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Comment by hannasanarion | Hacker News Reader

A police camera watching a gas station is not the same as a police camera watching your front door.

This is a tech community, and I like tech metaphors - it’s like old CCTVs were inside the firewall and these new services our outside the firewall. In the old model, sharing your data (videos) was opt in each time. You could be sure that only you had access to the data unless you chose to share it. In the new model, you are always sharing, and these hacks show you don’t really even know who you are sharing with.

No, but my camera watching what happens outside of my house is also not the same as a police camera. I didn't have such a camera at my old house, but if I did, there were several happenings that would have been reported to police.

I think the general issue though is that devices like this exist in kind of a grey area of ownership. Yeah, it's "your" camera or "my" camera, but in reality they're wholly dependent on services provided by Amazon or Google or whatever other large data collator. And while there are pretty obvious reasons for that to be the case, it also opens up a rather large dragnet-style video surveillance system that looks juicy as heck to certain groups, and we have to rely on "large company not known for amazing defence of privacy" to prevent this.

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 still think it is my camera, even if I chose a camera that is dependent upon third party services.

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.

Ring lets law enforcement know that potential video evidence exists, and with that knowledge, they can go to a judge and get a warrant for it. Law enforcement can do this without ever letting the user who recorded the video know.

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.

>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.

> Or they could get the warrant to obtain the video directly from you....

They'd need knowledge that your cameras even exist. Ring provides an easy to use map of their surveillance network.

They don't need a warrant necessarily, just a subpoena. And with Ring, you never would get a chance to challenge it, because you're not the recipient.

there were several happenings that would have been reported to police.

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.

These were vehicle related incidents. The important thing would be to get better descriptions of the vehicle to (hopefully) help with a later financial claim. Prevention is really a secondary goal.

True, but camera=deterrent?

Certainly not a ring doorbell camera. Mine is so slow to respond to motion it won't capture a pic unless you walk up to it and stand in one spot for a few seconds. 99% of my motion events are just an empty street. You can fast walk up to a ring doorbell camera and knock it off the wall, or just cover it with a piece of tape, before it has a chance to capture a picture. I would bet this is true of most consumer level "security" cameras.

This is funny because it's true. The wired "pro" version works a lot better (it does reliably capture video from just before the motion was detected until the end of the event), but you can still just knock the camera off the wall since it takes a couple minutes to upload the footage to the mothership (even with a solid wifi connection and 1 gig symmetric fiber connection beyond that)

Oddly enough, they used to be faster. I have a Gen-1 ring, and for the first two years I had it, it would dutifully record folks walking up the path to my front door. Nowadays, unless it's the UPS guy waiting for a signature, it's 30 seconds of empty street, just like you said. It's enough of a change to genuinely decrease the utility of the camera.

They are not the same, and the latter does not happen with Ring cameras. Read all the articles more carefully. The issue is with the app and cloud stored footage, both of which are optional.

"Optional" features that literally everybody is going to get because what is the point of a security camera if you can't record or view remotely.

I don't know about the indoor cameras, but the ring doorbell can send a notification live to your phone with live video, without saving it on the server. I would imagine this is the same case for indoor cameras.

Neither cameras watching gas stations nor cameras watching your front door are "police cameras".

They are privately owned cameras, but feel free to expand on what makes these cameras different in your opinion.

Police can get footage from Nest cameras, indoor and outdoor, without owner permission by applying directly to Amazon, and users can't opt out of Amazon's "Rekognition" tool that is always on and alerts police when a face on their wanted list is recognized on a camera.

That tool had better not have a false positive rate that can be measured or Jeff Bezos will have some blood on his hands. The response to a 'wanted' criminal being spotted can easily cause that wanted person to end up dead and if it turns out to be the wrong person afterwards that would be more than just a little bit problematic.

>Police can get footage from Nest cameras, indoor and outdoor, without owner permission by applying directly to Amazon

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.

Applying for a warrant through a legal process is absolutely not the same as requesting data from a tech company (especially because Amazon has incentive to cooperate with police in order to continue to sell these cameras)

Amazon is going to require a subpoena/warrant to turn over video...I'm not sure why you think their cooperation with police is required in order to continue selling cameras.

Why do you think that their cooperation must be required before they will cooperate? Police are major Amazon customers as well, what's to keep them from handing over data to preserve their good-will?

>Why do you think that their cooperation must be required before they will cooperate?

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)?

You have your own CCTV tapes, and you know when they are being seized because the warrant is delivered to you, not the manufacturer of your camera.

They aren't going to get a warrant if they don't know your CCTV system exists, whereas Ring provides law enforcement with a map of their surveillance network. You won't know when your Ring footage is seized by law enforcement, but you'd sure know if you were served a warrant.

Neither cameras watching gas stations nor cameras watching your front door are "police cameras".

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.

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