The Dark Knight was released in 2008. In that movie, Batman hijacks citizens' cellphones to track down the Joker, and it's presented as a major moral and ethical dilemma as part of the movie's overall themes. The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.
Crazy to think that less than two decades later, an even more powerful surveillance technology is being advertised at the Super Bowl as a great and wonderful thing and you should totally volunteer to upload your Ring footage so it can be analyzed for tracking down the Jok... I mean illegal imm... I mean lost pets.
Pulled from IMDB, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox voices the consternation perfectly:
> Batman: [seeing the wall of monitors for the first time at the Applied Sciences division in Wayne Enterprises] Beautiful, isn't it?
> Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone.
> Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver.
> Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong.
> Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius.
> Lucius Fox: At what cost?
> Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person.
> Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person.
> Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it.
> Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.
Lmao did they really say it's null-key encrypted?
Unfortunately a very realistic depiction of how many of the brands advertising their security the strongest often have the most ridiculously broken security (flock)
I rewatched recently. That's what he says all right.
> The only way Batman remains a "good guy" in the eyes of the audience is by destroying the entire thing once he's done.
A key part of that is when he tells Alfred that he did not even trust himself with that level of surveillance and coded it to only grant access to Alfred. Further, Alfred agrees to aid Batman by accessing the data but simultaneously tenders his resignation.
I doubt Amazon has anyone like Alfred in charge of this thing. Because if they did, the resignation would already have been submitted.
> Alfred
Wasn't it Lucius Fox?
It was :) Morgan Freeman not Michael Caine.
same difference
This is a bit orthogonal to the article, but Christopher Nolan gives me the willies. Almost all his films have this kind authoritarian apologia in them.
Is that the same willies as something like 1984 or Black Mirror? All they are doing is taking some idea present now, and just taking it too the darker places of it while society is currently only seeing the rosy side of things. It's stories like this that might be first time someone might actually consider other implications of ideas.
I think they take issue with how it was ultimately okay to do to catch the Joker as long as Batman didn't use it and gave power to Luscious who resigned, instead of just calling it out as terrible and not doing it. That's how I read their comment anyway. "apologia"
The Dark Knight Rises (the batman movie with Bane) seemed especially notable in this way - almost directly caricaturing the Occupy Wall St protests that were relevant at the time.
It's hard to not become disillusioned with our industry when most of it is just the manifesting of that Torment Nexus tweet. It's like no one in the tech world actually understands any piece of fiction that they have ever consumed.
I knew plenty of people growing up who thought Fight Club was just a fun movie about guys who like to fight and make a club to do so and it gets a little crazy, then cut to credits. They then theorized making their own such club. This to say, yeah, I think sometimes the audience can be overestimated in their ability to understand deeper meaning in art.
And Scarface was an inspiring rags-to-riches story.
And some extreemist are using fight clubs to gather followers, emulating the movie in the other direction. So-called "active clubs" are springing up using "fitness" to gather young angry males to the cause. Most join without realizing. Even gym owners are surprised to discover thier facilities have become clubhouses.
https://www.jfed.net/antisemitismtoolsandresources/neo-nazi-...
Never doubt they understand, there's just too much money to be made making the Torment Nexus
The Dark Knight was released in the summer of 2008. This was almost 7 years after 9/11.
Many aspects of that film were deliberately done to explore post 9/11 America. This includes the methods Harvey Dent uses, the things the Joker says, and the surveillance scenes and more.
These discussions surrounding surveillance have been around long before 2008.
Of course. The use of mass surveillance in the movie is not-so-subtly referencing the PATRIOT Act. But again, it's presented as a moral dilemma, and multiple protagonists acknowledge that it's far too powerful to exist, and its use is a last resort. It falls into the larger theme of Joker pushing Batman to violate his ethics for the greater good.
One could argue that because it was successfully used to catch Joker, the movie concludes that mass surveillance is sometimes necessary to stop evil, but it's at least presented as a dilemma. A massive corporation coming out and saying "mass surveillance is awesome because you can find lost pets" is a crazy escalation of the surveillance state.
I mean the message in The Dark Knight is really messy. The characters believe it’s immoral, but they use it anyway, and it saves lives and stops the Joker.
