Ring cameras are basically being used as a gigantic police-partnered dragnet:
Amazon’s Ring Planned Neighborhood “Watch Lists” Built on Facial Recognition
https://theintercept.com/2019/11/26/amazon-ring-home-securit...
If this provides a disincentivize to an average user buying Ring cameras, their immature 'prank' may have unintentionally helped the nation.
I'm completely against any fully automated system where the police can have access to the camera's data.
But on the other hand, what if the system was implemented completely locally, and all with the owner's control and permission?
So your Ring app pops up and says "Hey, your local police department is looking for a suspect and your camera spotted them. Would you like to share the footage?".
So many petty crimes (e.g. home burglaries, car breakins, etc) go unsolved because the police just don't have the tools and resources to go after all those crimes. I have neighbors who've had their homes and cars broken into. It's a violating experience, and I think it's justified to want the perpetrators of those crimes caught and sentenced appropriately; at the very least to dissuade others.
Within the context of a well built, local, permissioned system, I'm not sure I'm against it.
Of course A) The likes of Amazon would never build such a system responsibly; they'd rather gobble up and abuse the data themselves. B) There are serious security concerns, as evidenced by TFA. C) Civil disobedience and similar acts are an important part of democratic society, and mass surveillance, responsible or not, threatens that. And finally, D) something which I think everyone misses when it comes to facial recognition systems ... they're still not very good. SOTA published recog systems make a mistake on 1 in 1000 faces (http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html), and that's on LFW which is fairly high quality. I'm sure FAANG does better, and SOTA will continue to improve quickly, but is that good enough for this kind of application?
So I'm torn.
And interestingly enough I've seen things just like that. The "police" at my old college would occasionally send out emails if they were looking for a suspect. The emails would always include a brief description of the alleged crime.
Perhaps they included that as a means to motivate people into reporting. I wonder if they'd have second thoughts about it if they knew some witnesses would explicitly not report anything if it was related to a crime they didn't agree with (for example, marijuana use).
As it is, it's a huge amount of effort to slice out these clips, upload them somewhere, figure out the plates involved, and then go through my police department's clunky incident reporting system. On the handful of times I've bothered to do it (like when I was almost creamed by someone running a red light), the response has been either nothing or "thanks but we just don't have time for that", or in one case an indication that they would be unable to charge the person unless I also had a face shot of who it was in the driver's seat.
Now, we can argue until we're blue in the face about whether it's right to snitch on people for these "victimless crimes", but I suspect (and commenters like Neil Arason agree) that more consistent enforcement would go a long way toward promoting safer and more respectful driving. A lot fewer people would drift through stop signs and crosswalks if they didn't think they could get away with it 99% of the time.
All that to say, if there was a portal somewhere where I could just upload my timestamped helmet cam and porch cam videos as part of a dragnet operation to identify and catch repeat violators of the rules of the road, I'd be awfully tempted to participate, despite ideological misgivings about pervasive surveillance.
They're probably just sick of the cyclist who fancies himself an amateur traffic cop and want you to go away.
When you do something that somebody else should be doing but isn't, it's common for that somebody else to response in a less than gracious way. It's not limited to police, but it's particularly common with police.
I had noted previously that these incidents were happening and that in many cases they made me feel unsafe. Various police contacts had told me that they didn't have time to be doing proactive enforcement. Submitting some reports was basically just checking to see which exact parts of the process they didn't feel they had time for— turns out it was basically all of it, unfortunately. But it was worth finding that out, I think, for the purposes of shaping other interactions with the PD, politicians, and local media.
In any case, the higher level of government takes these kinds of violations very seriously— not yielding to a pedestrian crosswalk is 4 demerits and a fine of up to $1000, so it really is up to my local PD to pick their priorities, and for whatever reason they choose not to enforce it.
What’s your standard for reporting a crime or attempted crime?
Because it's the truth. A driver receives a citation, not a vehicle. And a vehicle owner is under no legal obligation to say who was driving a given car at a given time. So based on those two facts alone, I don't see how you think the police can just drop citations in the mail based on a screenshot or a video clip.
After a few days you get a letter in the mail with the photo they took of you and information about the fine to be paid.
They're pretty controversial, but it's nothing new.
I suspect that the bigger issue might be that this type of footage supplied by citizens might not be considered verifiable (it's pretty easy to doctor videos/images these days). Video and images coming from devices that the police/government have vetted would be considered more likely to be authentic. Of course we know a bad actor (or a vendor working on commission!!) could still probably tamper with these...
Ah the old, "Guilty till you prove you're innocent by ratting out someone else".
My neighbor('s wife) got one of those red light tickets and they mailed the picture to him (as registered owner) asking him to identify the driver so they could send them a ticket. I told him to just ignore it since it obviously wasn't him in the picture and he wasn't required to do the police work to track down the driver for them.
