I promise I'm not clairvoyant.

I promise I'm not clairvoyant. The timing of this post was just uncanny.

I posted the below last Friday, two days before the Super Bowl, and had drafted it a week earlier because the topic was already on my mind. A lot has happened since then.

If you didn't watch the Super Bowl (or haven't heard the outrage), Ring aired an ad for a feature called "Search Party," which allows Ring devices in your neighborhood to use AI to search for a lost dog. On the surface, it seems wholesome. But the undertones are concerning, and the backlash was swift, with many calling it "Orwellian." Hence the post below.

Some other news also broke. In the Nancy Guthrie case, video of a potential suspect was released that came from "residual data located in backend systems" from Nest. What makes that strange? The Pima County Sheriff's Department had previously stated that investigators couldn't access the doorbell camera footage because Nancy Guthrie did not have an active Nest subscription, and the camera had been disconnected.

The mechanisms behind how that footage was obtained are largely unknown and still just speculation. Maybe it was recovery of data that had already been deleted. Maybe it was never deleted in the first place.

And the final piece? Ring and Flock canceled their partnership, announced just yesterday.

The world moves fast.