The Hidden Cost of Amazon’s Surveillance Tech
By: Will Oremus
Tags: Amazon, Technology, Ring, Pattern Matching

The Hidden Cost of Amazon’s Surveillance Tech

A new drone from Amazon subsidiary Ring raises familiar questions

Ring

The phrase “surveillance capitalism” was coined by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff to describe the system in which internet platforms such as Google and Facebook profit through free services that track users’ online behavior. Another company in their cohort, Amazon, has in recent years taken a different approach with its subsidiary Ring by offering actual, physical surveillance devices that allow its users to track other people. It’s not surveillance capitalism so much as plain old surveillance tech.

The surveillance tech model is far more straightforward than surveillance capitalism, at least on the surface: Customers pay Ring directly for the privilege of putting Alexa-enabled cameras on their property. The power of surveillance is in the user’s hands, and they can choose whether they share it with neighbors or law enforcement through the Neighbors app.

The two models have something in common, however, in that the surveillance comes at a cost that isn’t reflected in the price paid by users. Economists call this an externality. In Ring’s case, the privacy cost is not to the people who buy Ring devices, but to the people they use those devices to watch. In some ways, that’s more insidious than the Facebook model — people choose to use Facebook, but they don’t necessarily choose to be captured on a Ring camera. On the other hand, Ring would likely argue that its devices also have positive externalities, because they make the neighborhood safer even for people who don’t buy them, although evidence for that is mixed.

The Pattern

Surveillance tech empowers its customers to disempower others.

Undercurrents

Under-the-radar trends, stories, and random anecdotes worth your time

The Cold War between mobile platforms and app developers flared up on multiple new fronts this week. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Google is tightening its enforcement of rules that give it a 30% cut of in-app purchases made through the Google Play Store on Android devices. It had previously turned a blind eye to some developers’ efforts to circumvent the fee by directing users elsewhere for payment. The move comes as both Google and Apple are facing antitrust scrutiny over such fees, and brings Google’s policies a step closer to the ones that have made Apple a bigger target to date. The move might seem counterintuitive, but it reflects both companies’ determination to hold the line in response to an insurrection from Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite. Google still has the more defensible position from an antitrust standpoint, because unlike Apple, it allows third-party app stores on Android devices. At the same time, Apple has temporarily backed down from taking a 30% cut of online classes and events sold through its App Store. While that may ease the pressure on one front, it underscores the arbitrariness of Apple’s rules, and how they can tilt the playing field for developers in one direction or another. Finally, a Facebook executive tells The Information that his company has pushed for Apple to allow users to set Facebook’s Messenger app as the default for messaging on iPhones. Facebook going public with that call, after apparently keeping it private for years, suggests it sees Apple as particularly vulnerable now, likely due to the various antitrust inquiries. If that’s the case, this is another example of how a credible threat of antitrust regulation can affect firms’ behavior even before any actual laws are passed or enforced.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Google is tightening its enforcement of rules that give it a 30% cut of in-app purchases made through the Google Play Store on Android devices. It had previously turned a blind eye to some developers’ efforts to circumvent the fee by directing users elsewhere for payment. The move comes as both Google and Apple are facing antitrust scrutiny over such fees, and brings Google’s policies a step closer to the ones that have made Apple a bigger target to date. The move might seem counterintuitive, but it reflects both companies’ determination to hold the line in response to an insurrection from Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite. Google still has the more defensible position from an antitrust standpoint, because unlike Apple, it allows third-party app stores on Android devices. At the same time, Apple has temporarily backed down from taking a 30% cut of online classes and events sold through its App Store. While that may ease the pressure on one front, it underscores the arbitrariness of Apple’s rules, and how they can tilt the playing field for developers in one direction or another. Finally, a Facebook executive tells The Information that his company has pushed for Apple to allow users to set Facebook’s Messenger app as the default for messaging on iPhones. Facebook going public with that call, after apparently keeping it private for years, suggests it sees Apple as particularly vulnerable now, likely due to the various antitrust inquiries. If that’s the case, this is another example of how a credible threat of antitrust regulation can affect firms’ behavior even before any actual laws are passed or enforced. Moore’s Law is dead. Long live… Huang’s Law? That’s the term the Wall Street Journal’s Chris Mims is trying to coin, in reference to a recent trend of accelerating performance by the silicon chips that power artificial intelligence. He makes the case for Huang’s law as part of a profile of the chip maker Nvidia, which has become a driving force behind A.I. advances in the past decade. “While the increase can be attributed to both hardware and software, its steady progress makes it a unique enabler of everything from autonomous cars, trucks and ships to the face, voice, and object recognition in our personal gadgets.” My OneZero colleague Dave Gershgorn, who follows A.I. more closely than I do, agreed the trend is noteworthy, but pointed out that an eight-year trend may be a shaky basis on which to build a law. Still, the comparison of Huang’s Law to Moore’s Law — which was driven in part but not exclusively by Intel — could be instructive in explaining why Nvidia wants to buy fellow chipmaker Arm.

Headlines of the Week

How much oversight can an oversight board have if an oversight board has no real oversight?

— Josh Sternberg, The Media Nut newsletter

Rat that sniffs out land mines receives award for bravery

— Anna Schaverien, New York Times

An entire village lost its broadband at the same time every day for 18 years. Now we know why.

— Jack Guy, CNN

Going postal: A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive

— Max Read, BookForum

I am all love blaseball (and you can too)

— Cat Manning, The Garden of Forking Narratives