Next month, Ring is rolling out a new feature called Neighbours — a type of social platform that will let you share local information such as suspicious activity or lost items, with a customisable radius of about five miles.
Neighbours launched in the US in 2018, but this is the first time it’s been available in the UK. You will find it within the Ring app from October 21, and anyone can join and start interacting with a local community for free — even if they don't have any Ring devices themselves.
You only need a Ring subscription if you want to join Search Party for Dogs, which is a feature that alerts you if your camera or doorbell detects a pet that has been reported missing, and lets you inform the owner privately.
We attended a launch event in London this week to learn more about Neighbours and Search Parties, and spoke to Dave Ward, International Managing Director of Ring, to find out how the company is tackling tricky issues like content moderation when running a social platform, and how Neighbours will keep discussions civil.
Search Party for Dogs
Ring is launching Search Party for Dogs in collaboration with rescue and rehoming charity charity Dogs Trust. If your dog goes missing, you can create a post in Neighbours, including a photo of your pet, and users with participating doorbells and cameras will be alerted automatically if your dog is detected on their property.
The finder can then let the owner know that the dog has been spotted in a private conversation. The owner won't be alerted automatically, and no videos or images will be shared unless the owner of the camera chooses to do so. At the moment, the feature is specifically for dogs; there is no Search Party feature for cats.
According to Rachel Casey, Chief Operations Officer, at Dogs Trust, approximately 25,000 dogs enter local authority care in the UK each year, with only 38% being reunited with their families.
The charity hopes that Search Party will help boost that number — though Casey emphasises that it's still vital to keep your pet's microchip details updated, and ensure they have ID tags and collars for easier identification .
"We know from out surveys of the local authorities that only two thirds of the dogs that come into local authority care are actually microchipped, and only half of those actually have the right details on their microchip," Casey said at a launch event in London.
Social platforms
After the event, we spoke to Dave Ward, International Managing Director of Ring, to find out more about Neighbours, and how Ring is tackling issues like moderation when it comes to community-created content.
Social media works best when everyone is on the same platform, so we began by asking how Ring will incentivise people to shift over from sharing local news on Facebook to Neighbours.
"We're not looking for them to move over and dismantle what they're doing," Ward said. "It's about giving them the tools to be a bit more community-focused and community-led around their area. I think when you look at other tools that are available today, they've all got their place in the world for different things.
He explained that local community groups on other social platforms often end up being muted because there are so many different things going on, and people complaining about certain topics. He said that the real value of Neighbours is being hyper-local to you, and that it is complementary to other networks rather than a direct replacement.
We ask you, are you sure you want to post this particular thing? Did that happen? Is this something that you think is right?
Dave Ward, Ring
When it comes to moderating content, Ward said that the process starts by prompting them to check what they are about to publish before doing so. This applies to both text and video clips.
"We ask you, 'are you sure you want to post this particular thing? Did that happen? Is this something that you think is right?'" Ward explained. "We give you guidelines around what you do and don't post, and then we go through a moderation process. We have a number of different LLMs and models that run through that to identify it against our set criteria. We publish the criteria so you can see it as well as a user. So we're very, very transparent with that.
"If something then is noticed as being non-compliant with our terms, we'll flag that. It goes to a human moderator, and we'll validate it, and then we'll tell you why. If we choose that we're not going to allow that post to go through, we're quite transparent with you. We say because of this, this, this, and this, and we think that's important."
If you see something that you think is inappropriate, which has got through the moderation process, Ward says, you can also flag it for attention yourself, and a human moderator will compare it against the platform's guidelines.
I'm probably going to be one of the first people doing a Search Party at this rate
Dave Ward, Ring
Finally, we asked Ward what he's most excited about when it comes to Neighbours and Search Party.
"I talk about like this ability to connect with your neighbourhood," he said. "When I was 12, I didn't realise actually the impact that some of these things happen. But as you get older, you realise like what happens when an event happens in your community and why it becomes important. So I'm excited the fact that we think we can get back to sharing things that are important.
"I'm particularly excited, obviously, for Search Party for Dogs. I'm a dog-owner, and you know, I was just saying I moved into a new house, and you know, there's a number of holes in that fence. And I was only thinking the other day, I'm probably going to be one of the first people doing a Search Party at this rate, so that's that's particularly exciting."
Ring will also be launching Community Requests in the UK later this year. This feature, already available in the US, lets people ask members of a community for help with an incident that may have been captured by their Ring camera or doorbell. Details of the UK launch haven't yet been announced, but in the US, members can choose whether to share video clips, or ignore the request. Nothing is shared automatically.
"We think this is genuinely game-changing for people, and I think here in the UK it's the right place to do it," Ward concluded. "We care about each other — we genuinely do. We look out for our neighbours. We just haven't had the tools.
"In the 80s you'd have been just down the street and been part of what's going on and be able to respond, and now you can do that from [anywhere], and you know that's super important."
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