Coyote Blog

During the Superbowl there was an amazing Rorschach test masquerading as a feel-good Ring doorbell commercial.  For those who missed it, find it here.  Essentially it touts a new service where neighborhood networks of Ring doorbell cameras can combine with Amazon AI to find a lost dog based on an uploaded photo.  Half the population reacted, "isn't that wonderful" and the other half of viewers, of whom I am one, reacted "that's freaking scary."  The network of camera feeds in the commercial looks very similar to Batman's (admitted even by him) dystopian cell phone surveillance array in the Dark Knight.

This is exactly the sort of wedge strategy that our public and private control freaks use to normalize dystopian systems and technologies.  You don't sell surveillance out of the gate with a system that tracks down a person in the neighborhood behind on taxes or child support.  No, you sell it as a system to find that adorable lost dog (notice not even generic pets or certainly not cats because dogs are the new children for this generation**).  They can fight all the backlash by saying, "Oh come on, who can be against finding lost dogs?"  Then, months or years later, the terms and conditions have morphed and broader search capabilities are enabled without the user even knowing (I own a Ring doorbell and I guarantee I never knew this feature was turned on by default or even existed). When it really gets scary, they are not even going to tell you about it.

I do not believe this is just a marketing mistake -- Ring appears to have adopted neighborhood surveillance as their core business model.  I have had a Ring doorbell for years and in its basic form of sending doorbell chimes to your phone and allowing you to see who is at the door and even talk to them remotely, it is a nice product.   I have always liked it.  But over the years I have noticed Amazon/Ring slowly morphing the app from just a doorbell / security tool into a neighborhood surveillance network.  If you have the app, you can see that most of the functionality is now about messaging and notifications shared around the neighborhood, generally dominated by local Karen's putting up panicky posts about someone they saw they thought was creepy.  In the main menu of the app, the very first option after a link to the dashboard is called "neighbors."  This is the neighborhood watch group on steroids.

As a libertarian, what do I have against private neighborhood voluntary surveillance networks?  Nothing, but this is neither voluntary nor private.  As for voluntary, this functionality was added on an opt-out basis with zero notification, at least until this commercial came out.  But what about privacy?

Well, I spent more time in the app yesterday than I probably had cumulatively over 5+ years.  The first thing I did was turn off this advertised feature.  From the main menu (the three bars in the upper left) you need to choose control center (not settings) and then scroll way down to "search party" (that is what they call it, to evoke maybe a bunch of guys with St Bernards looking for a lost hiker) and turn it off.

So while I was in the app I started trying to see if there was a way to block Amazon from sharing all this with the government or other third parties.  There is an intriguing option in the control center labelled public safety which says it controls public safety agency notification settings -- maybe one can block sharing with the government?  Nope.  Turns out this option is just to change what police and other agencies can post to your neighborhood feed.

In the same control center there is a privacy tab.  I clicked on that, but there are no settings.  Only a promise to be really really nice  and make our privacy their highest priority but no specific commitments on data privacy.  Also note the use of "neighbors" over and over.  It is as if they are trying to establish some right to collective privacy (whatever the f*ck that is) instead of individual privacy.

But it does say that I am in complete control so maybe there is a data sharing option somewhere else.  Further down we finally get to the "data management" option.  It says "Request a copy of your data, manage third-part access, or delete your data."  There we go!  Here is the screen you get:

This is the whole screen. Notice anything?  As promised, you can download your personal data, I guess just to see what the CIA is looking at.  You can delete your data, at the cost of bricking your products.  But there is no actual option to manage 3rd party data access.  It is promised in the privacy statement, it is promised in the menu header, but it does not exist.  After an hour on their site and in the app, I still don't know who has access to my doorbell camera image.

**footnote: The other day in Orange County CA I was doing my 4 mile walk through some neighborhoods and I passed 4 young (at least relative to me) women pushing strollers.  When I looked, all 4 strollers had dogs in them, not children.  Some time ago someone said (sorry I can't give credit, can't remember) "dogs are the new children, plants are the new dogs."  I didn't really understand that until recently but I believe it.  I can't remember an airline flight I have been on that had more babies in the cabin than dogs.

