The problem with doorbell cams: Nancy Guthrie case and Ring Super Bowl ad reawaken surveillance fears
Essential brief
Many people bought the devices thinking they would do little more than protect their delivery packages
What happens to the data that smart home cameras collect?
Can law enforcement access this information – even when users aren’t aware officers may be viewing their footage?
Two recent events have put these concerns in the spotlight.
A Super Bowl ad by the doorbell-camera company Ring and the FBI’s pursuit of the kidnapper of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie, have resurfaced longstanding concerns about surveillance against a backdrop of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The fear is that home cameras’ video feeds could become yet another part of the government’s mass surveillance apparatus.
Ring’s Super Bowl ad appeared intended to inspire hope: a neighborhood harnessing the power of technology to find a lost dog: a distraught girl misses her pet, Milo, who has gone missing.
Gone are the times of putting up “missing” posters.
Simply posting Milo’s photo through the Ring app automatically alerts a host of nearby cameras to use AI to look for a match, the ad says.
A neighbor then arrives on their porch with Milo, safe and sound.
As they reunite, feel-good music plays.
But the reference to the AI-powered feature Search Party, meant to mimic the activity of a real one, quickly triggered comparisons with a dystopian Black Mirror episode.
Viewers wondered: if the company could quickly access hundreds of Ring cameras in a neighborhood to find a dog, what’s stopping it from targeting a person in the same way?
In Guthrie’s case, the FBI released a video Tuesday showing a masked person at her doorstep.
But the footage appears to have been retrieved from a Google Nest camera that officials previously said was disconnected and lacking an active monthly subscription for premium features.
Without a subscription, users cannot typically store footage.
The publication of the footage from Guthrie’s home indicated that law enforcement could still access “residual data located in backend systems”, in the words of FBI director Kash Patel; cybersecurity experts have said this may be because doorbell cameras often have back-ups stored in a cloud.
It’s currently unclear whether law enforcement used a warrant. “There’s a very distinct and marked difference between what you have access to – in terms of whether you’re paying for it or not – and what the company has access to,” said Chris Gilliard, a data privacy expert who has researched how wearables and smart doorbells are contributing to mass surveillance.
Ring, owned by Amazon, and Nest say they comply with law enforcement requests for data, including footage, when it’s legally required and in instances where there’s a threat to someone’s life.