Max Eliaser, the Amazon employee insisting that the connected Ring doorbells and cameras should be shelved, posted an explanation on Medium. “The deployment of connected home security cameras that allow footage to be queried centrally are simply not compatible with a free society. The privacy issues are not fixable with regulation and there is no balance that can be struck. Ring should be shut down immediately and not brought back,” he wrote.

Eliaser isn’t alone in raising a warning voice about the potential threats to privacy posed by the popular doorbell camera. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published a report revealing substantial breaches to the privacy of users of the Amazon-owned “smart” technology. EFF’s ...