Amazon's Ring Planned Neighborhood "Watch Lists" Built on Facial Recognition
By Sam Biddle, The Intercept
27 November 19
Ring, Amazon's crimefighting surveillance camera division, has crafted plans
to use facial recognition software and its ever-expanding network of home
security cameras to create AI-enabled neighborhood "watch lists," according
to internal documents reviewed by The Intercept.
The planning materials envision a seamless system whereby a Ring owner would
be automatically alerted when an individual deemed "suspicious" was captured
in their camera's frame, something described as a "suspicious activity
prompt."
It's unclear who would have access to these neighborhood watch lists, if
implemented, or how exactly they would be compiled, but the documents refer
repeatedly to law enforcement, and Ring has forged partnerships with police
departments throughout the U.S., raising the possibility that the lists
could be used to aid local authorities. The documents indicate that the
lists would be available in Ring's Neighbors app, through which Ring camera
owners discuss potential porch and garage security threats with others
nearby.
Ring spokesperson Yassi Shahmiri told The Intercept that "the features
described are not in development or in use and Ring does not use facial
recognition technology," but would not answer further questions.
This month, in response to continued pressure from news reports and a list
of questions sent by Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey, Amazon conceded that
facial recognition has been a "contemplated but unreleased feature" for
Ring, but would only be added with "thoughtful design including privacy,
security and user control." Now, we know what at least some of that
contemplation looked like.
Mohammad Tajsar, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of
Southern California, expressed concern over Ring's willingness to plan the
use of facial recognition watch lists, fearing that "giving police
departments and consumers access to 'watch listing' capabilities on Ring
devices encourages the creation of a digital redline in local neighborhoods,
where cops in tandem with skeptical homeowners let machines create lists of
undesirables unworthy of entrance into well-to-do areas."
Legal scholars have long criticized the use of governmental watch lists in
the United States for their potential to ensnare innocent people without due
process. "When corporations create them," said Tajsar, "the dangers are even
more stark." As difficult as it can be to obtain answers on the how and why
behind a federal blacklist, American tech firms can work with even greater
opacity: "Corporations often operate in an environment free from even the
most basic regulation, without any transparency, with little oversight into
how their products are built and used, and with no regulated mechanism to
correct errors," Tajsar said.
Mounting Concern About Ring
Once known only for its line of internet-connected doorbell cameras marketed
to the geekily cautious, Ring has quickly turned into an icon of unsettling
privatized surveillance. The Los Angeles company, now owned by Amazon, has
been buffeted this year by reports of lax internal security, problematic law
enforcement partnerships, and an overall blurring of the boundaries between
public policing and private-sector engineering. Earlier this year, The
Intercept published video of a special online portal Ring built so that
police could access customer footage, as well as internal company emails
about what Ring's CEO described as the company's war on "dirtbag criminals
that steal our packages and rob our houses."
Previous reporting by The Intercept and The Information revealed that Ring
has at times struggled to make facial recognition work, instead relying on
remote workers from Ring's Ukraine office to manually "tag" people and
objects found in customer video feeds. The automated approach to
watch-listing described in the documents reviewed by The Intercept may seem
less unsettling than that human-based approach, but it potentially allows
for a litany of its own problems, like false positives and other forms of
algorithmic bias.
In its public-relations efforts, Ring has maintained that only thieves and
would-be criminals need to worry about the company's surveillance network
and the Neighbors app. From the way Ring's products are designed to the way
they're marketed, the notion of "suspicion" remains front and center; Ring
promises a future in which "suspicious" people up to "suspicious" things can
be safely monitored and deterred from afar.
But "suspicious" is an entirely squishy concept with some very potentially
dangerous interpretations, a byword of dog-whistling neighborhood racists
who hope to drape garden-variety prejudice beneath the mantle of public
safety. The fact remains that anyone moving past a home equipped with Ring
cameras is unavoidably sucked into a tech company dragnet, potential fodder
for overeager chatter among the suburban xenophobe set. To civil
libertarians, privacy scholars, and anyone generally nervous about the
prospect of their neighbors forming a collective, artificially intelligent
video panopticon maintained by Amazon for unregulated use by police, Ring's
potential consequences for a community are clear.
Earlier this fall, Motherboard reported on a push by Ring to encourage
camera owners to seek out, identify, and report to police anything and
anyone they considered "unusual" in exchange for product discounts.
According to the story, Ring "encouraged people to report all 'suspicious
activity,' including loitering, 'strange vans and cars,' 'people posing as
utility workers,' and people walking down the street and looking into car
windows."
