Claimant says: "We bought and installed a Ring Doorbell from Amazon for our own protection.
We are uncomfortable with the sheer amount of surveillance in our society, and we have been aghast at news reports of people publicly sharing Ring videos of perfectly innocent people as suspicious. However, we eventually decided that we were even less comfortable with potential intruders and thieves.
We paid a substantial amount of money for Amazon's Ring Doorbell. This was not a free product where a company can say they need to defray costs by ”
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Claimant says: "We bought and installed a Ring Doorbell from Amazon for our own protection.
We are uncomfortable with the sheer amount of surveillance in our society, and we have been aghast at news reports of people publicly sharing Ring videos of perfectly innocent people as suspicious. However, we eventually decided that we were even less comfortable with potential intruders and thieves.
We paid a substantial amount of money for Amazon's Ring Doorbell. This was not a free product where a company can say they need to defray costs by selling our information. It's a device with certain component parts and costs, including those for support.
We now discover that Electronic Frontier Foundation did a deep dive into what Ring Doorbell actually does to monetize the customer's so-called privacy.
Ring Inc's privacy policy reassuringly says, We put your security first. That includes your privacy, too.
Apparently not. Ring has been selling our data, including potentially very sensistive geolocation data, to multiple buyers, including the utterly appalling moral vacuum that is Facebook. If I wanted Facebook to have my information, I'd give it directly to Mark Zuckerberg.
While setting up the Ring app, I was very cautious about permissions. However, I literally couldn't set it up unless I gave permission for certain accesses, particularly since (obviously) I'd be using the app to access video while away from home.
Now, looking at my phone setting, I realize that we were forced into giving permission for Ring to access our phone locations while using the app. There is no reason for this whatsoever, certainly once the app is installed. But did Ring prompt us to review our settings once set up was complete? Of course it didn't. It just took advantage of us.
All of these companies have been, or will be, subject to hacking. So now, thanks to these grasping stoats, anyone potentially knows exactly how far away I am from our home--or whether I'm alone in it.
I have set out some provisional terms for settlement of my claim. However, if you choose not to meet them, I want you to buy back this device at full price. You'll still have made plenty of money.
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