Amazon’s Ring: How Smart Home Cameras Produce a Consumer Policing Model

Government, police and businesses deploy fear and terror to control the narrative surrounding the politics of surveillance and increase their power over individuals’ everyday lives. As with Foucault’s panopticon, in modern day surveillance, people are often unaware that they are being watched, or if they are aware, they comply for the betterment of the community. Companies like Amazon push the boundaries of acceptable surveillance methods with home cameras under the guise of “keeping people safe,” and adopt new biometric technologies that their law enforcement partners use against local communities as seen in Dallas/Fort Worth. According to David Lyon, the new surveillance is “individualized and competitive” (Lyon 60). We must not forget the active role of the subject regarding surveillance and its aggressive technologies. As subjects in a rapidly advancing technological world, it is vital that we should learn to return the gaze and counteract abusive surveillance methods like the Ring.