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Crime The Media

Amazon's Doorbell Company Is Selling Fear (theatlantic.com) 63

Posted by EditorDavid from the crime-Rings dept.
Amazon Ring is building "a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbors," reports the director Nieman Journalism Lab, in a post from The Atlantic: That's right: A doorbell company wants to report crime news. It already is, actually. Several people on LinkedIn describe their jobs as "news editors" at Ring... I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is a really bad idea. Crime has declined enormously over the past 25 years, but people's perception of how much crime there is has not. A majority of Americans have said that crime is increasing in each of the past 16 years -- despite crime in each major category being significantly lower today than it used to be. A 2016 Pew survey found that only 15 percent of Americans believed (correctly) that crime was lower in 2016 than it had been in 2008 -- versus 57 percent who thought it had gotten worse...

These mistaken beliefs are driven largely by the editorial decisions of local media -- especially local TV newscasts, which are just as bloody today as they were when murder rates were twice as high. There's a term for it: "mean world syndrome," the phenomenon where media consumption makes people see the world as more violent and dangerous than it really is... But news organizations have multiple and sometimes conflicting incentives that might affect how they present the local police blotter. A company that sells security-optimized doorbells has only one incentive: emphasizing that the world is a scary place, and you need to buy our products to protect you....

So think about this managing-editor job. Ring wants to be "covering local crime" everywhere, down to the house and neighborhood level. So one managing editor, plus however many other people are on this team, is supposed to be creating a thoughtful, nonexploitative editorial product that is sending journalistically sound "breaking news crime alerts," in real time, all across the country. Are they really delivering news or just regular pulses of fear in push-notification form? If that's the job, it is literally impossible to do responsibly... It's like relying on the people who make antivirus software to tell you about the latest cybersecurity issues: Even when the reporting is sound, it's still prone to exaggerating the scale of the threat and still aimed at making you so afraid that you give them money.
The article's author spent 10 years working for newspapers (most recently the Dallas Morning News), and argues that "the reality is that 'breaking crime news alerts' are not something the majority of people needs -- especially if 'two Greenpeace volunteers stood on my porch for 30 seconds' is the bar we're talking about. It's not actionable intelligence -- it's puffing a little more air into an atmosphere of fear..."

He concludes that Amazon Ring "says it's selling safety, but it's really selling fear. "
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Amazon's Doorbell Company Is Selling Fear More

Amazon's Doorbell Company Is Selling Fear

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  • And? (Score:2)

    by Kohath ( 38547 )

    What would you expect a security system vendor to do?

    • Brink's Home Security

    • Exist in a world where real governments stop these super monopolies from forming. The issue isn't that the security doorbell company wants news of crime to increase, it is that amazon is a security + news + book + TV Content + Streaming + game development + software development + Grocery Store + damn near any other business you can think of. Being able to synergize everything together, manipulate masses of people for any goals they might have. That's what anti-trust laws were supposed to prevent.

  • It’s not just to sell more Ring Doorbells (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday May 04, 2019 @04:52PM (#58539118)

    They’re profiting two ways - from your subscription purchase (love the idea of paying monthly for my doorbell, BTW), and from the image database they’re accumulating from the photos taken by “your” doorbell. The database is sold to local police (see the previous Slashdot story) and I would guess also to marketing companies.

    Amazon has quite a racket going. Google at least gives you free services in exchange for the privilege of selling you... but Amazon has figured out how to get YOU to pay for their profiting from you!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by functor0 ( 89014 )

      Amazon has quite a racket going. Google at least gives you free services in exchange for the privilege of selling you... but Amazon has figured out how to get YOU to pay for their profiting from you!

      Er, you know that Nest (a competitor of Ring) is own by Google right? This means that Google has exactly the same racket going on.

  • selling fear? Not really. (Score:3)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Saturday May 04, 2019 @04:58PM (#58539148) Journal
    Personally, I am more concerned about Ring sending our data to China. But excluding that, we can see what is going on with our neighbors places and some of it is interesting. For example, a neighbors child has autism and runs around ringing doorbells. Thankfully, after this showed up on several doors, and on the ring network, it became known and now, if we see that it is him and he is 1/4 of a mile away, we can notify parents (he steals out of their house, parents are working hard on this ).
    Then we have seen ppl stealing packages and knew WHO to look for in the neighborhood. They were caught and the stealing was stopped (ppl from Denver went 35 miles away to avoid being caught; ring made it possible).
    Now, we have seen an adult male that is looking into windows while wearing no shoes and PJs. Very weird. Not sure what is going on, but it will be figured out.

