Does Amazon’s Jeff Bezos ring your bell? Perhaps not, but should you visit a home equipped with a Ring Doorbell system then you’ll be ringing one of his. The Ring brand is owned by Amazon, and its range of hi-tech video doorbells are proving both popular and controversial.
It’s not that video door entry systems are anything new. They’ve been available for decades. The Ring system, however, is easy to use and pretty affordable. It’s also fully digital – on your smartphone or tablet, you can look at what your doorbell sees and have the footage stored online for a modest monthly fee.
In America, a Ring doorbell can be yours for as little as $99 – or nothing at all if your local police force is giving them away to residents. The New York Post reports on the cops’ enthusiasm for these gadgets:
“…as more police agencies join with the company known as Ring, the partnerships are raising privacy concerns. Critics complain that the systems turn neighborhoods into places of constant surveillance and create suspicion that falls heavier on minorities. Police say the cameras can serve as a digital neighborhood watch.”
We’ve come to think of CCTV as a top-down intervention – the province of law enforcement agencies and security services. Indeed, the spread of CCTV networks conjures up the world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a totalitarian state has its citizens under continuous surveillance, not least through the ubiquitous Telescreens.
However, unlike Orwell’s dystopia, the reach of CCTV in the real world is limited. Indeed, the state sometimes struggles to fund installation, maintenance and monitoring – leading to cuts in coverage. But rather than celebrate their liberation from the all-seeing-eye of the state, local people tend to react with dismay: never underestimate the popularity of security.
The technology is advancing – becoming cheaper, smaller and smarter. With Amazon and other providers developing video surveillance as a mass consumer product, the old top-down model of deployment and control is giving way to something more decentralised and, some might say, insidious.
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