mjr002 hours ago
The Dark Knight was released in 2008. In that movie, Batman hijacks citizens' cellphones to track down the Joker, and it's presented as a major moral and ethical dilemma as part of the movie's overall themes. The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.
Crazy to think that less than two decades later, an even more powerful surveillance technology is being advertised at the Super Bowl as a great and wonderful thing and you should totally volunteer to upload your Ring footage so it can be analyzed for tracking down the Jok... I mean illegal imm... I mean lost pets.
cyodean hour ago
Pulled from IMDB, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox voices the consternation perfectly:
> Batman: [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it?
> Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone.
> Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver.
> Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong.
> Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius.
> Lucius Fox: At what cost?
> Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person.
> Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person.
> Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it.
> Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.
culi41 minutes ago
Lmao did they really say it's null-key encrypted?
Unfortunately a very realistic depiction of how many of the brands advertising their security the strongest often have the most ridiculously broken security (flock)
seg_lol6 minutes ago
They should have used base64 encryption.
StilesCrisis24 minutes ago
I rewatched recently. That's what he says all right.
koolbaan hour ago
> The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.
A key part of that is when he tells Alfred that he did not even trust himself with that level of surveillance and coded it to only grant access to Alfred. Further, Alfred agrees to aid Batman by accessing the data but simultaneously tenders his resignation.
I doubt Amazon has anyone like Alfred in charge of this thing. Because if they did, the resignation would already have been submitted.
polaran hour ago
> Alfred
Wasn't it Lucius Fox?
loloquwowndueoan hour ago
It was :) Morgan Freeman not Michael Caine.
dylan604an hour ago
same difference
slg2 hours ago
It's hard to not become disillusioned with our industry when most of it is just the manifesting of that Torment Nexus tweet. It's like no one in the tech world actually understands any piece of fiction that they have ever consumed.
mlsu5 minutes ago
I've had a startling number of conversations exactly like this:
"Oh, you read as well? What do your read?"
"[this book], [that book]"
"Those are all non-fiction, any fiction?"
"I don't read fiction. If I'm not going to learn anything, it's a waste of time."
"..."
RankingMemberan hour ago
I knew plenty of people growing up who thought Fight Club was just a fun movie about guys who like to fight and make a club to do so and it gets a little crazy, then cut to credits. They then theorized making their own such club. This to say, yeah, I think sometimes the audience can be overestimated in their ability to understand deeper meaning in art.
hydrogen780031 minutes ago
And Scarface was an inspiring rags-to-riches story.
pbhjpbhj8 minutes ago
It's said that Starship Troopers failed to do as well in USA because people thought it was pro-fascist propaganda ... it doesn't seem possible that could genuinely be the case.
sandworm101an hour ago
And some extreemist are using fight clubs to gather followers, emulating the movie in the other direction. So-called "active clubs" are springing up using "fitness" to gather young angry males to the cause. Most join without realizing. Even gym owners are surprised to discover thier facilities have become clubhouses.
https://www.jfed.net/antisemitismtoolsandresources/neo-nazi-...
malfistan hour ago
Never doubt they understand, there's just too much money to be made making the Torment Nexus
b00ty4breakfastan hour ago
This is a bit orthogonal to the article, but Christopher Nolan gives me the willies. Almost all his films have this kind authoritarian apologia in them.
dylan604an hour ago
Is that the same willies as something like 1984 or Black Mirror? All they are doing is taking some idea present now, and just taking it too the darker places of it while society is currently only seeing the rosy side of things. It's stories like this that might be first time someone might actually consider other implications of ideas.
steezeburger22 minutes ago
I think they take issue with how it was ultimately okay to do to catch the Joker as long as Batman didn't use it and gave power to Luscious who resigned, instead of just calling it out as terrible and not doing it. That's how I read their comment anyway. "apologia"
b00ty4breakfast18 minutes ago
No, it's more like the militarism in a Heinlein novel. It is, at best, an unexamined assumption and, at worst, a celebration, or sometimes a passive acceptance, of violence to enforce the status quo.
tsunamifury6 minutes ago
Do not mistake Nolan's ability to call out the failures of both absolute freedom and absolute control and their interaction with him advocating for any of them.
