They have the same defects, that is.

Products like Nextdoor and Ring are helping fight crime in new ways, while creating new problems that… aren’t new at all, as is evident from this Markup piece.

One is extra work for law enforcement, albeit, likely, much more sustainable than most alternatives: “There’s so much more evidence that’s out there, digital evidence, that detectives get a bunch of false positives.". The other problem was immensely much easier to foresee.

This is just like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etcetera

People have been monitoring passersby since the invention of villages. Before digital technologies, however, you could not report, share, criticize automatically everything happening around your house, even when you were sleeping. Now, “The wisdom of the crowd becomes the tyranny of the crowd [thanks to] technology,", said a law professor.

But it should have been obvious that what people have done for years on social media made to polarize, that is attack and denounce each other at the slightest provocation, or just out of boredom and ignorance, would just happen again with “neighborhood watch” platforms and products.

With one serious aggravating circumstance: the racism and “hate speech” reported by the Markup is by, on or among people who, by definition:

• know where to find each other, to put in practice what they say
• even if no actual violence or discrimination happens on the moment, will have to live close to each other for decades anyway

Those smart surveillance cameras and platforms don’t look so smart, after all.