Ring's doorbell alerts to cops are buzzing with false alarms (The Daily Charge, 7/31/2019)

Today on The Daily Charge, what is writing on the iPhone? Spotify is still the king of streaming and ringing doorbells are causing headaches. [MUSIC] Good morning and welcome to Cnet's Daily Charge. It's one Wednesday, July 31 I'm offering I'm Johnny Salzman. Let's take a look at today's headlines. Apple reported its earnings on Tuesday night tails the iPhone sales are down, but overall Apple is doing pretty bad wearables and services like the App Store. Shara, what was the biggest take away from Apple's call? I think what we're really seeing is that the Iphone is struggling, sales have been down for three straight quarters, so Apple is now really relying on things like services, webhost to kinda boost their sales and keep things going for them. The problem is the I phone is still The biggest product that they sell, this is actually the first quarter that it hasn't been over 50% of their revenues since like 2013 I believe. So they're, they're doing a good job getting into services and making more money from something like that, but it's still is kind of a struggle for them. So how much does Apple have riding on the iPhone 11 now? Yeah, it's interesting. I think people are generally expecting that the iPhone 11 is going to basically look like the iPhone X and the XS, so the design isn't really expected to change from the past couple of years. Typically when that happens, the sales are not that great. The S years, people aren't going to be lining up for Two weeks to buy this probably. It's I think it's gonna be really hard for them to come out with something really super innovative in that phone until we start to see 5G in the iPhone next year. Or the year after that. Next up moving on from Apple's earnings we had to Spotify which had its second quarter report this morning. We now know that Spotify is more than 108 million subscribers as it races against its next biggest rival Apple Music. John, you are a pretty bright and early for this call. I heard Spotify promise to fix a big problem before the end of the year. Why is that? Right? So One hundred and eighty million subscribers is by far more than Apple Music and any other streaming service. But it was less than what people had sort of been expecting. And that's because they're highly discounted super juicy student plan. They didn't actually tell anybody about it. Like you had to sort of you know students are people that don't know about a deal because. They are becoming students that qualify for this plan. Year, every year we have our new students coming in. And if we don't market it, then people don't know about it except by word of mouth. And so they fixed that problem. They're actually telling people about this plan that is a really good driver of getting subscribers. So they say that that won't be a problem The end of the year. And finally, today's main story more than 225 police departments have partnered with Amazon's ring the video doorbell that lets you record who's at your door. They have acts they have access to a special police portal that sends them crime alerts when residents post them to the neighbors app or report now finds out about two thirds of those crime alerts are not really crime. Most of the alerts sent to police or just have people walking around or have them driving in neighborhoods. In one case somebody called police on a detective at her door after the police responded to another alert she had already sent.>>So it seems like the neighbors app and ring, Causing more problems than they are solving crimes? Is that actually what's going on? That's not to say that ring doesn't solve any crimes at all. I mean, it's credited with helping solve them murder, multiple murders and like different states that they do stop. There are some porch, like package thieves like that. But that seems to be the exception to the rule where the majority of these cases are. Just have people. There's a man at my door that I don't know who it is. That could be somebody trying to steal your package that I could also just be somebody knocking on your door asking if you heard about the good word of the day. [LAUGH] Or asking for donations or asking for votes or anything like that. The point is that the majority of this posts the police are having to investigate Are not always crimes and it leads to a lot of false alarms. It's kind of like a digital ding **** ditch going on now. [LAUGH] What does Ring actually say about this? So Ring actually supports the increased police calls, they say that false alarms have always been a thing and the whole point of Ring is to be able to call police That being said, though, it doesn't really address the fact that it takes resources away from police officers that could be investigating, you know, actual credible leads as opposed to person who is scared of a car like driving around the block more than three times. [LAUGH] Thank you again for joining us. tag us online and let us know what you want to see on the show for the daily charge on alpha dang. Am Shara Tipton. Am Jerry Sofie. Thank you for listening goodbye. Very wonderful. [MUSIC]