Don't get the willies from the warning, learn from it.
His brother and the writer, Jonathan Nolan, is the greatest prophet of our era.
fwipan hour ago
The Dark Knight Rises (the batman movie with Bane) seemed especially notable in this way - almost directly caricaturing the Occupy Wall St protests that were relevant at the time.
bayindirh7 minutes ago
In the series Person of Interest, there's a scene where you can see racks of servers which allows to track everyone in a city (New York?).
When I first saw the scene I said: "This amount of servers is not remotely enough to pull something like this".
When I think of the scene now: "These amount of servers can do much more than the scene portrays".
I mean, most of the tech presented in the series is almost standard operations procedure via mundane equipment now.
Scary.
ViktorRay2 hours ago
The Dark Knight was released in the summer of 2008. This was almost 7 years after 9/11.
Many aspects of that film were deliberately done to explore post 9/11 America. This includes the methods Harvey Dent uses, the things the Joker says, and the surveillance scenes and more.
These discussions surrounding surveillance have been around long before 2008.
mjr002 hours ago
Of course. The use of mass surveillance in the movie is not-so-subtly referencing the PATRIOT Act. But again, it's presented as a moral dilemma, and multiple protagonists acknowledge that it's far too powerful to exist, and its use is a last resort. It falls into the larger theme of Joker pushing Batman to violate his ethics for the greater good.
One could argue that because it was successfully used to catch Joker, the movie concludes that mass surveillance is sometimes necessary to stop evil, but it's at least presented as a dilemma. A massive corporation coming out and saying "mass surveillance is awesome because you can find lost pets" is a crazy escalation of the surveillance state.
Gagarin1917an hour ago
I mean the message in The Dark Knight is really messy. The characters believe it’s immoral, but they use it anyway, and it saves lives and stops the Joker.
mjr00an hour ago
Yeah, as I say in a sibling comment, it's a fair reading of the movie that it's ultimately pro-surveillance because it shows that despite being immoral, unethical mass surveillance catches the bad guy. But "surveillance is unethical but necessary when battling the forces of evil" is worlds away from "surveillance is totally awesome and everyone should buy a Ring camera."
MichaelZuoan hour ago
That kind of change in morality seems possible for an 18 year timespan? If anything the slope is closer to typical than to the maximum recorded.
The moral norms of societies, in many aspects, changed even more from 1928 to 1946.
text04042 hours ago
Even more concerning is that Ring is partnering with Flock [1], which has been the subject of quite a bit of controversy recently [2][3][4], with the CEO lashing out at critics with inflammatory language [5][6].
[1] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-and-ring-partn...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-roundup
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/10/ice-school-c...
[4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/effs-investigations-ex...
[5] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-...
toephu210 minutes ago
I'm not going to refute your points, but Flock does do some good.
By the end of 2025, San Francisco reported significant declines across nearly all major crime categories, in particular: Homicides are down 20% (2025 vs 2024), and in 2025 were at their lowest level since 1954.
SFPD reported a 125% homicide clearance rate in 2025 (solving more cases than occurred that year), citing license plate readers (read: Flock) and drones as key factors in providing digital evidence.
So the reduction in crime is not solely due to Flock, but is has definitely helped.
whatthe128992 minutes ago
> the reduction in crime is not solely due to Flock, but is has definitely helped.
what's the theory? murderers see flock cams and decide not to murder? most of the general public doesn't even know what these cameras are (or that they even exist).
davidw2 hours ago
The WeRateDogs guy broke character and put out a video attacking that ad
blell2 hours ago
The weratedogs guy has been posting political messages for as long as I can remember. This is completely in character for him.
moffkalast2 hours ago
"They aren't good politicians, Bront."
