Amazon’s UK snooping problem
Up until two years ago, a British scientist named Dr Mary Fairhurst lived in a brick house at the end of a quaint road of connected homes in Oxfordshire, UK. Her neighbour, audio-visual technician Jon Woodward, lived on the other side of a narrow road between their houses. Mr Woodward had installed several Amazon’s Ring cameras around his property, including on his shed, at the end of his driveway and on his door as a doorbell.
In 2018, Mr Woodward was doing refurbishments on his house and invited Dr Fairhurst for a tour. He showed her a video clip on his smartwatch of a car driving out of their communal car park, a live feed from one of his cameras.
Mr Woodward seemed to be trying to impress her, Dr Fairhurst later told a court, but she was alarmed. The cameras could see where she parked her car and other parts of the surrounding property. Dr Fairhurst later sued Mr Woodward for breaching her privacy with the cameras. But the presiding judge spotted a bigger issue: Mr Woodward’s cameras could hear just as well as they could see.
Melissa Clarke, a county court judge in Oxford, pointed out that Mr Woodward’s Ring camera could reliably record audio at conversational volume from 68 feet (20 metres) away, based on an experiment carried out by one of the witnesses in the case. That’s about the length of a 10-pin bowling lane or, for the Brits, the length of a cricket pitch. When triggered by movement, the cameras mounted on Mr Woodward’s doorbell and at the foot of his drive could capture conversations on her driveway, at her front door and even in her back yard, Ms Clarke said in her judgment, made public on Oct 12.
If Mr Woodward wanted, he could identify who was speaking because he was familiar with his neighbours, she added. All told, obtaining audio data was “even more problematic and detrimental than video data”.
The case, which will probably be cited in UK courts for years to come, spotlights how the “listening” concerns normally associated with Amazon’s Alexa devices apply to its cameras, too. Back in 2018 when Mr Woodward showed off his cameras, he didn’t have the ability to turn off their audio recording capabilities. Amazon only made that possible through a firmware update last year. Today, audio recording is switched on by default when Ring cameras are purchased, a spokeswoman for Amazon said. “We strongly encourage our customers to respect their neighbours’ privacy and comply with any applicable laws when using their Ring device,” she added.
That needs to change. Amazon should either take the audio recording functionality out of its cameras, or at minimum, have it off by default. It’s largely pointless in crime fighting — who needs to hear what a porch pirate is humming when they take off with your package? — and holds the potential to collect salacious gossip on behalf of the snoopiest of neighbours. Even if audio is turned off, “How can any of us know what settings our neighbour has set?” asks Stephanie Hare, an independent researcher and author of a forthcoming book on technology ethics. “It’s not like we can audit them.”
Britain has an estimated 10 million surveillance cameras mostly operated by private businesses, according to the British Security Industry Association. That number doesn’t include privately-owned cameras, like car dashcams and Ring doorbells (which each cost 90 pounds, or about 4,000 baht). But it does mean the Brits have among the highest densities of surveillance technology outside of China.
Lawmakers are capitalising where they can. Last month the UK’s opposition Labour party said that its vision for fighting crime involved a “next-generation neighbourhood watch” using data from doorbell cameras and WhatsApp groups. “‘Next generation neighbourhood watch’ sounds pretty friendly and reassuring, rather than ‘private video and audio surveillance network,’” Ms Hare notes.
There’s a silver lining to all those cameras, though: A greater chance of lawsuits that can spotlight the privacy problems.