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Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

#4 is a no-go in my book.

Things like Ring, Nextdoor, and Facebook already exist. Nextdoor and Facebook are riddled with inanity, from political rants to dumb jokes to hoaxes to common scams to law enforcement rants.

I don't want more information from my neighbors -- 99% of it is garbage. I want highly-filtered information. Basically, a neighborhood watch but with an aggressive spam filter. Right now I glance at the various neighborhood feeds with one eye closed, sifting through the intense stupidity, trying to capture valuable intelligence.

Of course, all of this may be a dumb corporate-run idea and maybe people should really focus on forming good relationships with their neighbors in meatspace and talk to them in person aka HUMINT.

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The "SaaS-ification" of security cameras should also worry us. Ring — not its customers — controls the videos taken with their cameras, creating a video surveillance network that the police can access without needing a warrant. They've partnered with 400 police forces to give them access to that data [1]. Although they claim to let customers deny police requests for footage, their terms of service allow them to hand video over to police if they deem the request "reasonable".

And it's not just Ring customers that are affected, it's anyone in the general vicinity. If your house is in the field of view of a neighbor's Ring camera, you're being surveilled too.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/28/doorbel...

> Although they claim to let customers deny police requests for footage, their terms of service allow them to hand video over to police if they deem the request "reasonable".

Defining what is a "reasonable government request" is a valid question, but it's really just not that high of a bar to get a records subpoena/search warrant for video like this. Courts sign off on those routinely, so I don't think you can really expect Ring or any company that holds your records to deny police requests for very long.

The system they have seems pretty balanced. The police look at the ring website to see who has cameras (they could figure that out by walking the neighborhood), they ask for the footage (instead of knocking on the door), they get turned down (or not), they get a warrant, the footage is released. Ring is reducing the overhead of asking somewhat, but they're not enabling mass surveillance or building AI systems that track suspicious people across multiple ring devices.

Is there something I'm missing here? If you record video of your front yard, and the police want to see it, they have a right to, subject to the normal judicial review.

> Ring is reducing the overhead of asking somewhat, but they're not enabling mass surveillance or building AI systems that track suspicious people across multiple ring devices.

Are you sure?

How can we as citizens verify it?

> Are you sure?

I'm not. Do I think it's likely that they are? No.

> How can we as citizens verify it?

The same way we verify that Google isn't producing broad-scale AI systems looking for specific subsets of people across the GMail data. Investigative reporting, whistle-blowers, regulation/lawmaking, and looking closely at the evidence presented when the government acts. This is why parallel construction is pernicious, as it prevents meaningful oversight of government malfeasance.

End-to-end encryption, and user ownership/encryption of data is also great, but it's not widely available, and many use cases don't work when the service provider can't see the data they're storing. Even when the data is encrypted, you can get a lot of valuable intelligence from metadata.

So, in other words, citizens can't verify anything. Instead, all we can do is hope that any abuse will eventually be noticed and reported by some random whistleblower somewhere.

That's hardly sufficient, and especially not with a company like Amazon.

Although I find your answer upsetting, I also find it reasonable. +1.

> Ring is reducing the overhead of asking somewhat, but they're not enabling mass surveillance or building AI systems that track suspicious people across multiple ring devices.

It really looks to me like this is exactly what they're building.

> Is there something I'm missing here? If you record video of your front yard, and the police want to see it, they have a right to, subject to the normal judicial review.

The issue is that Ring's terms specifically allow them to circumvent "normal judicial review" if the request is "reasonable". From the same WaPo article:

> Ring users consent to the company giving recorded video to “law enforcement authorities, government officials and/or third parties” if the company believes it's necessary to comply with “legal process or reasonable government request,” its terms of service state.

I'm fine with the police having access to video after obtaining a warrant or subpoena, even if it's not a particularly high bar to clear. But that should still be the bar. We shouldn't expect Ring to refuse police requests even after being served, but we should expect them to hold out until that point — and unfortunately, we can't trust them to do that.

> Is there something I'm missing here?

Yes. If Ring had even the barest shred of ethics, they would client-side encrypt the videos stored in their cloud. It would use no extra space. The user would have to explicitly approve the decryption and sharing of videos.

But they don't, because being able to access and datamine those videos is a huge money-maker for them.

Ring is terrible, but their engineers willing to implement this corporate surveillance state? They're the worst. They wield their software skills as a mercenary would a weapon against innocents. I seriously cannot even comprehend how they sleep at night and look at themselves in the mirror in the morning.

At least folks over at Apple are sane and are making sure that HomeKit surveillance videos are client-side encrypted.

And then the second someone lost their phone, their camera becomes worthless and they can't view their videos.

The average user can't be trusted to manage client-side encryption keys reliably.

No? You can derive a key from a password.

My ring is basically useless for surveillance, at night especially. It can't see across the street and barely gets beyond my front stoop. This is even with the lights on and a street light nearby. Likewise for my Arlos, useless at night. During the day they are a bit better but the resolution isn't anything special and it'd be impossible to catch a license plate. Make, model and color but that's about it.

In the UK, you can't lawfully film another persons dwelling, in that you would break the law by having any of a neighbours property in view.