GaryBluto2 hours ago
Why is it that (from what I've seen) the average American citizen is fine with mass surveillance but only if it's not used to track illegal immigrants? It's such an odd thing to draw a line in the sand over.
csoursan hour ago
Objection: facts not in evidence!
The problem with the current push on "illegal immigrants" is that
1. It has been incredibly brutal
2. Many of the currently "illegal" immigrants were not illegal until their status was revoked by the current president.
3. The question of your immigration status, under the current system, is decided without proper access to legal representation.
---
Some people feel that the current push is solving a real problem in the real world.
Unfortunately, the real world is actually very complicated, and you can't flatten that complication without violence.
If that is hard to imagine, replace the ICE acronym with Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, Bureau of Land Management, or Internal Revenue Service.
neogodlessan hour ago
I have documentation proving that I am, in fact, the Average American Citizen.
I am not fine with mass surveillance.
_DeadFred_2 hours ago
Because we decided the Constitution doesn't apply to a huge group of people living within the United States, and that seems wrong to those of us raised to believe the Constitution was important and the actual law of the land. It kind of doesn't work at all once we add a government decided 'subjective' layer on top of it. You could argue that already happened but this is the first most obvious in our faces instance.
add-sub-mul-div2 hours ago
Because it's them finally becoming aware that abuses of surveillance are real and tangible and not cable news rhetoric.
pibaker26 minutes ago
There would be less backlash to the Ring ad if the ad was honest about how people actually use it. Show us porch pirates, burglars and stupid neighbor who backs into your car being caught on camera.
But instead, they have to come up with something "wholesome" like finding your lost doggo. The wholesomeness is so forced and cringe that it makes you think they have something to hide. It almost feels like the people who wrote this ad and the people who greenlit it knew something was wrong so they have to come up with a cover story. But like a child smiling at you with his biggest smile while anxiously keeping his hands behind his back, it only makes them more suspicious especially in a time when big tech feels more and more like an adversary than a friend.
Animats20 minutes ago
They don't have a lost-kid feature?
In China, kids are accustomed to face recognition early.[1] The kids are checking into school via fare gates with face recognition. Here's an ad for Hikvision surveillance systems showing the whole system.[2] Hikvision has a whole series of videos presenting their concept of a kindly, gentler Big Brother. This is probably the most amusing.[3]
Amazon's concept is in some ways more powerful. They don't need full coverage. Just sparse, but widespread coverage. Anything that moves around will pass through the view of cameras at some point. Suspicious behavior can be detected in the back end cloud processing, which improves over time.
Flock has the same concept. Flock coverage is sparse in terms of area, but widespread.
"1984" was so last cen.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SMKG8aLTJ38
toephu28 minutes ago
Every technology has pros and cons. Are you insuating Flock is bad and evil (with your reference to 1984?)
I don't think Flock is this Big EviL coMpaNy you are making them out to be.
SFPD reported a 125% homicide clearance rate in 2025 (solving more cases than occurred that year), citing license plate readers (read: Flock) and drones as key factors in providing digital evidence.
foxfired30 minutes ago
There’s no need to fear the construction of mass surveillance anymore. It’s already here. We built it one convenience at a time [0]. When I see all my friends with Alexa devices at home, ring cameras, and a million food apps on their phones, it feels like it’s already too late.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/we-have-all-we-need-for-mass-survei...
jedbergop3 hours ago
Amazon also had the ad about Alexa killing you. Not sure what they were thinking exactly.
wakamoleguyan hour ago
It was some attempt at reductio ad absurdum. If you are concerned about letting Alexa into your home, you must be as irrational as Chris Hemsworth. Edit: I'm misusing reductio ad absurdum, but somebody will please tell me what the fallacy here is called.
dmoy31 minutes ago
Straw man?