Yeah, as I say in a sibling comment, it's a fair reading of the movie that it's ultimately pro-surveillance because it shows that despite being immoral, unethical mass surveillance catches the bad guy. But "surveillance is unethical but necessary when battling the forces of evil" is worlds away from "surveillance is totally awesome and everyone should buy a Ring camera."
That kind of change in morality seems possible for an 18 year timespan? If anything the slope is closer to typical than to the maximum recorded.
The moral norms of societies, in many aspects, changed even more from 1928 to 1946.
Even more concerning is that Ring is partnering with Flock [1], which has been the subject of quite a bit of controversy recently [2][3][4], with the CEO lashing out at critics with inflammatory language [5][6].
[1] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-and-ring-partn...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-roundup
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/10/ice-school-c...
[4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/effs-investigations-ex...
[5] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-...
There would be less backlash to the Ring ad if the ad was honest about how people actually use it. Show us porch pirates, burglars and stupid neighbor who backs into your car being caught on camera.
But instead, they have to come up with something "wholesome" like finding your lost doggo. The wholesomeness is so forced and cringe that it makes you think they have something to hide. It almost feels like the people who wrote this ad and the people who greenlit it knew something was wrong so they have to come up with a cover story. But like a child smiling at you with his biggest smile while anxiously keeping his hands behind his back, it only makes them more suspicious especially in a time when big tech feels more and more like an adversary than a friend.
The WeRateDogs guy broke character and put out a video attacking that ad
The weratedogs guy has been posting political messages for as long as I can remember. This is completely in character for him.
"They aren't good politicians, Bront."
Why is it that (from what I've seen) the average American citizen is fine with mass surveillance but only if it's not used to track illegal immigrants? It's such an odd thing to draw a line in the sand over.
Objection: facts not in evidence!
The problem with the current push on "illegal immigrants" is that
1. It has been incredibly brutal
2. Many of the currently "illegal" immigrants were not illegal until their status was revoked by the current president.
3. The question of your immigration status, under the current system, is decided without proper access to legal representation.
---
Some people feel that the current push is solving a real problem in the real world.
Unfortunately, the real world is actually very complicated, and you can't flatten that complication without violence.
If that is hard to imagine, replace the ICE acronym with Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, Bureau of Land Management, or Internal Revenue Service.
I have documentation proving that I am, in fact, the Average American Citizen.
I am not fine with mass surveillance.
Because we decided the Constitution doesn't apply to a huge group of people living within the United States, and that seems wrong to those of us raised to believe the Constitution was important and the actual law of the land. It kind of doesn't work at all once we add a government decided 'subjective' layer on top of it. You could argue that already happened but this is the first most obvious in our faces instance.
Because it's them finally becoming aware that abuses of surveillance are real and tangible and not cable news rhetoric.
Are you a dog?? No?? So you do not have anything to worry about!!
So they say.
There’s no need to fear the construction of mass surveillance anymore. It’s already here. We built it one convenience at a time [0]. When I see all my friends with Alexa devices at home, ring cameras, and a million food apps on their phones, it feels like it’s already too late.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/we-have-all-we-need-for-mass-survei...
The fears of mass surveillance are some of the funniest things I can think of. Do you think a tree grows a leaf and then says I don’t care what you do leaf.
Amazon also had the ad about Alexa killing you. Not sure what they were thinking exactly.
It was some attempt at reductio ad absurdum. If you are concerned about letting Alexa into your home, you must be as irrational as Chris Hemsworth. Edit: I'm misusing reductio ad absurdum, but somebody will please tell me what the fallacy here is called.
Straw man?
That ad was great. I'm not sure how it sells Alexa products, but it was hilarious.
Fears of mass surveillance? It's already mass surveillance
This nitpick in language adds nothing to the conversation and is fundamentally incorrect. "Fears of" does not imply the thing feared doesn't exist.
Fear of bears in the woods? We already had bears.
Know what is super easy to do? Not buy Amazon Ring products.
that advert is just so horribly manipulative it's borderline evil
how can normal people go to work and produce this output?
(I suppose everyone that is prepared to work at Amazon corporate is... a certain type of person)
It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it. Surveillance is desired by the politically and economically powerful, and the contravening forces are weak and largely unorganized. Do we punish politicians or businesses for bad behavior? No? Then they'll engage in whatever behavior advances their interests.
You could purge the world of every single person with evil intentions, and things would maybe get better for a little while, but without fundamentally changing the underlying rules of the system the same thing would play out again with different actors.