On a side note...I was talking to a buddy about this and we were theorizing that they couldn't even compel him to give the name of the driver due to spousal privilege, dunno?
In general though, "don't talk to them" is broadly the best (and really, the only good) advice when dealing with the police.
Remember that our entire legal system was founded on the belief that you are innocent until proven guilty. Not "we think it was probably you" or "statistically it was probably you," but proven. So if my vehicle went through a red light that doesn't qualify as proof that I ran a red light. It qualifies as proof that something a computer thinks was probably my car was in an intersection at a particular moment in time. The state still has to prove I did it to ticket me (in reasonable states, anyway).
Is an in-depth investigation like that realistic over a citizen submitted video of a minor traffic violation? No, of course not.
But the other side of this is that if you had more automation in place and could see the data in aggregate, you could get a much better picture of where the problem spots are (for active enforcement or infrastructure improvements) and also potentially identify problem vehicles making the same errors day after day in the same spot (and then either go after them or put them on some kind of watch-out-for list).
There needs to be some flexibility in society that allows for human error in instances where there is literally no personal, physical, monetary, etc damage. The kind of police state where all footage is processed for any minor traffic offences is such a dangerous road (if you pardon the pun) to take because it leaves people with no margin for genuine human error.
Think of it like senior developers having a bad day and making school boy errors; or mistyping your username (something that should be muscle memory); or that guy who accidentally hits "reply to all" -- we've all made stupid mistakes. If those mistakes haven't caused harm then I don't see why need to be reported.
The less careful we are even when the mistake doesn't cause harm, the more frequently we'll make the mistake. Some feedback that made people be more careful, and pay more attention, would be good.
And at a larger level: if we can't be bothered to be that careful (or simply can't at all), and want to be allowed to not be that careful, then maybe we should make more societal changes to stop depending on humans driving 3000+lb machines. All this is great data for less driving but because it's mostly invisible, it can't be used to rebut the "but I want my own car and I want to drive it myself" folks.
> The less careful we are even when the mistake doesn't cause harm, the more frequently we'll make the mistake. Some feedback that made people be more careful, and pay more attention, would be good.
That only works if mistake are concious. My point is mistakes can be unintended like rowdy kids causing a distraction at the wrong time.
> The gap between these mistakes causing harm and not causing harm is basically just luck.
I agree. But also the gap between a good driver driving well and a good driver making an honest mistake because of a badly timed distraction is also just bad luck.
It's happened to me before -- I've ran a red light at temporary traffic lights after my 2nd child was born (so I was tired thus required sharper focus) and my 1st child was so excited about having a baby sister that he kept making a scene. For a fraction of a second I lost focus and that fraction of a second happened to be when I was approaching road works. I was lucky that it was a Sunday evening and driving along a quiet village road so there wasn't any other vehicles. But I still had ran a red light despite my best efforts of driving safely.
> And at a larger level: if we can't be bothered to be that careful...
It's not about people not making the effort to drive safely; it's about human error. If it were that easy to drive then we'd already have infallible autonomous cars but we don't because driving isn't actually all that easy. This is also why I'm fully in favour of all these new smart safety features that autonomy has introduced; they help reduce the impact of the worst instances of human error.
Just to recap: I have little sympathy for bad or negligent drivers. I just want to remind people that it's easy to demonise others but sometimes actions are genuine flukes of bad luck.
It's not as though I'm arguing anyone who runs a red light should go to jail. Heck, maybe our fines are too high, or should take income into account—I think all of those things would be healthy conversations.
But cars are deadly vehicles, and mistakes—regardless of the circumstance—should have consequences before someone gets killed. As frequently as possible.
- Oh, no one was hurt? Just a close call? Everyone go home and try to be more careful out there next time.
- Oh, you killed someone? I mean, it's a fluke— could have happened to anyone. Honestly, you've suffered enough emotional trauma already, here's a slap on the wrist to make the victim's family feel a bit better.
This is not hypothetical; it happens all the time. Here's an example from my city:
Cyclist struck and killed, Feb 2017: https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/cyclist-dies-after-being-hit-fr...
All charges dropped, March 2018: https://www.therecord.com/news-story/8354441-charges-dropped...
The library charges you a fee for returning a book late— it's a small penalty and a reminder to be more attentive in the future. Fines on the road should be treated the same way, as an additional cost you pay for the privilege of using the road, in proportion to the number of "mistakes" and "brain farts" you have.
And who knows, maybe that additional cost might motivate a few more people to choose transit or a cab instead of driving while fatigued, or pull over and wait for the kids to stop fighting in the back seat.
For example cyclists have caused serious harm and even kills pedestrians before. Also pedestrians and cyclists have caused serious accidents to motorists when causing car drivers to react suddenly, to swerve or break harshly which has resulted in those drivers colliding with other motorists.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying the level of responsibility between pedestrians, cyclists and motorists are equal; clearly they're not. But there is still some shared responsibility when talking about road safety.
