The new partnership automates crowdsourcing of user video. “Their system will get a ping and say, hey, there’s a fire within a mile of your property, you should know about it,” says John Mills, the CEO of Watch Duty. Users then get the option to share a live feed of the view from their front porch with the world.
“Front-row seats—street-level view to what’s actually happening—is a crazy concept,” Mills says. “We’ve seen this before. People will release flooding imagery or fire imagery and stuff from Ring cameras and put it out on Twitter.”
According to Siminoff, more than 10,000 Ring cameras were in the area of the Palisades fires. If they had been utilized to help residents and first responders have more views of where the fires were, Siminoff says, the extra info could have been a big help.
“I do think this will be something that will help in these situations in the future to just give them more real-time data of where the fire actually is,” Siminoff says.
When Ring reached out to Watch Duty, Mills says he talked with Siminoff, who shared his experience in the Palisades fire. Working together felt like a natural fit.
“He’s like, I want to get this fucking deal done right now,” Mills says, colorfully paraphrasing the conversation. “And then just gave us a fucking huge check and was like, we’re going to build this, get it out fucking early next year. I’m like, alright.”
Ring’s data-sharing practices, and the Neighbors app in particular, have drawn significant controversy. Ring has touched off privacy concerns by working with the police to share user videos, getting sued for not protecting private videos, and becoming the most high-profile AI surveillance device out there. (WIRED generally does not recommend Ring cameras, due to our concerns about how the company has handled these privacy issues over the years.)
“We’re trying to make things better, not worse, but we’re going to keep learning,” Siminoff says. “We’re going to iterate on this continually until we help collectively, with other companies and other technologies, to minimize the impact of these natural disasters that seem to be getting worse and more frequent.”
Mills says Ring’s efforts in the wildfire space squares with Watch Duty’s ethos. The service is primarily run by hundreds of volunteers who track wildfire information from a variety of sources. Ring videos are yet another potentially useful data stream.
“If it’s one person’s house burning down, we’re not going to show that to the world,” Mills says. “It’s not very useful. But if we see a whole entire block going up in fire, we’re going to publish that. If we watch ember brands flying down the street, we want to show that to civilians and especially first responders.”
Another feature Fire Watch offers is AI-powered smoke and fire detection for Ring Home subscribers. While Ring and Watch Duty both use AI in some capacity, Mills says this is different from the fire detection system Watch Duty uses, which is always vetted by a human. (Likely one of Watch Duty’s many volunteers.)
