“Ring Nation reality show glorifies spy cameras”
Amazon’s new Ring Nation reality show would glorify the surveillance society, where everyone keeps an eye on everything, critics say.
Amazon still seemed like such a good idea. You collect images from the popular door security camera Ring, wildly popular in the crime-ridden US, partly because of the fear sown by Amazon. And then you’re going to bake a nice reality show of that.
Ring Nation, cozy or creepy?
The benefits are obvious. The images cost next to nothing. You also hardly need to edit them and you only need a male or female to talk all these images together. Cash desk! Especially if all viewers who don’t have one yet also want to order such a beautiful Ring camera. At Amazon, of course, who owns the company, all this ingenuity comes from.
The intention was to make Ring Nation a compilation of marriage proposals, bloopers, funny animals and neighbors saving neighbors.
Protests from privacy organizations
However, this turned out to be a problem for organizations, such as Media Justice, that consider privacy to be of paramount importance. They are afraid that these smart cameras will soon be located next to every door, which can monitor just about anything.
And they have a good reason to do so. Amazon works with American police departments to install their beautiful cameras everywhere and share the images with the police. With an aggressive marketing campaign, the company sows fear, causing many local residents to purchase these cameras. The images from Ring cameras are stored on Amazon’s eager servers. And Ring Nation would normalize this.
In short, a sort of commercial version of what China is doing on a large scale and a win-win situation for Amazon that makes money from both the cameras and the data the cameras produce.
