Ring, a smart doorbell company bought by Amazon in 2018, is beginning to shape the face of home security. In 2021, Amazon plan to release the Ring Always Home Drone on the market, a surveillance device that flies around your house watching for intruders. However, this could also hand Amazon private data on people’s home lives. Regarding this potential breach of privacy, Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch states:
“It normalizes surveillance of yourself, your family, your children”
“Whether people are actually worried about it or not, it will change behavior over time, particularly with these ambient surveillance devices that are just constantly listening in the background, that is a massive step change from what was once a sacred, private space of home.”
“This takes commercial surveillance into a whole different realm.”
“By the time it does come to developing policies and safeguards, by then you’ve got big tech lobbyists involved. Once these drones are flying around our heads, what do we do? How do you put them back? You can’t put this stuff back in the box. Once it’s normalised, once it’s out, it’s so hard to put it back in.”