It's particularly a challenge because of confirmation bias on the motorist's side. Every driver can remember times that they were frustrated or had to swerve to avoid an irresponsible person on a bicycle, but it's likely that those cases where a cyclist or pedestrian had to jump out of their way have passed from memory, if they were even noticed at all in the first place. I'm not immune to this— I have a recollection from a few years ago of driving out to a pumpkin patch with my family and passing a cyclist on the shoulder of the country highway without slowing down or given them a proper side buffer. I wouldn't have thought anything of it at the time except that my partner called me out on it, but it's perfectly possible that rider felt threatened by what happened. I suspect that most of the drivers who blow through crosswalks in front of me have no idea I was in them— in their mind, nothing registered as "wow, I almost hit someone because I didn't see them, I should down!"
My sense from having had these conversations over the years is that most drivers enjoy an enormous amount of privilege on the road and are very resistant to acknowledging the role it has in shaping their views and experiences.
And the failure of the “black lives matter” campaign should be evidence of how little general support you build by starting out needlessly dividing.
I feel like the internet is full of dispatches from a fantasy/science fiction alternate universe where people are divided into warring tribes of (SUV) drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians that are somehow mutually exclusive.
I vaguely remember a time or a place or a timeline when people would drive here and there, with a bike rack on their car, and then they would get out and walk or ride their bike somewhere. All in one day!
But I guess today everyone does only one thing their whole life. Or else they have lost the ability to imagine doing anything other than what they are currently doing, minute by minute.
Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of motorists have never experienced the road from the perspective of a bicycle seat, or last rode a bike decades ago as a child or teenager. For those who live in a garage door community, it's possible that you could even go many years with your only vulnerable pedestrian experience being the weekly dash across the Wal-Mart parking lot.
So yes, there is some tribalism to this. The people who ride bikes (some of the time) are a minority group, but I don't think we're the ones driving that mentality.
You could fall in the mud and get kicked... in the head... with an iron boot. In the Wal-Mart parking lot, naturally.
I don't think that's true at all. Indeed, feedback and fear of consequences are two things that drive people to become conscious. Both of mistakes and of the potential for mistakes.
With the best will in the world, you cannot prevent 100% of distractions 100% of the time. Young kids, for example, will always find a way to circumvent your best efforts at least some of the time.
I understand you somehow feel at the mercy of your kids, and think that should entirely excuse negligent driving. But please understand that plenty of parents feel and behave otherwise.
We don't get a choice in this— we do it because the alternative is being killed in the street, and then when people actually are hit, we get to hear smarmy commentary about how it wouldn't have happened if they'd just looked both ways, or been wearing brighter clothing, or chosen a different time of day to go out for a walk:
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/03/12/we-need-to-change-the...
But it's hard to even build a case out of this that will be accepted by people who don't have that first hand experience of being the vulnerable road user. Most places in North America, small driver errors are only barely punished if at all, and there's pretty much universally zero effort to track close calls involving people walking and cycling.
Is this commonplace in the US? In the UK most streets are safe to walk down (even some country roads which don't have pavements/sidewalks). In the UK there isn't such thing as jaywalking (etc) so it is the drivers responsibility to give way to pedestrians even when those pedestrians aren't following the highway code themselves.
No. There are certain things in your example like rolling stops and lane changes in intersections that are completely safe when there are no other vehicles or pedestrians near the intersection. The existence of the yield sign and its use prove the former.
It may well be that it's fine if you're very, very confident there "are no other vehicles or pedestrians" nearby. But what is that literally every driver says who strikes a person walking? That they "came out of nowhere". It turns out enough drivers are bad at judging these things that it makes sense to just blanket ban them.
However my cycling experience is limited to UK roads. It might be the case that roads in the US are, in general, more dangerous for cyclists -- I'm not suggesting that is true but I'd be interested to know if that was the case.
Just because you don’t kill someone every time you drift through a lane on a corner or don’t stop at a light doesn’t mean that you never will.
I also don't agree it's exclusively a matter of luck whether human error results in an accident. It's usually experience and good reactions whether you're able to recover from human error fast and safely enough to prevent an accident. Much like how cyclists have to learn to read the road and pedestrians have to learn how to safely cross busy roads, motorists should learn how to handle shitty situations. Please remember that sometimes those situations happen for reasons outside of the motorists control such as jaywalkers, animals in the road, other motorists making mistakes or even cyclists not following the rules of the road. This absolutely means motorists have a significant responsibility to drive safely but also means that it's not just a matter of luck whether someone forgetting to indicate results in fatality; that's simply not the reality of things.
