The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international digital rights group, has called former basketball player Shaquille O'Neill, also a spokesman for Ring, a home surveillance company, to cancel his October 27 appearance at the US Association of Chiefs of Police conference.
Instead, the group wants to have a one-on-one discussion with the former NBA star about Amazon home monitoring devices, the Ring, its partnerships with law enforcement, and its negative impact on the privacy rights of society and individuals.
Founded in 2013 as a startup in the manufacture of electronic door bells with the technology of monitoring and protection of home doors, O'Neill became a spokesman for the ring in 2016 in exchange for a stake in the company acquired by Amazon in 2018.
"Rather than joining these agreements - with the police - where Shak (Shakil's nickname) delivers tens of thousands of dollars in the form of ring devices to police officers from all over the country, we would like to offer the basketball legend an opportunity to talk to privacy experts about the damage they do," the Border Foundation said. Could be inflicted on individuals by these partnerships. " O'Neill has previously appeared in videos with police to promote the bells.
For a long time, Amazon was hiding details about Ring Bells and its partnerships with police departments across the country, in terms of the number of police departments that got them, what happened to the data they picked up, and how their presence changed community interactions internally with neighbors and externally with the police? But records obtained by Motherboard's technology site slowly revealed that Amazon was building a monitoring network throughout the company.
Ring's devices are a big privacy problem because they can collect footage and deliver it directly to the police without a warrant. Their surveillance not only affects members of a single community, but anyone who passes through the doors of the ring without knowing their existence is subject to surveillance without their consent.
The Border Foundation hopes that talking with O'Neill will help raise awareness of the danger of the Range organs to individual freedoms, which will help reduce the growing demand for these technologies by state institutions.