When Doorbell Cameras Meet Delivery Workers
Aiha Nguyen and Eve Zelickson discuss security, privacy, control, and their new report: At the Digital Doorstep
Last week, Data & Society published At the Digital Doorstep: How Customers Use Doorbell Cameras to Manage Delivery Workers, a report by D&S Labor Futures program director Aiha Nguyen and research analyst Eve Zelickson. The report draws on interviews with delivery drivers and video doorbell users from across the US to document the spread of a technology that’s marketed as a safety and security tool — but whose primary use in practice is the monitoring, instruction, and punishment of workers by customers. Investigating the changing relationships between corporations, workers, and customers as a significant share of retail shifts from brick-and-mortar establishments to the doorstep, Nguyen and Zelickson focus on Amazon’s fleet of gig workers, known as Flex drivers, and the popular Amazon Ring home security camera.
We spoke to the two authors about the implications of this shift, the power dynamics at play, and what surprised them in their research.
For more, join us on October 27, 2022 for “Power and Retail at the Digital Doorstep,” a conversation about the hidden relational dynamics that shape how we shop today. RSVP here.
What is the promise of these networked doorbell cameras — the problem they purport to solve — versus the reality of how they’re being used?
Eve Zelickson: Video doorbell cameras are marketed as a tool that keeps you safe in your home. For example, the slogan of the Amazon Ring doorbell camera is, “when communities work together, safer neighborhoods become a reality.” Our interviews with doorbell camera users confirmed that the motivation for purchasing this technology is the desire to feel more secure in their home, and the desire to protect their personal property. Networked doorbell cameras notify users of movement at the door, have a built-in speaker, and provide real-time footage of their doorstep which can be easily saved and shared. These attributes allow users to surveil and interact with those outside their home while they remain inside it.
Aiha Nguyen: Customers are installing doorbell cameras as protection from a potential criminal, but in the process, they end up surveilling the people who are actually routinely present on their property: delivery drivers. Doorbell users we interviewed described a range of actions that we termed “boss behavior” — actions they took, often in the name of safety or package security, that also served as a way to monitor and manage delivery drivers. The customers are acting like these workers’ bosses, but that is not actually their role, or the reason they say they have the camera. So there is this mismatch between the motivation for purchasing a doorbell camera and its day-to-day use.
What do privately owned doorbell cameras have in common with other forms of retail and worker surveillance, and what’s new here?
Nguyen: Doorbell cameras, as a form of worker surveillance, are peculiar because they are more protracted and distributed than traditional tools of worker monitoring and, most significantly, they are controlled by the customer. In comparison to, say, a CCTV monitoring system in a physical retail store, which is managed by a retailer who often follows established rules and guidelines around use and storage of this footage, doorbell cameras are owned by individual customers. People share it with law enforcement, they send it to the retailer, they post it online. During the pandemic we saw more people sharing footage of drivers on social media, sometimes as a form of entertainment and other times in an effort to shame or embarrass them.
Zelickson: The undue weight that customer ratings and reviews carry for gig workers has been documented by researchers like Ngai Keung Chan, Karen Levy, Solon Barocas and others. One thing that seems different about this type of gig work is where it takes place: the doorstep. The doorstep is emerging as a new physical locale of consumption, but it is also someone’s private property. This muddies the water when it comes to questions of control, worker protections, and privacy.
These doorbell cameras have been rapidly and widely adopted, and are becoming another kind of technology that people have come to believe they need. What are the broader consequences of this shift? What’s your sense of the real problems this tech is solving for, versus the unintended consequences?
Nguyen: Drivers told us that doorbell cameras are ubiquitous in most of the neighborhoods they service. As far as the real problem this tech is solving for, we aren’t convinced there is one. Of course, it’s understandable that people want to feel safe and secure in their homes, but there are other ways to achieve this that don’t have consequences like exacerbating racial profiling and subjugating a low-wage workforce with near constant surveillance.
As a result of the proliferation of doorbell cameras and the growth of e-commerce, we are also seeing law enforcement and local governments pay more attention to package theft. Doorbell cameras have put this new type of criminal — the “porch pirate” — on full display for us, and as a result, at least a dozen municipalities have introduced legislation that would increase the penalty for package theft; some of these bills have reclassified package theft as a felony. This introduces so many questions and concerns about over-policing; with millions of drivers ferrying packages to doorsteps, it’s very likely this would mean more of them are pulled into the law enforcement dragnet. It is also self-reinforcing: as police departments are becoming more reliant on private surveillance systems — mainly smart doorbell cameras — to investigate crimes, private surveillance is becoming an apparatus of state surveillance.
