Will A Ring Doorbell Finally Be Useful?

Amazon has come up with a new twist on this with their new feature entitled ‘search party’. This has to do with lost pets and initiating what is known as a search party where people can submit footage of a qualifying pet from their own doorbell videos.

A photo is submitted to the service and those wishing to provide private info can do so by replying to the owner. The idea has a lot of potential but according to many users, this particular doorbell has issues.

Apparently there is a lot of noise that acts as interference in the units and on the platform, there is monitoring that includes deletion of helpful posts. The material is supposed to be private but is hosted with the company so many suspect privacy violations are a thing.

So if this unit already has issues and is not trusted, how will this new feature be accepted even if it has a great potential to help distraught pet owners? There also seems to be a huge grey area regarding the legality of posting videos where property of others or other people are caught in the footage.

I wondered about this myself when viewing You Tube videos where pets were revealed doing funny things on doorbells. Did these posters ask permission from those people who had the original videos?

I suspect there is a lot of sharing going on in this case and no permission was obtained. It has the potential to become a legal nightmare. At the same time, when postings are helpful for something like a missing pet, surely there must be a way to deliver the service.

I am all for another method to reunite people with their animals. That is why I am bringing this up. But I worry this has not been well thought out and since other issues are already prevalent that have not been rectified, the benefits might be lost. And our pets deserve better.