Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???
Ring paid somewhere between $8 and $10 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot to tell 120 million viewers that their cameras now scan neighborhoods using AI.
The math is wild. Ring has roughly 20 million devices in American homes. Search Party is enabled by default. The opt-out rate on default settings in consumer tech is historically around 5%. So approximately 19 million cameras are now running AI pattern matching on anything that moves past your front door. Today the target is dogs. The same infrastructure already handles “Familiar Faces,” which builds biometric profiles of every person your camera sees, whether they know about it or not.
Ring settled with the FTC for $5.8 million after employees had unrestricted access to customers’ bedroom and bathroom footage for years. They’re now partnered with Flock Safety, which routes footage to local law enforcement. ICE has accessed Flock data through local police departments acting as intermediaries. Senator Markey’s investigation found Ring’s privacy protections only apply to device owners. If you’re a neighbor, a delivery driver, a passerby, you have no rights and no recourse.
This tells you everything about Amazon’s actual product. The customer paid for the camera. The customer pays the electricity. The customer pays the $3.99/month subscription. And Amazon gets a surveillance grid that would cost tens of billions to build from scratch, with an AI layer activated by default, and a law enforcement pipeline already connected.
They wrapped all of that in a lost puppy commercial because that’s the only version of this story anyone would willingly opt into.