Documents Show "Proactive Suspect Matching"
According to the Ring documents reviewed by The Intercept, which have not
been previously reported, the company planned a string of potentially
invasive new surveillance features for its product line, of which the facial
recognition-based watch-list system is one part.
In addition to the facial watch lists, Ring has also worked on a so-called
suspicious activity prompt feature that would alert users via in-app phone
notification when a "suspicious" individual appears near their property's
video feeds. In one document, this feature is illustrated with a mockup of a
screen in the Neighbors app, showing a shabbily dressed man walking past a
Ring owner's garage-mounted camera. "Suspicious Activity Suspected," warns
the app. "This person appears to be acting suspicious. We suggest alerting
your neighbors." The app then offers a large "Notify Neighbors" button. The
document leaves how exactly "suspicious" is defined a mystery.
A third potentially invasive feature referenced in the Ring documents is the
addition of a "proactive suspect matching" feature, described in a manner
that strongly suggests the ability to automatically identify people
suspected of criminal behavior - again, whether by police, Ring customers,
or both is unclear - based on algorithmically monitored home surveillance
footage. Ring is already very much in the business of providing - with a
degree of customer consent - valuable, extrajudicial information to police
through its police portal. A "proactive" approach to information sharing
could mean flagging someone who happens to cross into a Ring video camera's
frame based on some cross-referenced list of "suspects," however defined.
Paired with the reference to a facial recognition watch list and Ring's
generally cozy relationship with local police departments across the
country, it's easy to imagine a system in which individuals are arbitrarily
profiled, tracked, and silently reported upon based on a system owned and
operated solely by Amazon, without legal recourse or any semblance of due
process. Here, says Tajsar, "Ring appears to be contemplating a future where
police departments can commandeer the technology of private consumers to
match 'suspect' profiles of individuals captured by private cameras with
those cops have identified as suspect - in fact, exponentially expanding
their surveillance capabilities without spending a dime."
Researchers and legal scholars have for years warned that facial recognition
and self-teaching machine learning technologies are susceptible to racial
biases, and in many cases, can amplify and propagate such biases further -
of particular concern in a law enforcement or security context, where racial
prejudice is already systemic. A February review of the Neighbors app by
Motherboard found that out of "100 user-submitted posts in the Neighbors app
between December 6 and February 5, the majority of people reported as
'suspicious' were people of color."
In an interview with The Intercept, Liz O'Sullivan, a privacy policy
advocate and technology director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight
Project, described Ring's planned "proactive suspect matching" feature as
"the most dangerous implementation of the word 'proactive' I've ever heard,"
and questioned the underlying science behind any such feature. "All the AI
attempts I've seen that try to detect suspicious behavior with video
surveillance are absolute snake oil," said O'Sullivan, who earlier this year
publicly resigned from Clarifai, an AI image-analysis firm, over its work
for the Department of Defense.
O'Sullivan explained that "there's no scientific consensus on a definition
of visibly suspicious behavior in biometrics. The important question to ask
is, Who gets to decide what suspicious looks like? And the way I've seen it
attempted in industry, it's just an approximation." Any attempt to hybridize
humankind's talents for prejudice with a computer's knack for superhuman
pattern recognition is going to result in superhuman prejudice, O'Sullivan
fears. "In order for society to function well, police have to be impartial;
we have to get to a place where they treat people equally under the law, not
differently according to whatever way an algorithm 'thinks' we look."
For better or for worse, the potential to amplify the prejudices of its
makers and customers is one that some members of the company's staff have
already grappled with, according to a Ring source who spoke to The Intercept
on the condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to discuss
company matters. This source recounted concerned conversations with
colleagues about the possible social consequences of their company's
technology. "We were talking about Neighborhood" - Ring's residential
surveillance social network and police resource - "about how all it is is
people reporting people in hoodies. We talked about the culture of fear that
we're perpetuating," they said. Like O'Sullivan, the source was particularly
concerned over the "proactive suspect matching" feature, which they said was
"designed to basically aggregate videos and create a profile of a suspect
who's hit up multiple homes in a neighborhood," and that the source believed
would end up prone to racial bias. It would, this person said, "maybe catch
porch pirates, but more realistically fuck over an innocent person of
color."
Ring's spokesperson declined to answer a list of specific questions about
the planned features, including what the company's institutional definition
of "suspicious" is, whether someone on a Ring "watch list" would ever be
informed of this fact, or what someone would have to be "suspected" of in
order to be labeled a "suspect" in Ring's systems. "Any features we do
develop," Shahmiri said, "will include strong privacy protections and put
our customers in control."
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