Amazon to launch Ring ‘neighbourhood watch’ app in UK amid US privacy fears

Amazon’s doorbell camera maker Ring is to launch its Neighbours community app in the UK in an attempt to supplant neighbourhood WhatsApp or Facebook groups.

The service is intended as a modern equivalent of a community message board, where neighbours can post about safety, community matters or lost pets.

It is being made available free of charge inside the existing Ring app for UK users from 21 October and can be used by anyone, regardless of whether they own one of the brand’s products.

“We used to have the village noticeboard, but as things have changed we no longer have that local connection,” said Dave Ward, the managing director of international for Ring. “Instead what you see in WhatsApp or other services is quite a broad-stroked flood of information, the bins being left out, that sort of thing. It’s a big group that ends up getting muted.

“We’re trying to tailor this down to just the things that really matter to your immediate community and then it becomes super useful.”

Those who join the service set their address and a radius of between 0.1 and five miles to join the local community.

Some of the more controversial features of the Neighbours service from the US will not be immediately available in the UK. That includes the Neighbours Verified service, which allows entities and services such as the local fire brigade to post advisory messages to local communities.

The Community Requests feature, which allows the police to issue calls for footage from Ring cameras in a local area in response to incidents, has drawn the most ire from privacy campaigners. It allows those with footage of incidents to share it with the police on an opt-in and per-event basis. The police are not informed of those that choose not to share footage.

Both features are being developed for release in the UK but not until later this year at the earliest.

Neighbours will launch with basic anonymised posting narrowed into categories, which must conform to a strict set of guidelines barring illegal content, discrimination, speculation or multiple other conditions.

The posts are moderated by AI and humans before and after being published. Content can be shared from Ring doorbells and other cameras.

“We are going to coach people to make sure they’re creating the right sort of post, asking them if that’s really something they want to write or whether it really need that descriptive term, to help stop the type of content no one wants to see and make it more community focused. That’s very different to other places [such as WhatsApp groups],” Ward said.

Amazon bought the video doorbell and home security camera maker in 2018 in a deal reportedly worth more than $1bn.

The new service will also have a feature called “Search Party for Dogs”, which allows users of lost pets to post an image and report of a lost dog.

Those in the neighbourhood who have Ring cameras and a suitable cloud subscription can opt in to join the search. They will then be notified if their cameras see a dog, prompted to check whether it is the correct dog, and then can optionally notify and share the video with the pet owner.

In an attempt to negate some privacy fears, Ring recently announced a new default encryption mechanism for camera footage called TAKE (throw away the key encryption). This feature provides Ring’s systems time-limited keys to the recordings, blocking the company and others access to the videos after 24 hours. Further processing or access, including by law enforcement, requires user consent to issue replacement 24-hour keys from the user’s Ring app.