This was originally posted on 2-1-25 but was lost in a  server update. 

Trump's first few weeks have been a mix of good and bad for this libertarian, all against a backdrop of horror at how Imperial the presidency has become.  But as of today, perhaps the most destructive and stupid initiative has begun:

Because we are all tired of those fentanyl-toting Canadians crossing the border illegally.   I mean, we all saw the Proposal and know how all those Canadians are trying to cheat US immigration law.

Seriously, this is beyond awful -- and not just because of the threat of retaliation, though that is real.  Even if all the affected countries roll over and accept these modified tariffs without response, this is still a terrible step for the US.  No matter how Trump and his very very small group of protectionist economist friends sell this, this is a tax on 300 million US consumers to benefit a small group of producers.   I don't have time right now to give an updated lesson on free trade -- that will have to wait for when I am not on vacation.  But I will offer a few ironies:

• After campaigning hard on inflation, Trump is slapping a 10-25% consumption tax on foreign goods.  That is a straight up consumer price increase for a variety of key products including much of the lumber we use to build homes, a lot of our oil and gas, a lot of our grain and beef, and many of our cars and appliances.
• Much of this inflation is going to disproportionately hurt Trump's base.  No one is going to care much if a Hollywood actor has the fair trade coffee they buy at Whole Foods go up in price, but Trump voters are going to see a direct effect of this on prices at Wal-Mart.
• Republicans have spent 4 years (rightly) condemning Federal and State governments for the economic disruptions of COVID lockdowns and restrictions.  While some of the inflation of the last 4 years was due to ridiculously high government deficits, another major cause was the COVID supply chain disruptions.  And now Trump is voluntarily recreating them.

The only small hope I have is that Trump is steeped from his business career in a certain style of brinksmanship bargaining that consists of taking an entirely destructive and irrational position in hopes that they folks on the other side of the table will back down and give him more than he should.  My son won poker tournaments like this because he would do so much crazy stuff that no one at the table wanted to challenge him.  I have always said that I don't think Trump is a particularly good business person -- he has run business after business that has failed.  But he is a good negotiator, and has exited numerous bankruptcies with his creditors giving him far more than one would think was necessary.

So I am sure his supporters would say that this is no different from the Columbia situation, when the Columbian president backed down quickly on not accepting repatriation of Columbian nationals under a storm of Trump threats.  Perhaps.  But even if this stuff is reversed, it is incredibly destructive because it is almost impossible for businesses to plan and make long-term investments when something so fundamental as tariff rates is changing so quickly and arbitrarily.

But there is yet another harm.  I know some folks are exhausted with the idea of American exceptionalism, in part because it has been a 75-year excuse to send our military bumbling around the world intervening in every conflict large and small, frequently overthrowing states only to have the replacement be even worse.

But there is one part of American exceptionalism that is important -- our example and our persuasion is a key support beam in upholding two great benefits for humanity -- free speech and free trade.  Every government official anywhere is a potential tyrant (if you think that is extreme, I would argue that this exact fear was one of the fundamental founding ideas behind our Constitution).  And tyrants want to have their opponents shut up and they want to shift economic activity to reward their supporters.  They love censorship and protectionism.

As such, in every country of the world, there is a tremendous headwind against free speech and free trade.  There is some natural gravity affecting government behavior that if there is not a constant, visible pressure to maintain free speech and free trade, they begin to be undermined.  And at least since 1945, the US has been the primary source of that pressure (one might add the UK to this, at least once upon a time, but looking at them now that is pretty much over).

Over the last 10 years, it has been incredibly depressing to see the US start to lose its commitment to free speech, particularly on the Left which has here-to-fore been the natural home of its defenders.  Trump and his supporters say things that seem like a positive step in returning to free speech, but I am a cynical man and I fear that we may only see censorship shifted to different topics rather than actually eliminated.  Time will tell, and I will have more on that later.

But in the case of trade, it is the Right in the US that has been the natural defender of free trade.  To see the Right not only abandon the defense of free trade, but actually start ramming torpedoes into its sinking carcass, is perhaps the most depressing part of Trump's order.