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“Rather than waiting for someone to trespass at your door and then calling the police, we want to detect the danger before it happens,” said Christian Cerda, CEO of SimpliSafe.
SimpliSafe pioneered low-cost security systems that do not require expensive wiring and can be installed by homeowners. Now the company hopes to build a system that is smart enough to detect potential burglars. For now, the system still relies on human help to decide whether someone is friend or foe. Officers are warned against using unfair criteria such as race when making such decisions. But Cerda hopes to one day create a version that can make such decisions on its own. And that possibility makes privacy advocates a little nervous.
“I don’t want a robot to decide that one person’s behavior is dangerous and another’s isn’t,” said Adam Schwartz, director of privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties organization.
“Dumb” security cameras like those from Amazon are popular Ring Doorbell cameras have already been criticized for posing a threat to privacy. Under pressure from civil liberties watchdog groups, Amazon said in January that it would no longer allow police agencies to request video footage from owners of Ring cameras for use in criminal investigations.
The SimpliSafe system raises several questions, such as whether it is allowed to perform facial recognition scans without the consent of the data subject, and whether an AI is smart enough to correctly identify possible criminal activity.
The new SimpliSafe system captures video footage of people approaching the home and alerts a human agent in the company’s emergency control room. The camera’s AI system can be taught to recognize the faces of family members and friends. If the visitor has a familiar face, the SimpliSafe agent is told to back off.
SimpliSafe’s new outdoor camera is on display in a small house in the company’s Boston office.Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff
But for everyone, the AI generates a text description of the person. For example, it could be reported that “an unknown person wearing a green shirt and blue pants was detected by the front door camera at 10:15 p.m.”
The agent can view live video from the camera and talk to the visitor through the camera’s built-in speaker and microphone. The officer said something like, “This is SimpliSafe. Your visit is recorded on video. Can I help you?” If the visitor comes to deliver a package, no problem. If he is a criminal, the officer can call the police.
The feature will be built into the company’s new outdoor security camera, which costs $200. Users will also pay $80 per month if people want to monitor the camera 24 hours a day, or $50 for surveillance that only takes place at night.
“I would say what they’re doing is quite sophisticated,” said Elizabeth Parks, president of market research firm Parks Associates. She said it is one of many attempts by homeland security companies to integrate AI technology such as facial recognition into their products. “The big players and newcomers are all looking at what the benefits of this machine learning are,” she said.
SimpliSafe already makes an indoor camera that allows officers to warn thieves after detecting a break-in in the building. The new outdoor camera should deter them before they break a window or kick in a door.
According to Hooman Shahidi, Chief Product Officer of SimpliSafe, many thieves are not afraid of burglar alarms. “When people break into houses, they hear the siren, and they say, yeah, of course there’s a siren or something,” Shahidi said. “I’ve got twenty minutes before anyone shows up.
In some US cities, it can even take an hour or more for police to respond to an emergency call. Shahidi said this is partly because about 90 percent of burglar alarm calls are false alarms. Knowing this, the police are often slow to respond to them. This could discourage people from buying an alarm system in the first place – why worry if help arrives too late? SimpliSafe hopes to win over more customers with a system that tries to deter thieves before they ask for help.
By combining AI with a human security officer, the SimpliSafe system minimizes the risk that a computer would call the police in response to an innocent visit. But the system still raises some civil liberties concerns.
For example, the automatic facial recognition feature will not be available to SimpliSafe customers in Illinois, Texas and Portland, Oregon. These jurisdictions have passed laws prohibiting the collection of facial recognition data without the individual’s consent. Mapping the faces of everyone who passes by could violate these laws.
There are also concerns that SimpliSafe’s new system is just the beginning. How long before it uses AI instead of humans to decide who is a threat? In an email, Cerda said that while the system doesn’t do this now, he made it clear that SimpliSafe is moving in that direction.
“After our launch period and as we scale, we will continue to refine this technology, further train and validate our models, and narrow down to specific cases where we are confident we are not introducing bias or other errors,” Cerda wrote. “At this point we will use the tool to filter out or even take action on an event; this is critical in our roadmap to deliver this service at scale and cost.”
Christian Cerda, CEO of SimpliSafe, with the company’s new outdoor camera.Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff
Cerda declined to provide further details on what kind of action the AI might take. But it’s possible that a future SimpliSafe system could respond to an unidentified visitor using only AI. The computer may decide to issue a verbal warning or even call the police, without a human as backup.
Companies are already using AI analysis of facial expressions to gauge people’s reactions to TV commercials or political campaign ads. And self-driving car developers are working on AI systems that assess the body language of nearby pedestrians to predict whether they will step onto the street.
That’s raising concerns in some quarters that a company like SimpliSafe could eventually use these methods to automatically assess criminal intent. And that’s what Schwartz is concerned about.
“All the biases and irrationalities in human life are fed into the AI and replicated by the AI,” Schwartz said. He worries that racial and class biases embedded in the software could harm innocent people.
Cerda admits this is a legitimate concern, at least until SimpliSafe builds better AI models. Therefore, the system will keep humans in control for the time being.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @GlobeTechLab.