No, this is wrong. There is no law that explicitly prohibits filming the public realm (e.g. the pavement) or incidentally capturing your neighbour's property.

There is a code of practice: the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice (SCCoP). There are also requirements to follow under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA).

The consequences of not following the SCCoP, the GDPR, and the DPA may result in regulatory action being taken against you by the Information Commissioner's Office as well as private legal action by the affected individuals, but it is not per se against the law to film those areas.

Things like Ring are really worrying because it's Amazon. Fear is the motivator in security camera sales. With Ring you've got a parent company whose CEO owns a national news organization(Washington Post) and a large media company(Amazon). Amazon is so aggressively pursuing being in every part of your life that the fear motivator is going to be really easy to manipulate.

Here's is a great long-form article on some of the societal implications of living in the age of Ring and NextDoor. It touches on this point throughout the article: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/steal...

Yeah, that sounds horrible... if it is anything like Nextdoor, there will be three posts a day about "There was a black guy sitting in his car!"

He was sitting there...menacingly!

Nah, you are thinking way to short-term.

The AI will flag the black person himself as often associated with complaints and posts tagged "danger". Thus barring him from job interviews and loans by other automated services (Uber, but for HR!) who bought the data set "to elevate user experience".

Creeping right back to apartheid, but I would say entirely worth it if it means I can get a notification that my cappuccino creamer was stolen 5 minutes ago by an unidentifiable person! /s

I cancelled my Nextdoor account in part because I got tired of all the paranoia and inevitable devolvement into political bickering, but also in part as a protest against Nextdoor that they need to police this kind of activity. It was only afterwards that I realized that Nextdoor wants this activity. Like Facebook, they see it as encouraging engagement thus traffic they can use to sell ads.

It confirms to me that cancelling was the right move for me but it also saddens me that we've gotten ourselves into a state in technology where the business model is to get people riled up and then profit from that discord.

NextDoor is great because I can learn who is and isn't racist in my South Carolina suburban neighborhood.

> Of course, all of this may be a dumb corporate-run idea and maybe people should really focus on forming good relationships with their neighbors in meatspace and talk to them in person aka HUMINT.

But then how do we filter out the political rants, insanity, dumb jokes, hoaxes, and common scams?

Thankfully, people usually do a decent job of filtering themselves in meatspace. At least, they are better at it in person than they are online.

There are also social cues and the lack of an ever present mob. A lot of people who are political activists online are not actually that confident in their views and absent the audience and ready defenders, won't express their views because they know they can't back it up in a one-on-one conversation.

Our city did a traffic survey of a local street that is the primary route for everyone going from surrounding neighborhoods to downtown and found the average speed was ~2 mph over the posted limit, with the 85th percentile at ~5 mph over the speed limit. These are reasonable speed for such a wide road. The city then added several 'safety' features to it, and found in a subsequent survey that the changes actually did little to slow traffic. One feature is a pair of speed bumps. Some drivers slow to about 5 mph to go over the bumps, increasing the risk of rear end accidents. Other drivers veer into the bike lanes to go partially around them without slowing down. Everyone else slows down a reasonable amount, but then subsequently accelerate back up to the speed limit on a block where jaywalking is common. Some of the features they added are, in my opinion, beneficial, like turning a side street into a one way road after frequent accidents from people turning left out of it.

But you can't talk about it on Nextdoor. The second you criticize the speed bumps you'll be ignored (if you're lucky) or attacked. Nuance is not allowed. You're either for all the changes, even the dangerous ones, or you're a crazy speed demon. Meanwhile, if you post about 'the children' who you are afraid for (even though no one has any evidence of a child ever being hurt by a driver on this road), you're going to get upvoted a lot within the first ten minutes.

Heh, a road to my parents’ used to be riddled with potholes and uneven sewer grates (Canadian winters + drainage issues probably).

The city spent months ripping it up and paving it nice and smooth.

Then a couple months later they put up speed bumps.

We spent a lot of money to get back to the speeds people already drove.

People on the next street over (it's a grid) are on Nextdoor complaining about all the traffic coming down their street now. And I'm sure it's the worst of the traffic that's going over there to avoid the features. I'm not sure how the city will fob off spending money on that street after spending the money on this one.

I once lived on a street that was incredibly badly maintained. The city informed the residents that they would be repaving the street and the residents campaigned hard for the city not to do that, for precisely the reasons you're talking about here.

Their campaign was successful, in no small measure because a poll of the residents showed 95% of them opposed the repaving, and that the local paper wrote a big story about the whole affair.

I hate how pervasive this degenerate thinking is in local politics. "we don't want a nice thing because then people would use it."

That's not the thinking at all, though. The thinking is that the road being in rough shape means that everyone is forced to drive at a sane speed through a residential street where children are frequently playing.

In other words, the "nice thing" isn't actually so nice in terms of the things that the people on that street really care about.

> focus on forming good relationships with their neighbors in meatspace

Remember that garbage you mentioned. We don't want to deal with other people's garbage in meatspace any more than we do online.

Many people self-censor to a much greater degree in person interactions vs what they post publicly online.

No man's an island. What some post online is nothing but free-wheeling, disconnected from feedback.

Everyone wants good editing and content as product feature. You can pay...

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