I agree there is a possibility but it's not even common likelihood (for the reasons I described above). I also agree (as I've also said above) that drivers do have a significantly greater responsibility to drive safely and I'm absolutely in favour of penalising people who have caused accidents....however penalising everyone for every minor mishap doesn't help improve road safety. It effectively just becomes another road tax. If you want to penalise bad drivers then go after bad drivers; but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
I don't have a principled argument why someone else shouldn't regard all riders the same way. It's arbitrary where you draw the line between risks that are reasonable to take because you feel like it and risks that aren't.
As an example: Jay walking across an empty street. It's great in many places and times, but others it's a hindrance and just so we frequently break it. But when I was in high school I remember at the end of the month cops would cite kids crossing a not so busy street with a fair walk to the crosswalk. Who cares? Such a thing isn't important and doesn't make us safer. We don't even correct our behavior when caught doing those things because we don't even recognize them as wrong.
So yeah, I agree. We need to be flexible as a society. No one likes sticklers or narcs.
He's reporting people that almost hit him. They're driving a 2 ton piece of metal. You can instantly change someones life with their recklessness. They absolutely deserve a ticket at the very least.
There's a girl down the street from me that got plowed by a car in a crosswalk as she was going to school. She's 11. She's basically a vegetable at this point. I honestly don't know why her parents didn't take her off life support when they had the chance. She got hit by a 20 year old who was texting and driving. She sent ten texts in the minutes before hitting the girl. If she'd been reported by someone earlier for texting and driving and had her license suspended, she wouldn't have destroyed a family that day.
If you can't concentrate due to screaming kids at the back of a car then you need to pull over until they stop. You have no right to endanger other people's lives just to get somewhere a bit faster.
The point about kids is just an illustration of a distraction you might not be able to control and which might be timed badly. It could also be a dog in the car which barks at the wrong moment or countless other things.
It's also a little optimistic to assume that it's as easy as "pulling over until they stop" in the cases where kids are generally being loud. There are as many examples of why that might not be practical as there are occasions when it's good advice. From experience I can tell you that no parent wants to drive while kids are screaming in the back and will readily pull over if that's likely to help. Sometimes though, it's not safe to do so or pulling over wouldn't make any difference to their behaviour (eg when they're hungry and there is no food in the car). But no decent person would ever want to put their family nor other pedestrians at risk so I can assure you it's really not the case of drivers endangering other people's lives out of a selfish desire just to get somewhere a bit faster.
You must be kidding, I live in a major city and see around 10 of these every single day. Peak hour seems to be a lot worse.
And that's the problem with proposals like these - everyone is in favor of them until they realize that they might be on the receiving end as well. If you support a position like this, make sure you support it for everyone, not just the people you don't like.
For all the other things, like rolling through stop signs, i think we should be changing the laws to allow bicyclists to yield instead of stop rather than using them as a gotcha.
I think it’s comical because here’s the laws broken by cyclists every day- running stop signs, right turn on red without stopping, turning without signalling, running red lights, using phone, using headphones.
I typically don’t care because bikes aren’t very dangerous to cars. But I think it’s comical that a cyclist thinks they citizen reported traffic citations is a meaningful use of anyone’s time.
Some people think that being a hall monitor might be fun. I suspect it’s not fun at all, because the value created is negative. The time to capture, prepare and enforce is a net loss to society.
> running stop signs, right turn on red without stopping, turning without signalling, running red lights
It's important to understand a few things:
a) A person on a bike is 1000x more vulnerable than a person in a car, and will definitely lose (physically, legally) if they misjudge the situation and end up getting struck.
b) A person on a bike has way better situational awareness than a person in a car— they have a higher vantage point, and a very wide field of view. They're extremely well equipped to judge distances and speeds and to catch things in their peripheral vision.
c) A person on a bike often faces obstacles you wouldn't be familiar with as a driver. For example, a red light that can only be changed by triggering the in-pavement car sensor or riding up on the sidewalk to push the beg button.
I have such a light on my commute, and I feel that it's safe for me to look both ways and proceed when it's clear (treating the red light as a stop sign). You may disagree on this choice and call me a scofflaw cyclist, but at the end of the day I'm still basically just endangering myself. When drivers whip around a RTOR with their head hanging out the window looking at the traffic they're trying to merge with, they're endangering anyone who might step out to cross the road.
All that said, if my local PD committed to broad and consistent enforcement of minor traffic violations, I would absolutely get on board and either commit to riding/walking up on the sidewalk to use the beg button or choosing a route that avoids that intersection. But as it is, they don't have any interest in enforcing any of it, so I think it's reasonable and non-hypocritical for me to make a choice that slightly improves my commute and endangers only me to a degree that I am comfortable with.
It’s hard for me to understand the situation of all other drivers. So I’m not going out of my way to judge them when I have incomplete information. If a driver is doing something reckless or dangerous I will try to prevent it by alerting authorities.
I’m more in favor of eliminating minor traffic offenses and having police work on important issues. Or even free a community up to not have as many police and perhaps have more teachers or other civil servants.
