Ring’s new ‘Neighborly Moments’ feature lets you give a shout-out to a neighbor’s act of kindness

Ring, the embattled maker of such popular smart security cams as the Ring Video Doorbell and the Ring Alarm, is looking to inject a little good news into the endless parade of stolen packages and “suspicious activity” reports in its controversial neighborhood watch app.

Ring just announced a new “Neighborly Moments” category in the Neighbors app that lets you—for once—highlight a good thing that happened on your street.

Among the examples served up by Amazon-owned Ring include videos of people shoveling each others driveways, neighbors moving the delivered packages of absent homeowners and apartment dwellers to more secure locations, and passersby cleaning up trash on the sidewalk.

Ring says it hopes the new Neighborly Moments category, which is already live in the Neighbors app, will “make it even easier for you to share these good deeds and celebrate the kindness of those good Samaritans with your community.”

The Neighborly Moments category adds a warm and fuzzy element to an app that’s drawn plenty of controversy in the past several months.

Privacy advocates have decried Ring’s partnerships with hundreds of local police departments, which can monitor the Neighbors feed and request recorded videos from Ring users.

The Neighbors app has also come under fire for giving users a false sense of rising crime even as national crime rates have dropped in recent years.

Ring recently rolled out a new Control Center dashboard that, among other things, is designed to highlight whether your local law enforcement agencies are participating in the Neighborhoods program, along with an option to opt-out from police requests for videos from your Ring cameras.