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Comment by srameshc | Hacker News Reader

> Police Department signed an agreement with Amazon's home surveillance equipment company, Ring, in 2019 to gain special access to the company's Neighbors app

this is the most scary part.

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1984

While the programmes could no longer be seen or heard, the screen still functioned as a surveillance device, as after Winston is taken into the Ministry of Love, the audio of his meeting with O'Brien with the telescreen "off" is played back to Winston.

You may be thinking of a different chapter, but O'Brien's apartment wasn't in the Ministry, it was in a different "quarter of the town where they lived" where "the whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro—everything was intimidating".

We really need these things to be Closed Circuit by law. Want the data? Get a warrant and seize the device physically. Centralized databases of surveillance information needs to be outlawed criminally.

Isn't the whole reason people buy those is because they back up to the cloud and they can view the feed from anywhere? CC security cameras are nothing new

You can buy closed circuit cameras for the past 40 years. People buy Ring to avoid the in-home infrastructure.

Hence, by law.

A legal mandate avoids the race-to-the-bottom trend.

What race to the bottom? It’s a choice. People like having choices.

When "choice" effectively limits societal options or generates massive externalities and/or long-term unpredictable impacts, all parties upon whom the "choice" impacts are not given voice, or choice.

Often commonweal is a better guiding light than "choice".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom

Sophie Zawistowska was offered a choice. Did her utility benefit by it?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=DZ9bht5H2p4

It's the user's choice to use a cloud-hosted security system. They can weigh the trade-offs and risks for themselves, same as with any other system.

Whether that data is accessible by law enforcement is a completely separate issue. A proper solution would be limiting this access and requiring consent and transparency, not removing infrastructure options because you think you know better than everyone else about what's best for them.

The issue, by virtue of legally allowed warrantless access, is inextricably conjoined, and the impacts of that choice accrue to not only the decisionmaker, but to countless others. Your premises are false.

Your proposed (and grossly insufficient) remedy is one form of legal mandate.

I'd strongly commend Shoshana Zuboff, Hanna Arendt, and Paul Baran, amongst numerous others:

"On the Engineer's Responsibility in Protecting Privacy", Paul Baran, 1968:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3829.html

Another view was expressed by AI pioneer and Nobel Laureate (economics) Herbert Simon:

"The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valueable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing."

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7d...

There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by IBM. Edwin Black documents this meticulously in his book IBM and the Holocaust:

https://ibmandtheholocaust.com

That's a wildly unreasonable stretch and limiting freedom for the claim of security leads to far worse results.

Infrastructure and third-party vendors need to be managed against risk. This is no different than using Gmail vs your own hosted email box. Same with a million other services. Are you claiming that they should all be shutdown now?

Legal issues need to be fixed by legal solutions, not by disallowing the service from existing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

It would go against this and lots of legal precedent supporting it, so definitely an uphill battle.

Warrants are extremely easy to get, basically rubber stamped. It's so bad that LE will put in things they know are outright unconstitutional, knowing the magistrate won't really read it or care about citizen's rights.

Even an extremely easy to get warrant takes both time and effort, by multiple people, to get. It's incomparable to an automatic feed to all the Ring cameras in a neighbourhood.

It's the difference between surveillance and mass surveillance. The latter is the bigger problem and warrants will solve it.

>Even an extremely easy to get warrant takes both time and effort,

And most importantly a paper trail that can be picked apart in court.

The most scary part about it is that people willingly buy and install that stuff in their homes.

Gives any rational human being the shivers.

Is it clear what this "special access" is? After touring the landing page of Amazon's Neighbors app it's not clear to me how this affects privacy. It could be as benign as a message board moderator position. Don't mistake me for saying that this is okay, I think this is dystopic, but I fear it will be hard to convince people with a Ring device that this is dangerous.

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