(www.theverge.com)
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.
> 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.
Unfortunately a very realistic depiction of how many of the brands advertising their security the strongest often have the most ridiculously broken security (flock)
You know movies aren't real life, don't you?
They're blockbuster movies about a comic book.
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.
The argument is that it would destroy the character's honor or whatever. But that is also a kind of sacrifice for the greater good. Maybe a lot of those are in fact happening but just not visible.
Wasn't it Lucius Fox?
"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."
"..."
And also fiction.
Frequently at the same time.
There is a genuine existential risk, and it's addressed in the best way possible. Military slavery ("conscription") is more evil than disenfranchisement, especially when citizenship is not required to live a good life. Nobody is tricked or coerced into signing up for military service. Potential recruits are even shown disabled veterans to make the risk more salient. There are no signs of racism or sexism.
Other objections are not supported by the film. There is no suggestion that the Buenos Aires attack is a false flag. I've seen people claim it's impossible for the bugs to do this, but it's a film featuring faster-than-light travel. The humans are already doing impossible things, so why can't the bugs? I've also heard complaints that there is no attempt at peace negotiations. There is no suggestion that peace is possible. It's possible among humans because most humans have a strong natural aversion to killing other humans. Real life armed forces have to go to great lengths to desensitize their troops to killing to prevent them from intentionally missing. But humans generally have no qualms about killing bugs, and the bugs in the movie never hesitate to kill humans.
The movie is an inspiring story about people making the right choices in a difficult situation. Some people look at it objectively, and some only react to the aesthetics. Those who look objectively understand it's actually faithful to the spirit of the book despite Verhoeven not intending that.
Seems reasonable (although clearly not the intent of the story and not a deliberate “false flag”)
https://www.jfed.net/antisemitismtoolsandresources/neo-nazi-...
But this is hardly unique to Nolan. Probably 90% of Hollywood movies that involve crime have this message in some form.
The popular ones with extra-human abilities - Flash, Superman, Spiderman, Captain America, etc, have more normal backgrounds.
Boys with toys though - Batman, Ironman, The Atom, are the 1%. Ant Man I guess is more normal, but he stole his suit (but Hank Pym was reasonably normal too)
> 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.
Then again, I guess the film ends up doing the same thing by only demonstrating concrete benefits alongside theoretical, but unrealized, harms...
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.
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.
For me, it’s a question of when, not if this happens in real life.
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.
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.
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.
The moral norms of societies, in many aspects, changed even more from 1928 to 1946.
[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-...
what's the theory? murderers see flock cams and decide not to murder? most of the general public doesn't even know what these cameras are (or that they even exist).
Look at places where there are CCTV cameras all over, there is very little crime there compared to the United States. I won't use China as an example because then you are going to attack me for saying it's an authoritarian state. In that case I will use democratic examples: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore.
If Arizona was blanketed in CCTVs, do you think this kidnapping would have happened?
And if it still did happen, I'm 100% sure the suspects would have been caught by now (11th+ day since the disappearance now).
This is the problem with limits on law enforcement. There are tradeoffs, and people really don't like tradeoffs. Many people prefer to just assume that law enforcement will use their powers for good, rather than have to think about whether any given change will do more harm than good due to enabling bad law enforcement.
The harsh truth is that safety/security can never be guaranteed. No amount of surveillance will 100% prevent any individual from being a victim of a crime. Surveillance might help catching the criminal to face justice afterwards, but it will never 100% prevent.
Because of that, and because of the potential for abuse, it is better to not be under constant surveillance than it is to give up your rights and privacy for no guarantees.
> No amount of surveillance will 100% prevent any individual from being a victim of a crime.
No, but if it reduces crime by 99% would you be in favor of it? (See South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore.. examples of democratic countries with CCTVs all over the public space.. and before you say well those are racially homogenous countries.. I say look at Singapore. Singapore is very diverse racially, and yet they have very low rates of crime. This is because they have strict laws against crime and these laws are actually enforced)
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.
Ring has been a problem and it has only gotten worse now.
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
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.
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."
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.
You were recorded walking into an abortion clinic, although face recognition identified as a resident of a state where abortion is illegal.
The problem with the current push on "illegal immigrants" is that
1. It has been incredibly brutal
2. Many of the currently "illegal" immigrants were not illegal until their status was revoked by the current president.
3. The question of your immigration status, under the current system, is decided without proper access to legal representation.
---
Some people feel that the current push is solving a real problem in the real world.
Unfortunately, the real world is actually very complicated, and you can't flatten that complication without violence.
If that is hard to imagine, replace the ICE acronym with Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, Bureau of Land Management, or Internal Revenue Service.
I am not fine with mass surveillance.
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).
After a week, Google finally hunted down/coughed up the footage. I imagine there were some people within Google who realized that if they provided the footage immediately, then it could discourage people from paying for the subscription.
Of course, they must also realize that by not providing the footage sooner, they may have allowed the perp to get away, or the victim to be killed.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/we-have-all-we-need-for-mass-survei...
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)
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.
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 :)
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.
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?
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".
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.
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 still surveillance, and it's subject to subpoena so it can become government data as needed. The centralization makes things worse, sure, but the desire to monitor others often comes from individual actors.
I can walk down my street and I will be recorded every step of the way by someone. The government didn't mandate this, each homeowner decided they "needed" a camera.
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)
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.
Archive link posted because in some cases (not all, strange enough) there's a paywall ("subscribe to continue reading")
So they say.
"Designed exclusively for tracking objects, and not people or pets"
(emphasis mine)
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.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/746588/apple-discusses-screeching-...
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.
My god how do they live with themselves.
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 guarantee the vast majority of people LOVE this new feature.
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?
The issue here isn't the recording, it's the packaging it up for sale that's the issue.