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Comment by sansnomme | Hacker News Reader

Well if you care about it so much, contribute either money or code and create ecosystem with the same level of layman UX. It's difficult to get legislation when you cannot demonstrate alternatives that do not severely reduce convenience. This is a forum of overpaid software engineers. Distributed neural network training isn't science fiction anymore. Go ship or pay others to do so.

Brave and DuckDuckGo built entire businesses on the premise of privacy. Many an arrogant reader here HN have no qualms claiming that they can replicate Facebook in a weekend.

Go forth and walk the talk. Yet another Mastodon client is cool, but do you know what's cooler? A production quality OCR competitive with Google Cloud Vision API, voice transcription on par with AWS Transcribe, or personal assistants with the ubiquity of Siri.

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Rather than working to devise "voice transcription on par with AWS", maybe we can also decide that some things are not necessary and should remain in the scifi realm. The novelty of yelling "Ok google navigate to...." wore off fairly quickly especially when I could just as easily type it. I use the "set an alarm for.." more often though. But really, imagine all the infrastructure required just so people can set alarms and timers with their voices!!!

I care about it enough to contact my local representative (my MP because I'm in the UK) and he agrees with me that there should be explicit legislation to control the use of these technologies. The EU's GPDR is a step in that direction when it comes to things like automated decision-making. Open source is not a solution here, and to suggest otherwise seems like it misses the wood for the trees. Besides which, I hardly think that restricting the use of cameras on doorbells (which is what this sub-thread is about) is "severely reducing convenience."

Don't want a camera on your doorbell? Don't install one. I would like to have the freedom to decide differently.

Do I have the freedom not to be filmed by your doorbell and have it sent to the police without even your permission to be processed and stored for however long they want and possibly used against me at a later date for something that isn't even a crime now?

Sure. Just stay off my porch.

And don’t walk by my house? For that matter, don’t bother visiting me?

If you're walking by my house, you're in public, and you have no expectation of privacy. (Actually, that's not true -- my house isn't visible from the street, so if you're on my cameras, you're definitely on my property.)

If you're visiting me, you're on my property, ditto.

Any attempts to "fix" this will only make the world worse in the end. The people you empower to enforce your opinions about privacy in (semi-)public places will begin by exempting themselves from whatever well-intentioned rules you have in mind.

s/my porch/the public roadway that my camera is recording 24x7/

(Shrug) If Google can film public areas, then so can I.

See, that's kind of the whole idea behind public areas. You aren't entitled to any expectation of privacy there. That's why they're called public areas, and not private areas.

The distinction is remarkably easy to comprehend.

I have zero objections to you recording your porch or driveway or whatever 24/7. Just don’t send it to amazon or google where they face match me and use their clever algorithms to extract money out of me at a store or something. Keep the video to yourself.

I hear you, certainly. I have cameras on my front porch, but you don't need to worry about the footage ending up in the hands of the police unless you actually commit a crime against me or my neighbors. And you don't need to worry about it being sent to Amazon in any event, because that's not going to happen, ever.

But I don't know how to give you the guarantees you're asking for without harming my rights, and ultimately yours.

Wait are we agreeing haha. I thought this whole thing was about ring and nest cameras that are mined by big corps.

The distinction between could could and should? Or the distinction between private and public? Because all are debated on a regular basis, vary by jurisdiction/country, and are not black and white. Take the issues surrounding filming police officers in public is an example.

Take the issues surrounding filming police officers in public is an example.

Right, and that's a good example of what I was talking about in my earlier reply, with regard to any attempt at "fixing" the Ring situation leaving us in a worse place than where we are now.

Currently, in the US, you have the right to put up a doorbell camera and record anything that happens on your property or in public areas adjacent to it. This is a GOOD thing. Rest assured, any restrictions on public/private recording will serve the police, and no one else.

The problem is that this is not your data alone. These devices are cloud hosted and subject to subpoena (at best). Indeed any restrictions on these recordings will serve the police.

Recorded phone calls without consent in some states is still inadmissible as evidence in court. Surely at least that law would protect the person in the other end of the lens.

Those laws are just further examples where the powerful have shielded themselves at our expense. Corrupt cops and public officials have more to hide than you and I do, so they have more to fear from being recorded.

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