Bicyclists should not get special rules. If you're on wheels, you obey the laws for vehicles. I say this as someone who cycles frequently - the cyclist "special privilege" mindset needs to stop.
On a bicycle, I can see and hear much better, ride slower and generally stop faster. I can change directions and swerve to avoid obstacles (faster than braking), scoot to the side and generally require much less space. I can jump off a bicycle and move it away (vs. cars getting in gridlock, blocking ambulances..).
Even if I get into a traffic accident, the consequences the consequences to others are likely to be much smaller (though fatalities do remain as an unlikely possibility).
Hm. What's your stance on mandatory visible license plates for all bicycles on the street so people with dash cams can clip video and report bicyclists who improperly use lanes or who blow through stop or yield signs? Or who cycle without helmets in places where they're required?
And the people who propose such schemes are usually not doing so in good faith. It's not because they actually want to make cyclists safer, they're typically just making a "gotcha" argument that attempts to equate irresponsible cycling and irresponsible driving in terms of the danger that each poses.
[1]: https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking-tra...
In any case, this isn't the world we live in, so it's all hypothetical at this point. In the short-to-medium term, the overwhelming danger on the road is from motorists.
I hate seeing all those idiotic cyclists doing dumb stuff giving cyclists a bad name and giving drivers an excuse to be even more aggro and aggressive.
What do you mean, despite ideological misgivings about pervasive surveillance?
You're literally saying you would upload your private videos as part of a dragnet operation, so it doesn't really sound like you have any ideological misgivings about pervasive surveillance.
Cars are generally respectful towards bikes in the Netherlands, but if some dude were to try this, don't expect too much sympathy ... from anyone, including the police apparently.
The penalties for these crimes are already extremely severe.
So I fall on the side of, I'd rather change the system proximally to help those who resort to this sort of petty crime for cash so they don't need it, rather than making it easier for cops to put these people back into a system which enslaves and disenfranchises them for generations (leading to more crime), and in so doing gives them an excuse to monitor literally anyone else in your neighborhood without a warrant for any reason.
EDIT: Yeah I don't call the cops. Go ahead and downvote I guess, or feel free to try another hypothetical you came up with in your head for this discussion.
The question of moral culpability might be relevant when discussing legal punishments, rehabilitation, social welfare, etc. but it really isn’t relevant to what basic measures one can take to protect their home. To use an extreme example, someone could be forced under duress to break into your home. They clearly wouldn’t be morally culpable, but that simply isn’t relevant. You still lock your doors.
It wasn't a particularly bad part of town, but the entrance to the parking area wasn't in a high traffic area and there was some green space nearby making it pretty easy for people to sneak into the parking area.
He eventually just stopped leaving anything at all in his car, rolling down the windows, and leaving it unlocked. As soon as he did that, the thieves would simply move onto the next vehicle without damaging his. Once most people started leaving their windows rolled down, the thieves stopped visiting to move onto more rewarding victims...
So sometimes the solution is to not lock your car doors. :(
I find it hard to believe that mild penalties are more effective deterent than high penalties and high enforcement.
That said, the punishment should still fit the crime
From a 2015 study[1]: "Three-strikes laws were associated with a 33% increase in the risk of fatal assaults on LEOs."
A traffic-related anecdote: the geograplically-isolated suburb I live in had a metric fuckton of speed traps about twenty years ago - like, an absurd quantity. You had cops staking out basically everywhere and giving massive tickets for the slightest infractions. Did this actually make people stop speeding? No way. It got enough people pissed enough that the entire municipal government was voted out on a program of ending the absurd overenforcement of traffic laws.
Now, it also didn't help that there was a widespread perception that the city government was using this to line its coffers, but I think the major takeaway is that citizens will only put up with so much if infractions that nobody really sees as serious are consistently, harshly punished. Eventually, you're going to get a backlash.
Of course, this calculus would probably be different if what was being punished wasn't crimes largely committed by a politically active upper middle class, but I think the example is instructive for many cases.
I guess prohibition also kinda falls into this category, so I should refine my original statement to "in cases of high enforcement/high penalties where most people don't see the big deal, those regimes will not last long via an accelerative mechanism."
In the 1990s, it was a regular pastime of my friend group.
But yeah, I'm totally for addressing the underlying societal causes of crime (the reasons otherwise decent people are driven by desperation to commit them), rather than just addressing the "symptoms"... enforcement and punishment is reactive and IMO does little to actually deter further/future crime.
Unfortunately after those one or two fake sections were caught everyone assumed everything was fake, and the internet took up that gossip like wild fire, tainting the whole video. Bit of a shame, and apparently that lie persists.
Thing is, I'm not sure they all do it out of desperation. One incidence in the neighborhood was most certainly an addict, for which I agree with your point in helping them. But a more salient example is a group of professional thieves that stole a local plumber's truck and tools.
