This time last year, I stayed in an apartment in Chicago filled with household gadgetry. As soon a visitor approached the front gate, our phones would chirrup in warning. Then the doorbell rang, and their face promptly flashed up on our screens. Via an app, we could climate-control the house, even if we were hundreds of miles away. My hosts, who were young parents, had a camera fixed above their toddler’s crib, which beamed live video straight to their cellphones, so they could check on him when they were out to dinner. The vacuum cleaner skated around the house of its own accord – until the two-year-old tried to ride it.

I relished my time in the smart home. It gave us all an innate sense of being in control of our lives — protected, organized, not to mention temperature-regulated. But what’s the price of convenience when it means that companies – and potentially governments — can have access to the most intimate information of all: how we live behind closed doors?

This week, controversy abounded over the Ring doorbell-camera system, bought by Amazon for $829 million last year and currently used by millions of security-conscious homeowners across the world. Fears are on the rise that Ring is creating a web of tightly surveilled neighborhoods. “Amazon’s home security company is turning everyone into cops,” Vice’s Caroline Haskins wrote in February. The Ring doorbell is integrated with a social media app called Neighbors, which allows users to upload their own video streams of outside their front doors and flag “suspicious” characters. Haskins looked at the app and found users were mostly flagging people of color. 

Ring has entered into hundreds of contracts cooperating with local police departments across the U.S., which means police can request, via Ring, that customers submit their doorbell footage as evidence in investigations. This week, Gizmodo reporter Dell Cameron revealed that Ring pass data straight back to the police about those who refuse to comply with the requests. And Buzzfeed News reported that while Ring claim not to use facial recognition tech, they’ve actually employed a “head of facial recognition research” in their Ukraine office.