Manjeet Rege, professor and chair of the Department of Software Engineering and Data Science at the University of St. Thomas School of Engineering, spoke with Vineeta Sawkar at WCCO Radio about growing concerns surrounding AI-enabled home surveillance systems such as Ring and Google Nest.
From the conversation:
Sawkar: She (Nancy Guthrie) didn’t have it, and she didn’t have the subscription that would record it. Yet the FBI was able to get this video even though it was supposed to be deleted. So fascinating to me how this is able to happen. It doesn’t surprise you, though?
Rege: Yes, exactly.
Sawkar: So when you look at surveillance cameras, and even though sometimes consumers may not opt in for law enforcement to have access, sometimes it is just a couple of steps away when it can end up landing in the wrong hands, where the consumers may not have actually intended for that particular access. In this case, it was Google Nest. But Ring cameras especially also have a reputation for having a partnership with law enforcement, where that particular level of access can happen. Well, they deny that they work with ICE. Who do you believe? They say that that is not true. But of course, there’s other information that points to the fact that that could be true with the Ring camera. That Super Bowl ad on Sunday, when they kind of sucked us in with, you can find lost dogs, people were very wary of that. And then should we be concerned at all?
Rege: Yes, this is a legitimate concern. People are not just reacting to the ad. They are reacting to a pattern. AI is moving into a phase where it does not just record; it interprets, identifies and alerts.
Sawkar: The concern is that Ring is shifting from passive recording to active scanning.
Rege: That is a major psychological and ethical leap. When AI starts interpreting what it sees across multiple homes, people would worry about how easily that capability could be repurposed.
And in my mind, some issues stand out. What if it is turned on by default? Now, Ring has said that it is turned off. But right now, it could be opt in. But in the future, automatically, it could be turned on by default, and it builds a foundation for mass surveillance at a neighborhood level.