If you're down on your luck and for whatever reason have to resort to looting houses and cars, I can see your point. But if someone has made it their _job_ to steal my neighbor's livelihood? My sympathy runs out.
Consider that once you invite the cops into your neighborhood though, they operate on their own biases, regardless of whether or not they think it's worth it to track down whoever stole the stereo out of your sedan. Car prowl is only the pretense for them to show up, and once they do their presence will be detrimental for the "addict" population. So you're maybe not punishing who you think you are.
The penalty is harsh but chances to get caught are somewhat low.
Exactly, so why not help people make better choices by letting them know that they're much more likely to be caught?
Also, to put things in perspective, grand theft-type crimes were historically (and currently, in some fundamentalist regimes) punished by hanging, amputation of ears or hands, or flogging. The punishments today are tender loving care by comparison.
Tell me, how were they desperate?
They left sunglasses and other valuables in the car, but trashed the inside. They left camping gear in my garage, but stole a sentimental machete and some other random odds and ends that weren't monetarily valuable at all.
If they stole all my camping gear, I wouldn't be as mad as them defacing my property.
It wasn't about petty cash. It was about shitting all over someone else's property. Literally, a friend had their car broken into, and they took a big dump on their hood. Didn't even steal anything.
Fuck people.
Have you considered that when penalties seem extremely severe, it's possibly because the percentage of perpetrators that are caught and punished is very low?
The goal here is to make video surveillance data equally accessible to police as to the general public for e.g. court defense, police brutality proof, insurance claims etc.
in any case, that seems to be a good delineation. one further issue to consider is the capture of spaces/property other than your own. cameras should be pointed at your property only, and not used to generally surveil public spaces (legal but icky) or other private property (legally murky).
I'm pretty sure this is it: https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/9/17953050/ring-ceo-jamie-s...
This doesn't sound ok at all. I won't delve into a thousand reasons why I don't like the idea, but let's just start with that answering "no" to that question can be easily treated as the obstruction of justice. So, to cut it short, if I'm not volunteering to lend my video feed to local police department by installing some additional plug-in that would download people faces from their DB and scanning the street for them, it shouldn't even attempt to by default.
It isn't even obstruction of justice if they explicitly ask you something and you refuse to respond: https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-when-encounter...
So I don't see how not responding to a question they didn't ask could be illegal.
If they come to your house and Willy nilly ask you for your cameras data because they believe that it spotted a crime then you can say no for sure, but then they’ll just come back with a court order to force compliance since there’s good reason to at least inspect the camera footage and I can tell you from experience I don’t know any judge that wouldnt sign a subpoena for that.
But to address what you actually said, I believe the vast majority of these requests that police are making from Ring users don't have a warrant/subpoena.
> The partnerships let police request the video recorded by homeowners’ cameras within a specific time and area, helping officers see footage from the company’s millions of Internet-connected cameras installed nationwide, the company said. Officers don’t receive ongoing or live-video access, and homeowners can decline the requests
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/28/doorbel...
I’m sure there is some TOS that states Ring will hand over any video and since the program is public knowledge, therefor If the individual still decides to willingly install it, IMO that’s on them. when are we going to start holding the user accountable?
fpgaminer was talking about something where facial recognition is done locally, giving the camera owner the option to contact the police. The cops would not even know you had a camera unless you told them (or unless they saw it).
You seem to be imagining all sorts of other things, including a warrant. Which, yes, if you ignore it is obstruction. But I don't think that was part of what fpgaminer was describing.
But in cases where the government has metadata, logs, or other verifiable info about what is on the account, media, etc., recent precedent has established that they can hold you without charges for any amount of time, in the cases of some individuals, several years, in order to attempt to compel you to give up your password.
This is enough information for the police to get a warrant or subpoena for your footage. Ring's business model involves integration with law enforcement, and as long as you keep them in the loop, that means the existence of your video evidence will be passed on to police. With that knowledge, law enforcement doesn't need your permission to get access to your videos, they just need to get a warrant or subpoena for them.
1) Why do you need a camera facing outside from your door to deter or help solve burglaries? Burglars generally steal things inside houses (assuming we're not talking about porch pirates, which is a separate issue). A ring-style camera pointed at your neighbors constantly isn't needed - put a camera inside your home if you're concerned about burglars.
2) If you start using ring-style cameras en masse to solve crimes, the criminals are just going to adapt to the expectation that there's a front door camera and commit crimes in ways that circumvent that single point (ex. go in the back door or side window, wear a mask, use a fake license plate, etc. I don't really see this solving any underlying problems - it's more of a temporary solution that escalates the surveillance state model to another level via an arms race.