tantalor2 hours ago
That ad was great. I'm not sure how it sells Alexa products, but it was hilarious.
gentleman112 hours ago
Fears of mass surveillance? It's already mass surveillance
colechristensen2 hours ago
This nitpick in language adds nothing to the conversation and is fundamentally incorrect. "Fears of" does not imply the thing feared doesn't exist.
raised_by_foxes36 minutes ago
Fear of bears in the woods? We already had bears.
manicennui13 minutes ago
Did they not realize that it is already a mass surveillance network?
blibble2 hours ago
that advert is just so horribly manipulative it's borderline evil
how can normal people go to work and produce this output?
(I suppose everyone that is prepared to work at Amazon corporate is... a certain type of person)
idle_zealot2 hours ago
It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it. Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful, and the contravening forces are weak and largely unorganized. Do we punish politicians or businesses for bad behavior? No? Then they'll engage in whatever behavior advances their interests.
You could purge the world of every single person with evil intentions, and things would maybe get better for a little while, but without fundamentally changing the underlying rules of the system the same thing would play out again with different actors.
gorjusborg26 minutes ago
> It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it.
Sorry, but people who do things they normally wouldn't because they are rewarded are not good people. They may be 'normal' in a distribution sense, but that doesn't mean the behavior becomes acceptable through it becoming commonplace.
blibblean hour ago
> They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally.
have you seen the cult like statements they make you emit if you want to pass the interview?
I had a colleague that interviewed there (and was accepted)
over the space of that month he completely changed
(and not for the better)
themafiaan hour ago
You pay a third party to make something like this for you. They can best be described as nihilists.
dev_l1x_be23 minutes ago
Are you a dog?? No?? So you do not have anything to worry about!!
So they say.
damnesian32 minutes ago
Know what is super easy to do? Not buy Amazon Ring products.
mr_machine6 minutes ago
Know what is super hard to do? Leave your house without being caught by someone else's Ring camera.
an-allen26 minutes ago
The fears of mass surveillance are some of the funniest things I can think of. Do you think a tree grows a leaf and then says I don’t care what you do leaf.
gbolcer41 minutes ago
Yeah in a world where if you post a Ring video of someone taking a crowbar to your mailbox which gets a strike in your neighborhood group and the video down for "hate", yeah, as useful as it is, the mass surveillance stuff is pretty alarming.
wolvoleo2 hours ago
Archive link posted because in some cases (not all, strange enough) there's a paywall ("subscribe to continue reading")
russellbeattie13 minutes ago
Amazon marketing broke a fundamental rule about consumer tech: Don't remind users about how much Big Tech knows about you.
Your various devices track everywhere you go, who you communicate with, what you search for, what you buy, what audio you listen to, what videos you watch, what games you play, who your family is, all your pictures and video you take, who comes and goes from your house, when you sleep, your health data, and much more.
And as a fundamental part of Big Tech's business they accumulate, aggregate and analyze all that information in various ways to increase profits. They don't keep this a secret, but wisely they don't brag about it to the general public.
Consumers have shown that are totally willing to give up privacy for convenience. Just don't remind them of it.
Archelaos2 hours ago
What exactly are the "neighborhood cameras" mentioned in the article?
jedbergop2 hours ago
Everyone's Ring doorbells and cameras.
RcouF1uZ4gsC19 minutes ago
I think Nancy Guthrie and the release of the doorbell video by scouring Google’s caches has done far, far more to make people want video cameras and cloud storage than any ad.
nullbyte2 hours ago
I'm afraid that ship has sailed
[deleted]an hour agocollapsed
Gagarin1917an hour ago
Bullshit. The only people worried are the ones that were already concerned and never bought a Ring.
