Amazon’s Ring wants to replace local WhatsApp groups. It’s a recipe for curtain-twitching disaster | Imogen West-Knights
Do we really want a slick digital message board overseen by Amazon? It’s the neighbourhood nonsense we treasure Ring, the Amazon subsidiary of camera-enabled doorbells fame, wants to be an even bigger part of your neighbourhood. Next month in the UK, it will be launching Neighbours , a community app that seeks to replace the now traditional neighbourhood Facebook or WhatsApp group. It will be…
Do we really want Amazon to oversee a digital neighbourhood message board? That's the kind of neighbourhood gossip Ring, the Amazon subsidiary known for camera-enabled doorbells, wants to become a bigger part of. Next month in the UK, it will launch Neighbours, a community app that aims to replace the traditional neighbourhood Facebook or WhatsApp groups.
The app will be available within the Ring app, free to everyone, even those without Ring products, and will include a community requests feature. Police can use this feature to request footage from residents living near reported crimes, who then decide whether or not to share it. My initial thought was that this is the height of paranoid culture gone mad.
If you must have a Ring doorbell (and my instinct as someone without one is that it's intrusive behaviour), then: OK. But does Amazon really need to run a digital village message board too? Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist.
Written by urgent.news from Guardian Business's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
