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WN TBD | Ring: Your Doorbell Is Watching

Slate News

Slate Podcasts

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.56K Ratings

🗓️ 20 December 2019

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Back in 2013, an entrepreneur named Jamie Siminoff appeared on Shark Tank. He was seeking an investment in a new product he was calling Doorbot, a smart doorbell that would make answering the door more convenient and users’ lives “more connected.”


Six years later, Doorbot is now Ring, an Amazon-owned home-security system that partners with more than 600 police departments around the country. How did Doorbot become Ring? And what are the consequences of placing surveillance cameras on front doors around the country?


Guest: Caroline Haskins, technology reporter at Buzzfeed. 


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

You might have seen this video that went viral back in the beginning of December.

0:08.0

In it, you see an Amazon delivery driver walk up to a front door in a Delaware subdivision to deliver a package.

0:16.0

And then he spots the treats. Sn, this is nice.

0:21.7

Snacks, drinks, a whole basket of things laid out for drivers like him.

0:26.9

Oh, this is sweet.

0:28.3

Oh, wow.

0:29.3

He celebrates.

0:30.3

He does a little happy dance.

0:32.2

And we can see all of this because the homeowner, the one who put out the snacks to begin with, had a ring smart doorbell.

0:40.2

The video went on Facebook, local news picked it up, and millions of people shared it as a

0:45.5

heartwarming holiday story. The driver, Karim Reed, told Yahoo News that he didn't know about the

0:51.3

video until he heard about it from his boss, but that he was surprised and humbled by the whole thing.

0:56.8

I was thinking about this video and videos like it when we called up reporter Caroline Haskins.

1:02.3

She wrote a series of investigative stories about Ring, the smart doorbell company, for Vice.

1:07.4

She says videos like this are key for the company.

1:10.3

Capturing these so-called wholesome moments is actually one of two-pronged approach to rings social media marketing.

1:18.7

So on one hand, they want to be able to catch people who appear to have been deterred from stealing a package or committing some sort of crime.

1:27.5

And on the other hand, they like to capture kids on camera, animals on camera, and wholesome

1:33.1

moments like these.

1:34.7

I wanted to know if Caroline, who's been writing about Ring for the past year, saw a

1:39.1

heartwarming story, or if she saw something else.

1:42.0

It's been customary for a long time to tip or provide some sort of holiday gift for people

...

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