    Selling fear? Nope. About the only thing wrong is the sending of my data to China, and not working with google hub. These last things are enough to make me flip to Google's doorbell, but, not because of fear.

    • Even if the crime rate has lowered, it does not mean it's bad to try and reduce the outlier crime remaining - especially minor stuff that may never even be reported to the police.

      One thing that would be nice is if there could be an open standard for companies to be able to make use of each others security feeds for monitoring - so if something happened at your house overnight, you could search area cameras of all kinds for that timeframe to see if anything similar happened, or the same suspicious people wer

      • that is kind of how this works with ring. we publish and other ring users can see what is going on in LOCAL area. We see some interesting things, such as bears, bobcats, coyotes, and cougars (including the animal ones), along with weird things or repeat crooks. And what is interesting is to see probable crooks who suddenly realize there is a camera recording them and boy do they stop quickly.
        All good to know that they are in the area.

        I do not like the idea of Amazon or CHina knowing what is going on, b

    • Personally, I am more concerned about Ring sending our data to China.

      This is a legitimate fear, along with the selling of data to Google, advertisers, scammers, and burglars.

      Crime has declined enormously over the past 25 years, but people's perception of how much crime there is has not.

      While crime in certain categories may have declined over the last few decades, only a small subset of crime is relevant to outdoor home cameras. So, murders, rapes, and violent crimes wouldn't be addressed by such cameras. However, theft of boxes delivered to front doors is. My guess is that the rate of this particular crime has increased significantly over the last decade.

      • Crime has declined enormously over the past 25 years

        Says who?
        A bunch of "social scientists"? Like I'd trust them.

        Besides, have all kinds of crime declined? Obviously not, so taking a
        bunch of different crime statistics and smushing them together into
        a combined "crime rate" is pseudo-scientific rubbish.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Personally, I am more concerned about Ring sending our data to China.

      Why should I care if the Chinese government knows the route of Jehovah's Witnesses around my neighborhood?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by cwatts ( 622605 )

      I agree with you. We need not be concerned about the sale of fear, but i worry a lot about the implicit racism in some of the neighborhood posts. I call it out when i see it, which makes me glad to be anonymized- Ring-buying liberals (and conservatives too) do not take it well when you point out their implicit racism.

      I do like my ring, though. When i first got mine, it really sucked- I couldn't get it to stay working for more than a day or two.. Sometimes it would stop working minutes after setup

  • Fear is an especially effective sales tactic. Bravery is rare and most of us are cowards most of the time. I think the saying attributed to Lincoln could be modified to include "Some folks are cowards all of the time."

    We are actually hardwired, body and soul, to be more afraid of bad things than to like good things. We also remember the bad things better and more vividly and for longer than the good things. In evolutionary terms, if any of your ancestors had made the mistake of not being afraid enough, then

  • A camera system will allow a clear view of the person trying to do crime in your low crime part of a city.
    As the FBI data sets show every year.
    Now with advanced camera quality and networks people can see the same attempts at crime.

    Who is trying to do what crime in their community.
    Who travelled from a bad part of the city to a nice low crime part of the city to do crime.

    The FBI has decades of data collected on who is doing the crime in your city.
    Now people all over the USA can see the results of not

  • Only the government should be allowed to sell fear. And then only to suit their own agenda. Fear that I might be allowed to mitigate on my own? Not allowed. But fear of something that the application of more government can prevent: That's OK. Poor and homeless people should not be feared, but welcomed. But income inequality of the type that can only be cured by well-funded handout programs. Or inequities resulting from climate change.

    Be afraid.

  • sounds more like some company has something against amazon and planting different articles about all the wrong they think amazon is doing. first articles all over the place about their face recognition software, then about privacy issues with alexa and now news services. wonder which amazon service is next. as far as sowing fear, is that not what the different anti-virus and anti-malware software companies are doing in their advertisements? Is this not what other alarm companies are doing when they

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