Amazon's doorbell camera maker Ring is to launch its Neighbours community app in the UK in an attempt to supplant neighbourhood WhatsApp or Facebook groups. The service is intended as a modern equivalent of a community message board, where neighbours can post about safety, community matters or lost pets. It will be available free of charge inside the existing Ring app for UK users from 21 October and can be used by anyone, regardless of whether they own one of the brand's products. "We used to have the village noticeboard, but as things have changed we no longer have that local connection," said Dave Ward, the managing director of international for Ring. "Instead what you see in WhatsApp or other services is quite a broad-stroked flood of information, the bins being left out, that sort of thing. It's a big group that ends up getting muted." "We're trying to tailor this down to just the things that really matter to your immediate community and then it becomes super useful," he said. ## How the Service Works Those who join the service set their address and a radius of between 0.1 and five miles to join the local community. Neighbours will launch with basic anonymised posting narrowed into categories, which must conform to a strict set of guidelines barring illegal content, discrimination, speculation and other conditions. Posts are moderated by AI and humans before and after being published, and content can be shared from Ring doorbells and other cameras. The service will also feature "Search Party for Dogs," which allows users to post an image and report of a lost dog. Neighbours with Ring cameras and a suitable cloud subscription can opt in to join the search, after which they are notified if their cameras spot a dog, prompted to verify it, and can optionally share the video with the pet owner. Amazon bought the video doorbell and home security camera maker in 2018 in a deal reportedly worth more than $1bn. ## Privacy Features Held Back for UK Launch Some of the more controversial features of the Neighbours service from the US will not be immediately available in the UK. That includes Neighbours Verified, which allows entities such as the local fire brigade to post advisory messages to local communities. The Community Requests feature, which allows police to issue calls for footage from Ring cameras in a local area in response to incidents, has drawn the most ire from privacy campaigners. It allows those with footage to share it with police on an opt-in, per-event basis, and police are not informed of those who choose not to share. Both features are being developed for release in the UK but not until later this year at the earliest. In an attempt to negate privacy fears, Ring recently announced a new default encryption mechanism for camera footage called TAKE, or throw away the key encryption. The feature provides Ring's systems time-limited keys to recordings, blocking the company and others from accessing videos after 24 hours. Any further processing or access, including by law enforcement, requires user consent to issue replacement 24-hour keys from the user's Ring app. ## Moderation Approach Sets It Apart, Says Ring Ward said the company will actively coach users on what they post, in a departure from the dynamics of ordinary neighbourhood group chats. "We are going to coach people to make sure they're creating the right sort of post, asking them if that's really something they want to write or whether it really needs that descriptive term, to help stop the type of content no one wants to see and make it more community focused. That's very different to other places [such as WhatsApp groups]," Ward said. The UK launch positions Ring squarely against the informal WhatsApp and Facebook groups that have become the default infrastructure of local community life, and against the wider market for neighbourhood safety apps. With the free tier open to users without Ring hardware, Amazon is betting that community content will pull new customers toward its subscription-backed camera ecosystem, where the privacy architecture introduced with TAKE encryption is designed to answer the criticisms that have dogged the company since the acquisition. ## What to Watch as the Rollout Progresses The 21 October launch will put the basic service in front of every UK Ring app user, with the arrival of Neighbours Verified and Community Requests later this year set to test how far British users will accept the features that proved most controversial in the US. The sequencing gives Ring a window to build moderation credibility through its AI-and-human review process and user coaching before police-facing tools arrive. The company's decision to gate those features behind later releases, and to default all camera footage to 24-hour expiring encryption keys, will be measured by privacy campaigners against the opt-in safeguards Ring has described, including the guarantee that police are never told which users declined to share footage during a Community Request.