I guarantee the vast majority of people LOVE this new feature.
gorjusborg22 minutes ago
Part of the problem here is that people who love it are affecting people who do not. If you want to put cameras to record inside your home, fine, but this is people recording their neighbors without consent. The sales pitch is finding Fido, but I doubt that is the end game here.
i_love_retrosan hour ago
Bullshit to you sir. I have a ring and have cancelled my subscription because of their scummy behavior
JoshTriplettan hour ago
Thank you for that. But please consider taking down the camera, too; it's just as much of a problem without a subscription, because you are the service being sold, not just the customer. Get one that stores and processes video entirely locally instead.
1970-01-012 hours ago
What backlash? "People voiced concerns" turns out to be 9 people if you follow the link. Where exactly is this backlash and why can't I smell it?
wolvoleo2 hours ago
Ring has experienced backlash before when they allowed police departments to browse the imagery without any kind of oversight or warrant. And has changed their policies as a result (in the most minimal way but ok)
And these are pretty high profile people whose job it is to represent the people who will also have concerns but don't all contact the verge about it :)
By the way i use ring cameras too but I've already mitigated them a lot. Installed telephoto lenses that can only see the specific area I want them to see, and I removed the microphones so they can't hear what I'm saying. I got some free with my ring alarm so I didn't really want to waste the hardware either.
teerayan hour ago
Everyone I’ve talked to about the Super Bowl ads has mentioned that one and said that it is creepy af. The backlash is mostly word of mouth in my experience.
egorfinean hour ago
Exactly. There are certainly more than 9 of us who value privacy and understand where this is going, but in comparison to millions of normies we aren't even a screeching voice of minority[1].
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/746588/apple-discusses-screeching-...
ranger_danger2 hours ago
If you search for this story on other sites, the comments are full of backlash.
igleria2 hours ago
At what number of people do you consider it a backlash?
1970-01-012 hours ago
1% of subscribers
thesuitonym2 hours ago
What about people who aren't subscribers and do not want their privacy invaded?
1970-01-012 hours ago
I'm afraid it's GDPR for them
add-sub-mul-div2 hours ago
The subtext is that idiots are buying these things and should at least become aware that there are reasons for backlash that haven't occurred to them.
assimpleaspossi2 hours ago
I found out that on Reddit people go there and ask things like this (someone asked recently): "My girlfriend and I are looking for something to do. Are there any protests going on today we can go to?"
Can you imagine people actually searching things out like that? These "people voicing concerns" are like that. Someone has to find something to be enraged about for the sake of finding something to do.
olyjohnan hour ago
Can you imagine people actually believing a post on Reddit, and then extrapolating that to everybody who is going to a protest?
goatlover2 hours ago
Or people are concerned about living in a surveillance state and wish to protest that or some other issue. Why downplay legitimate societal concerns?
nutjob2an hour ago
So instead of drinking or shopping they want to support a cause?
My god how do they live with themselves.
wantlotsofcurryan hour ago
What an absurd take.
crooked-v2 hours ago
That ad gave me a visceral shudder of revulsion, not so much for the specific functionality on display as for the timing, which absolutely could not have been accidental. They might as well have just put 'and we're working on automatic alerts for ICE!' in the ad.
themafiaan hour ago
"Helping abusive husbands find their escaped wives."
josefritzisherean hour ago
Amazon has a very bad track record in this area. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/amazon-is-wagi...
Traubenfuchsan hour ago
> joseffritz
As an Austrian I have to wonder, is this name a homage to Josef Fritzl, one of the most well known Austrians of modern time?
ChrisArchitect2 hours ago
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46950915
bradley13an hour ago
Recording public spaces should be illegal. Public street? Public sidewalk? Not your turf, no cameras, no recording.
Dylan168076 minutes ago
I think that goes too far, but limiting public space recordings to a camera you're operating in person would be a good starting point.
jedbergopan hour ago
I'm not sure you've thought this through. That would mean you can't record law enforcement or any other abuse of power.
The issue here isn't the recording, it's the packaging it up for sale that's the issue.
toephu214 minutes ago
So google maps streetview should be illegal?