The dynamics that networked doorbell cameras introduce at the doorstep have a lot to do with power. What are the power dynamics at play here?
Zelickson: Much of our report focuses on the dynamics between the delivery driver and the customer, in which there is a very clear power relationship — essentially, one party has the ability to get the other fired. For a large percentage of delivery drivers who are classified as independent contractors, the stakes are higher, because they rely on maintaining good ratings and positive customer reviews to keep their gig.
In all of this, it’s really important not to forget Amazon and other powerful retailers, who have engineered this situation. Through the sale of doorbell cameras and subscription services that rely on platform delivery drivers, these companies have transformed what used to be a labor cost into a revenue stream. The patterns of customer behavior we reported, the monitoring, instructing, and punishing of delivery drivers — and the consequences of these behaviors: drivers being reprimanded, deactivated, or shamed online — are all possible because Amazon has devised a system of surveillance and control that ultimately benefits them. And ultimately it’s not just Amazon that’s benefiting from this new structure — it’s most of retail.
It’s ironic that these systems, which are marketed as helping consumers feel safe and secure, so often result in workers feeling worried and vulnerable. Can you talk about that trade-off?
Nguyen: First, we should think about whether these cameras are actually making people safer and how they do so. In some instances, customers believed the cameras were a deterrent. To our knowledge, we don’t actually have reliable data on this — but as a feeling, it’s a hard thing to disprove. Second, we should consider whether that sense of safety is worth the cost associated with these cameras: to workers, to people of color, etc. There are other approaches to community safety, ones that don’t come with these negative consequences. In our report we mention urban theorist Jane Jacob’s concept of “eyes on the street” which explains how areas can be kept safe by human street activity, not technology or law enforcement.
Is there a story in the report or from your research that has particularly stuck with you, or that particularly exemplifies the issues at hand?
Zelickson: In interviews with drivers, there was near unanimous agreement that rural deliveries posed the most risk in terms of logistics and safety. The houses are far apart, and drivers often have to maneuver down long, unpaved or rocky driveways. There is often insufficient lighting and sometimes drivers won’t have cell service, which makes getting to the actual location all the more difficult. Despite all of these challenges, there was one Black Amazon Flex driver who said that he prefers these routes because he interacts with fewer people during them. He told us that, when delivering in neighborhoods, especially in communities where he stands out as a Black man, he is stared at, or in his words, he is “an attraction.” Many of the drivers of color we spoke with, especially those who deliver in their personal vehicle, expressed similar sentiments of being watched or monitored in a neighborhood. This story, in particular, was very revealing for us to see how workers of color can feel the compounded impact of a tool that has been used to racial profile and control work.
Nguyen: From the customer side, one story that stands out was a woman from a suburb of Massachusetts who, watching through her doorbell camera, saw a delivery driver drop the back of a sticker in her street. She went outside and asked him to pick it up, and then started ordering him to pick up other trash in her lawn and the street. This interaction was only possible because of the affordances of the doorbell camera, which allowed her to watch that happen live from inside her home. It’s an egregious example of the level of power that the doorbell camera affords customers: That customer was emboldened to confront that worker and make demands of them that may not have been typical in a more traditional workplace.
Was there something you learned in this research that surprised you?
Zelickson: We were surprised that some of the delivery drivers we spoke with actually preferred to have doorbell cameras present. These workers felt that the camera functioned as a form of protection or a digital witness. In their view, the camera (and its footage) could protect them against false accusations that they stole a package or broke a pot or drove on the lawn. In this way, we see workers doing what they have done for centuries — appropriating their own surveillance or restraints to their benefit.
But delivery workers also knew that there was no guarantee they could get access to the footage, because it is privately owned. As the proliferation of footage of delivery workers online and the proposed reality show Ring Nation suggests, workers have no control over if or where footage is shared. There’s more research to be done on the role of footage of delivery work and how it’s becoming an important tool — one that could potentially exonerate a falsely accused worker, or make them an internet meme.
