Amazon’s Ring is adding a way for users of its Neighbors app to share good things happening in the neighborhood, instead of just bad things. And if you’d rather only see those good things in your feed, you can do that too.
If you see your neighbor do a good deed, like, say, bringing your garbage can in from the curb, you can share a video of that good deed captured by one of your Ring cameras and tag it as a “Neighborly Moment.” Here’s an image of what a Neighborly Moment might look like:
The Neighbors app has always let you post good deeds — what’s new is that Ring is officially encouraging that by creating a green dot and “Neighborly Moment” tag that distinguishes these nice posts from other tags like “Crime,” “Safety,” “Suspicious,” “Unknown Visitor,” or “Lost Pet.”
Ring also lets you filter your entire Neighbors feed by one or more of these filters, so if you only want to see Neighborly Moments from now on, you can do that.
It’s a potentially wholesome feature for an app that has been criticized for encouraging people to post about crimes and suspicious activity in their neighborhoods. Many of the posts made by users of the app make racist assumptions about people captured in the videos, according to a Vice investigation.
There are also numerous privacy concerns with how Amazon-owned Ring shares some data with law enforcement, and Amazon even works with some police departments to encourage Ring customers to opt into sharing their Ring data. To help address some of these privacy concerns, Ring added a privacy dashboard to its app last month to help customers better manage privacy and security settings for their Ring account and cameras.