Ring provided 100 LAPD officers with free devices to influence adoption

All the people who are mad about web tracking violating their privacy should spend 95% of their privacy activism on Amazon.<p>They&#x27;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.

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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&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ideatovalue.com&#x2F;insp&#x2F;nickskillicorn&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;true-story-post-notes-almost-failed&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ideatovalue.com&#x2F;insp&#x2F;nickskillicorn&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;true...</a> for a random link verifying the Post-It story.

It&#x27;s illegal for us non-corporate types to bribe cops. Seems to be permissible when Amazon does it.<p>:(

Gifts are super important for landing big contracts. I&#x27;ve heard a lot of stories about sending VPs Away suitcases or watches to catch their attention and initiate a sale.

Old marketing trick.<p>Patagonia and Keen send freebies and coupon codes to their influencers, the forest service.

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&#x27;t support that, then you really don&#x27;t support the enforcement of laws in general - which seems like an argument for crime and&#x2F;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&#x27;s up to them. That&#x27;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.