Amazon secretly planned to use facial recognition and Ring doorbells to create neighborhood "watch lists"

Ring is Amazon's surveillance doorbell division, and a big part of their sales strategy involves terrifying people about the possibility of crime, partnering with police to assist in terrorizing Ring owners, and to provide police with warrantless, permanent, shareable access to surveillance doorbell footage (something the company has repeatedly lied about). Hundred of police departments have now partnered with Ring and they act as buzz-marketing teams for the company in exchange for freebies and access.

From the earliest days, it's been rumored that Ring's strategy included facial recognition (Amazon has a giant facial recognition division called "Rekognition"). Amazon denied this even as they advertised for and hired a head of facial recognition research for Ring.

Now, a leak reported by The Intercept reveals that Amazon once had a secret plan to use Ring cameras and facial recognition to automatically compile a "watch list" of neighborhood undesirables whose presence trigger alerts to Ring owners. The blacklists would be distributed through Amazon/Ring's "Neighbors" app, which is currently a dumpster fire of racist white people sharing alarmed messages about brown people their surveillance doorbells recorded in their neighborhoods.

It's not entirely clear how the "watch lists" would be compiled, but the leaked documents describe using AI to identify "suspicious activity," which is not something that machine learning systems can actually do, but which many vendors claim they can.

According to the Ring documents reviewed by The Intercept, which have not been previously reported, the company planned a string of potentially invasive new surveillance features for its product line, of which the facial recognition-based watch-list system is one part.