Ring to Launch Neighbours Community App in UK on October 21

Neighbours is designed for posts about suspicious activity, safety, community matters, lost items and missing pets. Users can post anonymously and sort content into categories, and posts can include video or images shared from Ring doorbells and cameras. Ring says posts are screened by artificial intelligence and human moderators before and after publication under guidelines that bar illegal content, discrimination and speculation.

At a London launch event, Dave Ward, Ring's international managing director, said Neighbours is intended to complement, not replace, existing neighbourhood groups on WhatsApp or Facebook. Ward told TechRadar that Ring was not looking for people to move over and dismantle what they were doing, but to give them tools to be more community-focused and community-led around their area. The Guardian reported Ward saying that broad WhatsApp groups often end up muted and that Neighbours aims to narrow information to what matters to an immediate community.

Ward described a moderation process in which users are asked to check what they are about to publish, whether it happened and whether it is appropriate. He said Ring uses large language models and other models to check posts against published criteria, then sends flagged posts to human moderators. If a post is rejected, Ring tells the user why, he said. Users can also flag content that has passed moderation for human review.

The UK launch will include Search Party for Dogs, developed with the rescue and rehoming charity Dogs Trust. Under the feature, an owner of a missing dog can create a Neighbours post with a photo. Ring users with participating doorbells or cameras and a suitable cloud subscription can opt in to search alerts; if a camera detects a dog, the user is prompted to check whether it matches the missing animal. The finder can then notify the owner privately. The owner is not alerted automatically, and no video or images are shared unless the camera owner chooses to share them. The feature is only for dogs, with no equivalent for cats.

TechRadar reported that Rachel Casey, chief operations officer at Dogs Trust, said about 25,000 dogs enter local authority care in the UK each year and only 38% are reunited with their families. She said surveys of local authorities showed only two-thirds of dogs entering care are microchipped, and only half of those have correct details on the microchip. The charity hopes Search Party will increase reunions, but Casey said owners should still keep microchip details updated and ensure pets have ID tags and collars.

The Guardian reported that some more controversial features of the US version will not be available in the UK immediately. Neighbours Verified, which lets entities such as fire brigades post advisory messages, and Community Requests, which allows police to ask for Ring camera footage in a local area, are being developed for the UK but will not arrive until later this year at the earliest. Community Requests has drawn criticism from privacy campaigners. It allows camera owners to share footage with police on an opt-in, per-event basis, and police are not told who declines to share.

Ring recently announced a default encryption mechanism for camera footage called TAKE, or throw away the key encryption. The Guardian reported that it gives Ring's systems time-limited keys to recordings and blocks the company and others from accessing videos after 24 hours. Further processing or access, including by law enforcement, requires user consent to issue replacement 24-hour keys from the user's Ring app. Amazon bought Ring in 2018 in a deal reportedly worth more than $1 billion.