> Why do you need a camera facing outside from your door to deter or help solve burglaries? Burglars generally steal things inside houses
If the police tells you they're looking for a suspect and that if you could help by supplying some of your footage of the outside, I think it's probably not burglars trying to steal from you. They could be any kind of suspect that the police at least have good reason to believe passed through the front of your home. Maybe they committed a crime at a neighbor's home. Maybe they're driving from far away, and the police heard that they might have passed through your street.
> If you start using ring-style cameras en masse to solve crimes, the criminals are just going to adapt to the expectation that there's a front door camera and commit crimes in ways that circumvent that single point
They'd also need to circumvent the points of maybe a few other homes nearby that cover the whole of the house the criminal is trying to get into.
It's important to note that in an actual courtroom or investigation setting, having blurry footage of a person across the street really isn't very helpful unless you're going full-on dragnet and intend to track their every movement over a period of hours. Foiling any investigation involving rings is pretty trivial otherwise - wear a mask and nondescript clothing and the video footage is pretty much useless.
In a round about way, the argument ends up concluding that we are, in fact, on some version of a slippery slope. We can see that slope quite clearly in what you write:
"So many petty crimes (e.g. home burglaries, car breakins, etc) go unsolved because the police just don't have the tools and resources to go after all those crimes."
Even just ten years ago, a number of the ideas being batted around now about privacy would have seemed alien. I understand that attitudes can change, but do we have the right attitudes now? Are they good attitudes? The attitude that sees nothing wrong with seriously contemplating whether it's a net good to have the police sitting in a tiny camera outside your front door? Go back a couple decades and we would have been appalled at the notion.
Sometimes I surprise myself with how much ground I've given up already (even if just on a personal level).
If the police themselves are corrupt and abuse their power, that's a problem, but it's a separate problem that not every country faces. If I was an American, I'd want to have proper accountability for the police first. They should be held to a higher standard than ordinary people, not a lower standard, like it seems they are.
Also, I think the chance of the police (as a group) not being corrupt is about the same as politicians (as a group) not being corrupt - essentially zero. The incentives just aren't there for there to be no corruption in law enforcement. And even if there's no corruption in law enforcement and your government is great, you still have to remember that police officers generally aren't the cream of the crop of society. They make mistakes and there usually isn't much recourse.
Yes it would be absolutely super if apps asked permission before sending your private data to a third party.
But we all know that because presumably there exist sufficient software engineers that do not consider the ramifications of their work (like AT ALL), this just isn't the way commercial software is going currently.
Isn't that sort of like saying humans are basically used as a gigantic police-partnered dragnet...seeing as our entire criminal system is primarily driven by eye witnesses of crimes?
Only what we know is eye-witnesses often have conflicting testimony, some will refuse to assist police officers (out of concern for their own safety or they just don't give a shit), and others outright lie.
For example, a UFC fighter's step-daughter was recently kidnapped and murdered (abducted right from a gas station)...video would later assist identify the suspect and lead to arrest, but also identify eye witnesses to the abduction (who never came forward because they "didn't want to get involved") but after the video identified the witnesses, their testimony ended up being important.
Reported. Not prevented.
The companies that make money off of law enforcement have conditioned people to believe cameras=prevention and camera=safety, which is false.
I mean, I have a couple of Nest cameras at home. They're useful, but even relatively recently Google forced an update that disabled some features. And despite the hardware being totally capable of it, there's no way for me to connect to it and get a video stream. I have to rely on a shitfest of an app and fork over money for any usable history. At that point… is it really "your" camera?
I've had similar frustrations with them, though. The Ring doorbell is so slow to respond that it borders on uselessness for certain tasks. I really wish that I could just monitor an RTSP feed from it. I'm thinking that it will be replaced with one that is able to do that eventually.
For that reason, it's essentially a police camera. The police can ask nicely for the video footage, and if you don't cooperate, they can easily get a warrant to obtain the potential evidence from Ring.
Or they could get the warrant to obtain the video directly from you....they just have 1 more option when a 3rd party vendor is involved that has a copy.
It doesn't matter if it is Ring or CCTV, so I'm not sure the practical difference that you would classify 1 as a police camera and the other not, no matter what if your camera captures a crime the police will likely be able to get a warrant for it whether you have to turn it over or Ring does. I think most people would rather a vendor like ring have to deal with warrants on their behalf.
They'd need knowledge that your cameras even exist. Ring provides an easy to use map of their surveillance network.
They are privately owned cameras, but feel free to expand on what makes these cameras different in your opinion.
So that brings us full circle to police are able to get footage from your CCTVs without your permission too by applying for a warrant directly to the court.
Because they have written Law Enforcement Guidelines that are pretty clear and otherwise as a lawyer I know they don't just turn over customer data and information without a written order (and even then, they may object and fight it in court).
Why do you believe they are just turning over consumer data/info/video without any court order (besides, police are customers and Amazon wants to keep customers happy)?
