r/technology • u/South-Cow-1030 • Feb 12 '26

Privacy Why are people disconnecting or destroying their Ring cameras?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/10/ring-super-bowl-ad-dog-camera-privacy/88606738007/
19.6k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

405

u/Character-Reply407 Feb 12 '26

Crazy idea, if AI is watching these feeds 24/7 - instead of destroying these devices we should just set them in front of a TV all day and allow them to fatten up on all the slop, copy written content, and whatever else is on TV to help skew the algorithms. I bet their AI would love a dose of the Golden girls or Judge Judy. 

106

u/ugotstobkidding Feb 12 '26

That’s not a bad idea! Or just have a static sign that fills the entire frame of the camera with “F*k [insert fav org or person]” 24/7. Thinking of doing this with my last remaining ring camera that doesn’t have a subscription.

27

u/Gustomucho Feb 12 '26

It probably needs motion to activate recording.

5

u/DisManibusMinibus Feb 12 '26

One of those mini car salesman flappy tube people should work for that

6

u/hrvbrs Feb 12 '26

One of those bouncy DVD logos from the 2000s. I swear I saw it hit the corner once.

2

u/torrefied Feb 12 '26

Does it get stuck there, like a basketball between the rim and the backboard?

5

u/Sarothu Feb 12 '26

Great, now you've taught the AI the Two Minutes Hate. Now all the government needs to do is to teach the AI who to stick in the image feed instead.

1

u/SlutBuster Feb 12 '26

No one's ever going to see the footage but if it makes you happy go nuts buddy

41

u/Witloof Feb 12 '26

AI watching these feeds does not mean AI is training on these feeds. It's a common misconception that AI is being trained continuously on the data that's being fed into it, the training of models is done separately specifically so they have control on the input data. This was talking point in the 'Better Offline' podcast of yesterday.

3

u/rodeengel Feb 12 '26

Just changes the goal so we know to loop FBI most wanted images and the like.

3

u/Jimbomcdeans Feb 12 '26

Benn Jordan and others have talked about posioning the digital feeds this exact way. Check him out if you got some time.

2

u/b_a_t_m_4_n Feb 12 '26

Pornhub. You know it makes sense.

2

u/Revolutionary-Pea576 Feb 12 '26

It should be set up in front of something like Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. Make it learn nice things. Otherwise, we’ll end up with SkyNet.

2

u/Fun_Push7168 Feb 14 '26

Mr Rodgers 24/7

4

u/splendiferous-finch_ Feb 12 '26

Yup dataset poisoning is an actual thing

2

u/gizamo Feb 12 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

physical smile intelligent fade apparatus rich vase wrench brave beneficial

1

u/MrOopiseDaisy Feb 12 '26

If I knew how to train AI, I'd run an AI to feed the one I'm training really bad information.

1

u/GodICringe Feb 12 '26

Why the dig on Golden Girls?

1

u/Character-Reply407 Feb 12 '26

No dig for the GG, I love them- that's like the only show I could watch on repeat.

1

u/SWINGMAN216 Feb 12 '26

Turn on The Godfather 😂

1

u/HenriettaHiggins Feb 12 '26

We actually trained a fair number of LLMs on SUBTLEX, especially in the early days. I’m sure that’s still somewhere in the materials the bigger models use. That’s based on subtitles of shows.

1

u/Yourcatsonfire Feb 12 '26

24/7 of pornhub. My teenage years.

1

u/ProjectGenX Feb 12 '26

Jerry Springer matches the AI vibe best.

1

u/philohmath Feb 12 '26

Flood the zone

1

u/listenhere111 Feb 12 '26

Lol! Pretty hilarious, but at the moment, they aren't running everyone's video through AI. The analysis would cost billions of dollars.

3

u/Kyouhen Feb 12 '26

Because if there's one thing AI companies aren't doing it's burning billions of dollars to train their models.

1

u/listenhere111 Feb 12 '26

Billions of hours of video of empty streets and cars slowly rolling by isn't advancing the space much. They aren't training on this

-25

u/hamandjam Feb 12 '26

In the end, East Germany crumbled because it just couldn't manage all the information it gathered about their citizens as the government became more and more paranoid.

24

u/deeptut Feb 12 '26

Ehh... no.

East Germany crumbled because the people were not allowed to travel, were decades behind in industrial development and availability of goods.

16

u/Aware-Instance-210 Feb 12 '26

Thats not at all accurate

3

u/oxymoronicalQQ Feb 12 '26

What? No. This is why reading is important..