Ring, a company best known for smart doorbells and home security cameras, has a massive network of these cameras installed, some of which are being used for surveillance purposes by police in certain cities. Shreyas Gandlur, a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign put together a map of these locations. Gandlur started out with a map created by Fight For The Future (FFTF), a nonprofit advocacy group. The map had its limitations. At the time, FFTF’s version only included about 50 cities, though more than 225 police departments were currently using the surveillance network. Adding additional cities came with a little help from Gizmodo. Gizmodo’s Dell Cameron wrote: With this knowledge, Gandlur simply had to find matching messages on social media — such as “excited to join neighbors by ring” — that matched up with law enforcement Twitter accounts. It was “nothing too complicated and it’s pretty funny that Ring controlling the content of police press releases came to my aid since basically every agency releases the same statement,” Gandlur told Gizmodo. Though the most comprehensive peek we’ve had to date, Gandlur points out that the map is likely to be incomplete. Your city’s absence doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t being spied on. But it’s an informative tool, one that gives citizens the power to fight back. And a fight it will be. And while Rekognition does have a handful of noble use cases, like assisting the International Center for Missing & Exploited Children, advocacy groups — including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, and Human Rights Watch — point out its potential for misuse: To date, a couple of bills have been introduced at the federal level that would curb the broad use of facial recognition without affirmative consent. None have been voted into law.
