A Super Bowl ad for Ring security cameras boasting how the company can scan neighborhoods for missing dogs has prompted some customers to remove or even destroy their cameras.
Online, videos of people removing or destroying their Ring cameras have gone viral. One video posted by Seattle-based artist Maggie Butler shows her pulling off her porch-facing camera and flipping it the middle finger.
Butler explained that she originally bought the camera to protect against package thefts, but decided the pet-tracking system raised too many concerns about government access to data.
“They aren’t just tracking lost dogs, they’re tracking you and your neighbors,” Butler said in the video that has more than 3.2 million views.
Oh boy that is so true, I was laughing my ass off during the financial crisis about how people were shocked that banks are businesses trying to maximize profits like any other business.
They genuinely thought that banks were some sort of community institution that existed to help people with their finances, and not businesses that are selling products to make money.
Still even if people are so ignorant that they are unaware of privacy issues, they have chosen to be willfully ignorant, because this issue has been talked about non stop for decades. For nothing to sieve in at some point, you have to be a special kind of willfully ignorant.
Even people that are very low information on technology, know that the Internet is a source of potential surveillance, and having your info on the internet in any form is a potential for being surveilled. Everybody knows that all the big IT companies are trying to gather as much information as they can. And Amazon is right at the top among them.
So to claim they were ignorant of Amazon possibly collecting and sharing their data is a bit far fetched IMO.
For the banks, the two biggest ones in germany were in fact exactly this: community owned and with supporting local residence and businesses in mind.