Month: April 2020

Enlarge / Ready for your closeup? (credit: Kameleon007)

Amazon subsidiary Ring, which has partnerships with almost 1,200 law enforcement agencies nationwide, does not currently include facial recognition or license plate scanning tools in its home surveillance line of consumer products. The company appears to be evaluating the feature feasibility of adding both tools, however, raising additional privacy concerns for its pervasive platform.

Ring last week distributed a confidential survey to beta testers weighing sentiment and demand for several potential new features in future versions of its software. According to screenshots shared with Ars, potential new features for Ring include options for enabling or disabling the camera both physically and remotely, both visual and audible alarms to ward off "would-be criminals," and potential object, facial, and license plate detection.

Such surveys usually include options a company is considering offering, though not necessarily actively planning to implement. The source who shared the survey with Ars, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, described these options as the "most troubling" of a much larger set of potential features described in the survey.

Enlarge / Fairgoers gather at Big Tex at the State Fair of Texas in 2018. Based on American data, presumably some not-insignificant portion of fairgoers traveled to Dallas in not-the-most-fuel-efficient of vehicles. (credit: Ron Jenkins / The Washington Post / Getty Images)

Greenhouse gas emissions are most commonly reported at the national level, which tends to make us compare nations to other nations. This makes some sense, as national policy can significantly influence emissions trends. But it's easy to forget that borders are just lines on a map, and some lines have considerably more people inside them than others. The citizens of Luxembourg don't ensure their country's low carbon emissions because they're lightyears ahead of the people of China in terms of efficiency—there are just a whole lot fewer of them.

In order to make more meaningful comparisons, you obviously have to calculate emissions per person. And when you do that, the United States really sticks out. (As does Luxembourg, by the way.) It's not surprising that per capita emissions in the United States are much greater than in India, where millions of people still lack electricity. But why are they also much greater than in the wealthier Western nations in Europe?

To answer that question, we need to do more than divide a national total by population. We need to break down the contributions to a person's carbon footprint—the emissions behind the things we buy and do. Doing that in a detailed way is a challenge, and researchers haven't been at it that long. "A lot of the research that's been done has been done quite quickly [with] available data and resources," UC Berkeley's Chris Jones told Ars, "And there really is a lot of work to do."