The World is Not Imploding with Violence
As if things were not bad enough already with the never ending news cycle that shares the terrible events of the last 1/2/12/24 hours I read this morning that Ring from Amazon and their associated Neighbors application are inking deals with local police and emergency services to gain access to the 911 call feed and activity.
We know humans are terrible at assessing risk. Look no further than the fear of flying but total comfort to get in a car and drive. Your life is a lot safer in an airplane than it is in a car based on the data but that does not change perception or fear linked to these two different forms of travel
I talked about risk assessment in this post on Prostate screening for men, and you can read plenty online that explains the Psychology of risk assessment and why we are so bad at assessing risk – so many factors come into play including our own personal bias, absolute and relative risks, units of risk, and even “deliberational blindness”.
Suffice to say there is enough content that is busy terrifying people into pulling their children off the streets worried about abductions, feeling that our house will be invaded in the next 5 minutes or our families will be subjected to a major accident that is terrifying our society. It is well known in news organizations that
If it bleeds it leads
The subtext to this is that drama sells and interests people, millions of people having safe, fun and satisfying days does not make for “news” that anyone will tune in to listen to, watch or read.
As the original piece highlights – the real purpose of this is to help Ring keep its users engaged on their app (their competing with big draws for your attention like Facebook, Instagram….) and manually reporting on crimes won’t do it
But how often is one the victim of a crime in their own neighborhood? Likely not enough to stay engaged with the app for very long. Ring’s solution is to push out alerts about alleged criminal activity reported nearby in real-time, according to company documents obtained by Gizmodo. Hiring people to monitor police scanners all day, however, is presumably too costly and inefficient. To pull off this trick, Ring needs something better: direct access to raw police dispatch data.
This scaremongering won’t do anything for your health and happiness (much like the constant focus on what everyone else is doing on Social Media and I would encourage you to either not sign up or if you have switch off the alerts. They are not the only ones attempting to get eyeballs focused on their app on a pathway to selling your attention as a commodity to advertisers for revenue. Nextdoor also has as similar activity and a cascade method of advertising trying to persuade all your connections to join because you have and then a constant stream of “alerts” to keep your engaged and logging in.
Take what serves you, leave what doesn’t