Some cities have enough police cameras that they certainly are police cameras watching the gas station.
The last time I checked, Chicago PD was bragging at having over 30,000 cameras. And that was a number of years ago.
Do you have a source for this? In my yearlong experience on a Federal Grand Jury, the vast majority of evidence we deliberated on was "hard". By that I mean video evidence, financial transactions, text messages, emails, cell phones tower pings for location, etc. Eye witness testimony helps solidify a case, but you typically need some form of "hard" evidence to even indict someone.
Even in your example, the video is what identified the suspect and lead to arrest not eye witnesses.
Yes, you are right, the majority of criminal convictions at trial are based on physical evidence (of course 9 out of 10 cased do not go to trial). But none of that evidence comes in without a witness that can introduce it.
So perhaps not an eyewitness to the crime itself, but a mandatory witness to introduce the "hard evidence". So for example take any DUI, before any video of the suspect or breathalyzer evidence can be introduced the officer needs to testify to the facts of the initial stop, then a witness needs to introduce the breathalyzer (make, model, has is been calibrated regularly, is/was the officer properly trained, did the test results get handled through the proper chain of custody, etc...).
>Even in your example, the video is what identified the suspect and lead to arrest not eye witnesses.
A video can't be introduced without a witness (now they don't need an eyewitness to the events depicted on camera, the store manager/records custodian will generally get the video in, but a good defense attorney might get it thrown out, so the eyewitness to the abduction becomes the key evidence in the case itself).
This is why "red-light cameras" failed constitutionality tests in many cases, because many jurisdictions tried to introduce the video without a witness...which violates the defendant's right to cross examine.
Or take the OJ case...all the physical evidence in the world from bodied, to murder weapon, to bloody glove...and no conviction.
Nobody cares about physical access to essentially disposable cameras. The stored footage is the whole game.
Ring lets police know that potential video evidence exists, and with that knowledge, they can then get a warrant to obtain the potential evidence from Ring if you choose not to share it.
Most people purchase Ring cameras for the cloud integration aspect, anyway.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/police-can-get-y...
It seems unlikely that a thief needs to see a published list of camera locations to find my house, unless for some reason he's looking specifically for houses that are protected by Ring cameras. My ring doorbell cam is readily visible from the street, so there's no secrets about placement.
I don't think most Ring cameras are meant to be hidden though, since it's primarily sold as a doorbell.
Now you just keep filming and have a never forgotten record of who lives in the neighbourhood. And if Facebook runs it though its face recognition system they get names, friends and other preferences. That completely changes the nature of CCTV recordings.
The law just hasn't caught up with it, also because of prolific lobbying by the usual bigdata actors.
There is no reason that our rights should be limited to what was found necessary to protect in the past. There must be a new category of expectation of transience, that Jeff Bezos and the FBI won't keep a permanent record of your every waking moment.
Don't you think that changes the nature of things, even if technically legal?
But as surveillance increases, so does stealth. You’d have to include that in your model.
Police can request that you share the footage you have, or police can get a warrant and obtain the footage directly from Ring.
The difference between a camera whose footage you control and Ring is that Ring provides a nice interface to let police know that potential video evidence that you captured exists. A camera system that you rolled out yourself doesn't send a message to law enforcement agencies each time your cameras potentially capture evidence.
The knowledge that video evidence exists makes it infinitely easier to get a warrant for it from a judge.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/police-can-get-y...
Thanks for the link.
> UPDATE 5:55pm ET: After we published our story, a representative from Ring responded to our request for comment to deny all allegations in the Government Technology report.
> "The reports that police can obtain any video from a Ring doorbell within 60 days is false," a spokesperson said. "Ring will not release customer information in response to government demands without a valid and binding legal demand properly served on us. Ring objects to overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course. We are working with the Fresno County Sheriff's Office to ensure this is understood."
Ring's own statement reflects what the OP stated: that Ring will turn over evidence when given a subpoena.
Ring also released a contradictory claim to what the police said Ring made available to them. Either the police are lying about a process they seem to know well and have used many times before, or Ring is lying in their statement to Ars.
Furthermore: Clearly, the Fresno police department person who spoke may not have understood the requirements for access or may not be aware of what prior actions (such as a subpoena) precipitated a release of video.
FTA:"The NulledCast is a podcast livestreamed to Discord. It's a show in which hackers take over people's Ring and Nest smarthome cameras and use their speakers to talk to and harass their unsuspecting owners."
They get hacked because of poor password choices.
You are fighting against a changing tide and the benefits of the cameras vastly outweigh the privacy concerns.
In the 90s monitored home security was a HUGE business. Thousands for an install and thousands more per year to have someone sit around and watch for unusual activity and report it to the police. ADT and Brinks are all that’s really left, but I remember dozens of companies competing in this space growing up.
Now you can get the same essential service, better in many ways, for $99 and a small monthly fee.