> It's not really about the individual people. They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally. Our systems reward this behavior, so people do it.
Sorry, but people who do things they normally wouldn't because they are rewarded are not good people. They may be 'normal' in a distribution sense, but that doesn't mean the behavior becomes acceptable through it becoming commonplace.
> They're probably all pretty normal interpersonally.
have you seen the cult like statements they make you emit if you want to pass the interview?
I had a colleague that interviewed there (and was accepted)
over the space of that month he completely changed
(and not for the better)
You pay a third party to make something like this for you. They can best be described as nihilists.
Yeah in a world where if you post a Ring video of someone taking a crowbar to your mailbox which gets a strike in your neighborhood group and the video down for "hate", yeah, as useful as it is, the mass surveillance stuff is pretty alarming.
Archive link posted because in some cases (not all, strange enough) there's a paywall ("subscribe to continue reading")
What exactly are the "neighborhood cameras" mentioned in the article?
Everyone's Ring doorbells and cameras.
I'm afraid that ship has sailed
What backlash? "People voiced concerns" turns out to be 9 people if you follow the link. Where exactly is this backlash and why can't I smell it?
Ring has experienced backlash before when they allowed police departments to browse the imagery without any kind of oversight or warrant. And has changed their policies as a result (in the most minimal way but ok)
And these are pretty high profile people whose job it is to represent the people who will also have concerns but don't all contact the verge about it :)
By the way i use ring cameras too but I've already mitigated them a lot. Installed telephoto lenses that can only see the specific area I want them to see, and I removed the microphones so they can't hear what I'm saying. I got some free with my ring alarm so I didn't really want to waste the hardware either.
Everyone I’ve talked to about the Super Bowl ads has mentioned that one and said that it is creepy af. The backlash is mostly word of mouth in my experience.
Exactly. There are certainly more than 9 of us who value privacy and understand where this is going, but in comparison to millions of normies we aren't even a screeching voice of minority[1].
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/746588/apple-discusses-screeching-...
If you search for this story on other sites, the comments are full of backlash.
At what number of people do you consider it a backlash?
1% of subscribers
What about people who aren't subscribers and do not want their privacy invaded?
I'm afraid it's GDPR for them
The subtext is that idiots are buying these things and should at least become aware that there are reasons for backlash that haven't occurred to them.
I found out that on Reddit people go there and ask things like this (someone asked recently): "My girlfriend and I are looking for something to do. Are there any protests going on today we can go to?"
Can you imagine people actually searching things out like that? These "people voicing concerns" are like that. Someone has to find something to be enraged about for the sake of finding something to do.
Can you imagine people actually believing a post on Reddit, and then extrapolating that to everybody who is going to a protest?
So instead of drinking or shopping they want to support a cause?
My god how do they live with themselves.
Or people are concerned about living in a surveillance state and wish to protest that or some other issue. Why downplay legitimate societal concerns?
What an absurd take.
That ad gave me a visceral shudder of revulsion, not so much for the specific functionality on display as for the timing, which absolutely could not have been accidental. They might as well have just put 'and we're working on automatic alerts for ICE!' in the ad.
"Helping abusive husbands find their escaped wives."
Amazon has a very bad track record in this area. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/amazon-is-wagi...
> joseffritz
As an Austrian I have to wonder, is this name a homage to Josef Fritzl, one of the most well known Austrians of modern time?
Bullshit. The only people worried are the ones that were already concerned and never bought a Ring.
I guarantee the vast majority of people LOVE this new feature.
Part of the problem here is that people who love it are affecting people who do not. If you want to put cameras to record inside your home, fine, but this is people recording their neighbors without consent. The sales pitch is finding Fido, but I doubt that is the end game here.
Bullshit to you sir. I have a ring and have cancelled my subscription because of their scummy behavior
Thank you for that. But please consider taking down the camera, too; it's just as much of a problem without a subscription, because you are the service being sold, not just the customer. Get one that stores and processes video entirely locally instead.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46950915
Recording public spaces should be illegal. Public street? Public sidewalk? Not your turf, no cameras, no recording.
I'm not sure you've thought this through. That would mean you can't record law enforcement or any other abuse of power.
The issue here isn't the recording, it's the packaging it up for sale that's the issue.