Jamie Siminoff, the CEO of Amazon subsidiary Ring, is stepping down from the function later this month, the corporate introduced Wednesday.
Siminoff will take the function of chief inventor on March 22, and Elizabeth Hamren will succeed him as CEO. Hamren most just lately served as COO of the chat app Discord, and has held government roles at Microsoft‘s Xbox division and Meta’s Oculus digital actuality unit.
In addition to Ring, Hamren can even oversee Amazon Key, the corporate’s in-home supply service; shared community service Amazon Sidewalk; in addition to Blink, one other maker of house safety cameras that Amazon acquired in 2017.
“Invention is my true passion. I am constantly looking at how we can adapt to deliver for our neighbors, which is what we’ve always called our customers,” Siminoff wrote in a weblog publish. “This is why I decided to shift my role to Chief Inventor and bring on a new CEO.”
The transfer comes 5 years after Amazon acquired Ring for a reported $1 billion in 2018. The deal has helped Amazon develop its presence within the good house and residential safety classes.
At the identical time, press studies have raised scrutiny over Ring’s safety protocols and the expertise’s threats to shopper privateness.
In 2020, Ring stated it fired 4 workers for peeping into buyer video feeds after studies from The Intercept and The Information discovered that Ring staffers in Ukraine got unfettered entry to movies from Ring cameras all over the world.
The firm strengthened its safety measures after a sequence of incidents whereby hackers gained entry to quite a lot of customers’ cameras. In one case, hackers had been in a position to watch and talk with an 8-year outdated woman. Ring blamed the difficulty on customers reusing their passwords.
Ring has additionally drawn criticism from privateness and civil liberties advocates over a controversial partnership with 1000’s of police departments throughout the nation. The program permits police and hearth departments to request video footage recorded by Ring cameras.
Privacy advocates have expressed concern that this system, and Ring’s accompanying Neighbors app, have heightened the chance of racial profiling and turned residents into informants, whereas giving police entry to footage with out a warrant and with few guardrails round how they’ll use the fabric.
Ring in 2021 started requiring police to make requests for movies or info public within the Neighbors app.
WATCH: Amazon’s good house dominance and the way it might develop with iRobot acquisition
Source: www.cnbc.com