not understand the difference
> It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it.
Sorry, but people who do things they normally wouldn't because they are rewarded are not good people. They may be 'normal' in a distribution sense, but that doesn't mean the behavior becomes acceptable through it becoming commonplace.
The idea is compelling to consider though - I just saw a clip of comedian Romesh Ranganathan saying that a reason he hasn't cheated on his wife is lack of opportunity; another side of the same idea.
Perhaps we would all be shit-head billionaires if given the opportunity.
Most of us stay within our ethical lane, but then we don't have the money to afford a private island to abuse people on; we don't have to resist the temptation to incite an insurrection, or to shift gold markets by threatening a war ... perhaps we'd be tempted?
> Perhaps we would all be shit-head billionaires if given the opportunity.
Statistically, if we were living in WWII Germany, most of us would not become freedom fighters. We'd keep our head down and support the regime. I think most people like to think of themselves as the exception but that's just "cope".
> They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally.
have you seen the cult like statements they make you emit if you want to pass the interview?
I had a colleague that interviewed there (and was accepted)
over the space of that month he completely changed
(and not for the better)
You pay a third party to make something like this for you. They can best be described as nihilists.
Just airtag your dog? Jesus Christ.
https://archive.is/J7KGU
Archive link posted because in some cases (not all, strange enough) there's a paywall ("subscribe to continue reading")
Did they not realize that it is already a mass surveillance network?
A country ruled by fear has their "security" systems turned on themselves. We truly live in an Orwellian dystopia
I think Nancy Guthrie and the release of the doorbell video by scouring Google’s caches has done far, far more to make people want video cameras and cloud storage than any ad.
Are you a dog?? No?? So you do not have anything to worry about!!
So they say.
I thought Ring was already sending data to law enforcement agencies (that paid Amazon for it). Also, I thought the EULA included language that basically said, "All your data are belong to us", so they could already do whatever surveillance they want.
Know what is super easy to do? Not buy Amazon Ring products.
Know what is super hard to do? Leave your house without being caught by someone else's Ring camera.
Yeah in a world where if you post a Ring video of someone taking a crowbar to your mailbox which gets a strike in your neighborhood group and the video down for "hate", yeah, as useful as it is, the mass surveillance stuff is pretty alarming.
What exactly are the "neighborhood cameras" mentioned in the article?
Everyone's Ring doorbells and cameras.
The fears of mass surveillance are some of the funniest things I can think of. Do you think a tree grows a leaf and then says I don’t care what you do leaf.
That ad gave me a visceral shudder of revulsion, not so much for the specific functionality on display as for the timing, which absolutely could not have been accidental. They might as well have just put 'and we're working on automatic alerts for ICE!' in the ad.
"Helping abusive husbands find their escaped wives."
Amazon marketing broke a fundamental rule about consumer tech: Don't remind users about how much Big Tech knows about you.
Your various devices track everywhere you go, who you communicate with, what you search for, what you buy, what audio you listen to, what videos you watch, what games you play, who your family is, all your pictures and video you take, who comes and goes from your house, when you sleep, your health data, and much more.
And as a fundamental part of Big Tech's business they accumulate, aggregate and analyze all that information in various ways to increase profits. They don't keep this a secret, but wisely they normally don't brag about it to the general public.
Consumers have shown that are totally willing to give up privacy for convenience. Just don't remind them of it.
I'm afraid that ship has sailed
What backlash? "People voiced concerns" turns out to be 9 people if you follow the link. Where exactly is this backlash and why can't I smell it?
Ring has experienced backlash before when they allowed police departments to browse the imagery without any kind of oversight or warrant. And has changed their policies as a result (in the most minimal way but ok)
And these are pretty high profile people whose job it is to represent the people who will also have concerns but don't all contact the verge about it :)
By the way i use ring cameras too but I've already mitigated them a lot. Installed telephoto lenses that can only see the specific area I want them to see, and I removed the microphones so they can't hear what I'm saying. I got some free with my ring alarm so I didn't really want to waste the hardware either.
Everyone I’ve talked to about the Super Bowl ads has mentioned that one and said that it is creepy af. The backlash is mostly word of mouth in my experience.
Exactly. There are certainly more than 9 of us who value privacy and understand where this is going, but in comparison to millions of normies we aren't even a screeching voice of minority[1].
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/746588/apple-discusses-screeching-...
If you search for this story on other sites, the comments are full of backlash.
At what number of people do you consider it a backlash?
1% of subscribers
What about people who aren't subscribers and do not want their privacy invaded?
I'm afraid it's GDPR for them
The subtext is that idiots are buying these things and should at least become aware that there are reasons for backlash that haven't occurred to them.
I found out that on Reddit people go there and ask things like this (someone asked recently): "My girlfriend and I are looking for something to do. Are there any protests going on today we can go to?"
Can you imagine people actually searching things out like that? These "people voicing concerns" are like that. Someone has to find something to be enraged about for the sake of finding something to do.
Can you imagine people actually believing a post on Reddit, and then extrapolating that to everybody who is going to a protest?
Or people are concerned about living in a surveillance state and wish to protest that or some other issue. Why downplay legitimate societal concerns?
So instead of drinking or shopping they want to support a cause?
My god how do they live with themselves.
What an absurd take.
Amazon has a very bad track record in this area. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/amazon-is-wagi...
> joseffritz
As an Austrian I have to wonder, is this name a homage to Josef Fritzl, one of the most well known Austrians of modern time?
Bullshit. The only people worried are the ones that were already concerned and never bought a Ring.
I guarantee the vast majority of people LOVE this new feature.
Part of the problem here is that people who love it are affecting people who do not. If you want to put cameras to record inside your home, fine, but this is people recording their neighbors without consent. The sales pitch is finding Fido, but I doubt that is the end game here.
"I guarantee the vast majority of people LOVE this new feature." And you base this guarantee on?
Bullshit to you sir. I have a ring and have cancelled my subscription because of their scummy behavior
Thank you for that. But please consider taking down the camera, too; it's just as much of a problem without a subscription, because you are the service being sold, not just the customer. Get one that stores and processes video entirely locally instead.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46950915
Recording public spaces should be illegal. Public street? Public sidewalk? Not your turf, no cameras, no recording.
I'm not sure you've thought this through. That would mean you can't record law enforcement or any other abuse of power.
The issue here isn't the recording, it's the packaging it up for sale that's the issue.
I think that goes too far, but limiting public space recordings to a camera you're operating in person would be a good starting point.
So google maps streetview should be illegal?