All the people who are mad about web tracking violating their privacy should spend 95% of their privacy activism on Amazon.<p>They're building a terrifyingly thorough, 1984-like surveillance network and actively pursuing govt contracts to use it for law enforcement.<p>If you want to create a weapon that could be used to control a populace quickly, it would look a lot more like this (and autonomous drones) than it would a human army.
Glock did crazy deals early on, letting US police departments trade-in their existing used guns from other makers for new Glocks at minimal or no cost.<p>Glock could afford to do it because Glocks are cheap to make due to the brilliantly simple design, with a manufacturing cost lower than the resale value of the used guns they were accepting.<p>Soon Glock owned the US police market, and that gave them the credibility to win in the US domestic market at full price.
When you have a new product, sometimes people need to be given it to figure out how to use it.<p>A classic example is Post-It notes. It sounded like something that nobody wanted. And it wasn't until 3M gave it to companies for free and found that 90% of them reordered that it began to see adoption. So the fact that a company hands out samples for free may just be a good marketing technique, and not bribery.<p>See <a href="https://www.ideatovalue.com/insp/nickskillicorn/2017/04/true-story-post-notes-almost-failed/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ideatovalue.com/insp/nickskillicorn/2017/04/true...</a> for a random link verifying the Post-It story.
Gifts are super important for landing big contracts. I've heard a lot of stories about sending VPs Away suitcases or watches to catch their attention and initiate a sale.
I am surprised by the comments here which seem very fearful of Ring. Personally I welcome anything that helps police actually locate and arrest suspects. After all the crime we experience daily in cities like SF and Seattle, I am all for citizens being able to share footage and help the police along. If you don't support that, then you really don't support the enforcement of laws in general - which seems like an argument for crime and/or anarchy.<p>Personally I am not convinced by the slippery slope argument that Ring cameras will lead to broader unrestricted general surveillance. Ring customers can choose to voluntarily share footage with the police, or not - it's up to them. That's not the same as a dystopian ever-present dragnet. And even if we have cameras on every corner run by the government (rather than Ring), we can establish legal controls such as needing a warrant or reasonable suspicion of a crime to examine footage or perform facial recognition matches.