
Ring’s Ukraine arm appears to be working on facial recognition technology - s_Hogg
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/amazon-ring-facial-recognition-ukraine
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pavs
I don't see whats the problem here.

A company has an international market. In one country, where they probably
don't have a law against facial recognition, does research on facial
recognition in their product.

In their home market, they are asked if they do Facial Recognition in their
product, which probably meant in the USA, and they rightfully said they don't.
The most likely scenario is that the spokesperson is not even aware that on
one market they do facial recognition _research_.

Seems like a manufactured outrage over nothing.

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ChuckNorris89
_> Beginning in 2016, according to one source, Ring provided its Ukraine-based
research and development team virtually unfettered access to a folder on
Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every
Ring camera around the world._[1]

Is that why Ring has it's RnD in Ukraine, to be away from US and EU privacy
laws?

[1][https://theintercept.com/2019/01/10/amazon-ring-security-
cam...](https://theintercept.com/2019/01/10/amazon-ring-security-camera/)

~~~
jsty
Any privacy regulation that could be circumvented by simply transferring the
data offshore surely wouldn't be worth the paper it's written on. The GDPR
certainly doesn't allow this.

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s_Hogg
Thing I don't get is, why tell on yourself like that? Why make such an
explicit job title?

Where I work there is a policy of no org charts ever because it just tells
other companies who to poach.

~~~
Jonnax
Do you get paid a lot of money?

Because I wouldn't want to work somewhere for years whilst being unable to
talk about what I've worked on.

~~~
s_Hogg
This is a company-wide thing, so if there's no HR diagram then it's hard to
poach both sales staff and tech people. I'm an ML guy and my title is ML Lead,
but that's still a long way from "ML Lead working on this one specific
problem".

~~~
kthejoker2
Are you allowed to have a LinkedIn account with your title?

And company, description, roles etc?

This just seems fundamentally anti-labor. Don't you _want_ to be poached, if
the opportunity is right?

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st1ck
Also relevant: [https://theintercept.com/2019/01/10/amazon-ring-security-
cam...](https://theintercept.com/2019/01/10/amazon-ring-security-camera/)

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throwawaysea
So what? I welcome facial recognition as an additional enhancement to home
security systems, especially if it can work across the network of other
customers’ cameras to help track criminals’ movement and if it helps lead to
their capture. Property crime is rampant here in Seattle and goes entirely
unpunished - making it cheap to solve these crimes using this technology would
be a huge benefit to quality of life. I really don’t understand the backlash
against Ring and others - it just seems like the latest outrage for people to
be irrationally upset about.

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tus88
Isn't that sort of what you would expect from a doorbell maker? Using facial
recognition as part of the unlock? It's almost too obvious an idea.

~~~
krapp
>Isn't that sort of what you would expect from a doorbell maker?

Call me a dinosaur, but no.

I expect doorbells to make a sound when someone pushes a button, and that's
all. I don't expect a doorbell to recognize the person ringing the bell and
share that data with third parties, and then potentially decide whether or not
to unlock the door for them.

>It's almost too obvious an idea.

I can't argue that Ring itself isn't a billion dollar idea... and in the
context of the concept itself, facial recognition makes sense.

But please let's not pretend this is just what anyone would expect from a
"doorbell maker," and potentially push the Overton window even further in the
direction of ceding personal autonomy and liberty to third parties for the
sake of convenience. Ring doesn't make doorbells, they run a social network
and video content distribution platform that monetizes people's front porches
and faces, for which a doorbell is just a gimmick.

It's an obvious idea for Ring but I still find the entire premise of smart
doorbells and smart locks to be a dark pattern in the IoT.

