Ring, the Amazon subsidiary of camera-enabled doorbells fame, wants to be an even bigger part of your neighbourhood. Next month in the UK, it will be launching Neighbours, a community app that seeks to replace the now traditional neighbourhood Facebook or WhatsApp group. It will be available inside the Ring app, free to everybody, including people without Ring products, and will include a community requests feature wherein the police can ask for footage from residents living near reported crimes, who can then choose whether or not to share it.

My first thought was that this is curtain-twitching culture gone mad. If you must have a Ring doorbell (and my instinctive feeling as someone without one, a feeling I will no doubt have until I get one and decide it’s great, is that it’s narc-coded behaviour) then: OK. But does Amazon need to be in charge of a digital village messageboard too?

The selling point, Ring thinks, is that posting will be anonymised, and posters will have to conform to strict guidelines on what they are allowed to post. It would, in other words, be very unlike the lawless badlands of a neighbourhood WhatsApp.

Maybe people really did want these groups replaced by something more centrally managed. I asked around people I knew about the WhatsApp communities that they were in, and the kinds of behaviour they had witnessed. Some of it, naturally, demonstrated an ugly dislike of homeless people, fear and loathing of door-to-door salespeople, racial profiling of local youths, and the view that everyone not personally known to the residents was a criminal........

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