The Rise of the Surveillance Complex

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There used to be surveillance states, and now, as Hurst suggests, there are surveillance complexes. There are aerial surveillance technologies, apps, and smart home solutions sucking up your personal data. And, of course, the video doorbell. That ubiquitous little device that brings the civilian infrastructure to the world of state surveillance.  

With this integration of data, video and audio capture, and cloud storage in perpetuity, we are engaged in a frightening aggregation of civilian, corporate, and state surveillance into one alarming complex. And one of the biggest drivers? That little Amazon Ring. Here are some numbers. Amazon sold more than 1.7 million video doorbells in 2021. Throw in Google's Nest, Vivint, and ADT, and that number balloons to 3.5 million. The video doorbell market grew 63% in 2021 alone. Ring is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen.

It gets scarier. Since Amazon brought Ring in 2018, it has established relationships with over 1800 law enforcement agencies that can request video content without a warrant. Ring cameras are owned by civilians giving law enforcement access to private video recordings of people in residential and public spaces that would otherwise be protected under the fourth amendment, allowing law enforcement to get around these constitutional and statutory protections. The line between police work and civilian surveillance is no longer clear. And the folks next door? They are your potential informant. And they are always watching. And scarier still, Amazon’s moratorium on integrating facial recognition into Ring expired in June.

And your data? Well, when you sign up, you agree to give Ring permission to control the “content” you share—both audio and video. Sure, they say you own the video as intellectual property, but Amazon’s terms of service say you give it an “unlimited, irrevocable, fee-free and royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide right” to store, use, copy, or modify your content. To boot, Rings’ terms of service say that the company may “access, use, preserve and/or disclose” videos and audio to “law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or third parties” if it is legally required to do so or needs to in order to enforce its terms of service or address security issues.

Being off the grid has a nice ring to it…