Ring: "We don't use facial recognition"; also Ring: "We have a head of facial recognition research"

One of the most obvious facts I've learned in covering the unfolding scandal of the secret deals between Amazon's Ring surveillance doorbell group and hundreds of US police departments is that Amazon loooooves to play word-games.

For example, I've been repeatedly emailed by company spokespeople to tell me that cops only get access to Ring customers' videos if the customers offer to share it; but what they never said is that if a customer turns down a police request, Amazon instructs the cops to make an "official request" to the company and then they grant warrantless access to the footage.

This kind of deceptive practice really is business-as-usual for the company: last week, the company tweeted at the ACLU to accuse them of posting something "misleading" when they said that Ring uses facial recognition with the footage it captures, and a Ring spokesperson (anonymous, as is inevitably the case with Ring, whose spokespeople have to be cajoled, pushed and wheedled to put their names to their statements to the press) told Buzzfeed that "Ring is not Rekognition and does not work with Rekognition" (Rekognition is Amazon's creepy, low-reliability facial recognition flagship product).

Maybe that's true, but you know what's also true? There's a dude at Ring Ukraine named Oleksandr Obiednikov whose title is "head of face recognition researchm" and who has given conference talks on how facial recognition can integrate with products like Ring. The company's filed multiple facial recognition patents, and its terms of service allow it to use the video from your doorbell to train facial recognition systems. Read the rest