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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

This headline leaves out an important detail from the article:

> Officers don’t receive ongoing or live-video access, and homeowners can decline the requests, which Ring sends via email

It's not as if the police are pulling a Batman and watching every ring simultaneously, but instead they can do the digital equivalent of going door-to-door and asking "Hey, did you catch footage of your neighbors house being broken into last night?"

Frankly, I actually trust a bunch of random citizens to have video footage more than I trust any company or government organization.

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With previous generations of home security systems, the recordings were stored in an on-premises hard drive. Ring doesn't give you that option, all video is stored on their cloud, "for the customer's convenience" of course.

The result of that is the random citizens won't have much leverage to say no, because the police can likely figure out a way to get the video from Ring directly.

> because the police can likely figure out a way to get the video from Ring directly

That's quite the legal or technical assumption.

There was an article just a few days ago about the CEO of a genetic testing company handing over information to the FBI.

It doesn't seem a reach at all for the FBI or state or local police to ask for or subpoena stored footage.

Search warrants are 100% routine and Amazon must comply with hundreds? of them daily.

The same is true if you don’t run your own local email server and use gmail.

> Ring said it would not provide user video footage in response to a subpoena, but would comply if company officials were presented with a search warrant or felt they had a legal obligation to produce the content. [Emphasis mine]

That's them basically saying, "Even if turns out we could have fought that request in court and won, we still don't want to get sued, so we want the benefit of the doubt for complying with any and all requests".

That's an unfortunate bit of general lack of company accountability to users instead of shareholders, and until we establish stronger digital rights for consumers, won't change, whether it's your ring footage or Grandma's chili recipe in google drive.

In what jurisdiction is a subpoena not a legal obligation?

> It's not as if the police are pulling a Batman and watching every ring simultaneously

I have serious doubts this can't happen with a keystroke if deemed necessary to protect citizens from imminent danger or terrorism. It's cynical but we also thought there was no chance the government was spying on all Americans telecommunications either.

I mean, yeah, probably, but on the scale that organizations like the NSA operate on, making deals with smaller IoT manufacturers like Ring is pretty inefficient. They’d probably rather just use that keystroke to pull the video straight out of whatever cloud object storage Ring relies on, in a way that’s generic to many IoT video-capture devices by many manufacturers, such that their software can pull all those assets in at once.

Smaller iot manufacturers like... Amazon

It's not really random citizens that have the footage though, it's Google. I don't want to slippery slope too far, but we've been shown time and time again that data in private hands is essentially also in government hands. You only have to look back at whisleblowers/leaks in the past decade to see that this is true. Worse yet, with techniques like parallel construction, it could be many, many years until you know the truth.

Isn't Ring owned by Amazon, not Google?

Yes.

Didn't have my coffee yet. Yes, Amazon. Doesn't really change my point.

I agree, and would add on that anytime data is centralized under control of any one actor – public or private – this is would be the case.

> This headline leaves out an important detail from the article:

No it doesn't, headlines aren't required to include every detail in the article. That's what the article as a whole is for. Pedantic objections to headlines are not useful or conducive to discussion, since they suggest an element of bad faith in the reporting that isn't present and bias discussion with the untoward accusation.

I doubt the resident get to learn what the request is for. So that footage might incriminate the resident, a family member,betc. Awks.

Also, how might a corrupt officer abuse this system?

How might criminals exploit this system?

How might Ring stuff up, and provide unauthorised access?

How might a secret court demand Ring provide access?

> and homeowners can decline the requests

And is it opt-in or opt-out?

Edit: actually, this is by request as stated in the article

A̶ ̶s̶y̶s̶t̶e̶m̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶o̶l̶i̶c̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶s̶k̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶m̶e̶r̶a̶ ̶o̶w̶n̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶c̶c̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶p̶e̶c̶i̶f̶i̶c̶ ̶t̶i̶m̶e̶ ̶r̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶t̶r̶u̶s̶t̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶n̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶g̶i̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶m̶a̶n̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶a̶c̶c̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶m̶e̶r̶a̶ ̶f̶o̶o̶t̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶l̶i̶m̶i̶t̶s̶.̶

I would also not trust a system recording videos of my life and sending them on remote server that I have not access to.

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