Ring's decision to cancel its partnership with Flock comes as tech companies face growing pressure to reexamine their work with federal agencies.
  • neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    104·
    8 hours ago

    Not buying it.

    The product leadership, directors and executives who dreamed this nightmare up and believed in it enough to make it a reality are still there.

    Never trust them again.

    • Ugandan Airways@lemmy.zipEnglish
      11·
      1 hour ago

      It feels like the cat’s out of the bag and they will just go ahead with whatever they planned on doing with this partnership, but not be as open about it. Bury it somewhere in the user agreement.

    • tempest@lemmy.caEnglish
      49·
      7 hours ago

      This happens every time there is blow back on something like this.

      They will reverse course and slow walk it a bit every 3 or 4 months and we will be back here in a years time.

      Someone’s bonus depends on this deal at Amazon, they are still going into work tomorrow and they still want that bonus.

      • devedeset@lemmy.zipEnglish
        5·
        6 hours ago

        Or they’ll just build a backdoor into it (it probably already exists) and never talk about it again.

  • billwashere@lemmy.worldEnglish
    107·
    11 hours ago

    I’m just glad people were smart enough to realize the implications of “finding lost dogs”. I immediately thought this implied terrible surveillance uses. I asked my wife about how she thought this would work and she thought it was very sweet (she and I are both dog lovers). I said so how are they “identifying these dogs?” She went through the mental process… “they just take the footage and use the same facial recognition to see if a dog matches a missing one…. Oh yeah, that’s bad”.

    I guess a lot of other people did the same thing.

      • Oak_Kitten@slrpnk.netEnglish
        14·
        7 hours ago

        Depends on how sophisticated it is. My iPhone has been able to correctly identify and tell apart different cats for about 3 years now and gets it right 90% of the time.

        And before I get the comments: yes, I’m about to fully leave the Apple ecosystem.

      • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        7 hours ago

        Yes absolutely it does. If you use Google Photos or Apple Photos they will handily identify every instance of your dog’s face. It’s not quite as accurate as people, but they’re perfect capable with little effort.

  • Renorc@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    10 hours ago

    “Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” Ring wrote in a blog post. “As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration.”

    Not necessarily because of privacy concerns.

    • III@lemmy.worldEnglish
      34·
      9 hours ago

      Absolutely not because of privacy concerns. But definitely not about a resources or time issue. This is them responding to the negative backlash without acknowledging their tone deaf Superbowl ad. If there was time or resource issue they wouldn’t have dropped tens of millions of dollars bragging about it.

    • MagicShel@lemmy.zipEnglish
      41·
      7 hours ago

      They are all over the place with their communication. I checked specifically when they first announced this partnership. And it turned out that when you share your videos with public safety, it was also being shared to Flock. And only the specific videos you choose to share. So I thought it was a big nothing before all this — just don’t share videos with public safety. I never have and never will.

      But to walk their cooperation back must mean they got significant complaints and need to do some PR. Or they tried some shit that wasn’t spelled out in their privacy statement.

    • Evotech@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      6 hours ago

      They can’t say that out loud of course. They do the same thing.

      But it’s obviously to mitigate the current shitstorm

  • RickyRigatoni@piefed.socialEnglish
    292·
    9 hours ago

    Huh. Looks like public outcry does work. I’m sure doomers will try to pretend this was a one time fluke.

  • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
    42·
    11 hours ago

    They already lost a bunch of people, some destroyed the devices too so no secondhand market customers from them either.

    That leopard is gonna get diabetes from all those sweet faces it’s eating.

  • aceshigh@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    7 hours ago

    That was an interesting move by them, considering they’re seeing in real time the short term effects - when did target “rebrand”?