Police in Mississippi to Pilot a Program to Live-Stream Amazon Ring Cameras
foundation.mozilla.org
foundation.mozilla.org
> "[Amazon and Ring] are not involved in any way with any of the companies or the city in connection with the pilot program. The companies, the police and the city that were discussed in the article do not have access to Ring’s systems or the Neighbors App. Ring customers have control and ownership of their devices and videos, and can choose to allow access as they wish."
Seems like a weird take to me. Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? And is it legal for you to live-stream it? Those are rights you'll need to trample on to do something about this Ring/police thing.
I think there’s a pretty big distinction between a single home or even many choosing to livestream and a company providing the means for police departments to setup centralized mass-surveillance.
Much of that may be racist in nature to keep minorities out of neighborhoods, but much of it is also people trying to keep their amazon deliveries from being stolen.
It's not hard to see that far into the future where police departments offer an app that will tell you who is at the front door before you open it -- and something like that will probably triple the sales of home security cameras.
This does not have to be a natural progression. That’s only true if we collectively decide we’re better off having centralized government surveillance.
Following any incident the police could do their jobs and respect the constitution by actually talking to people and requesting they assist rather than implementing mass-surveillance to avoid doing work.
> Lumumba said the city would only be able to access the devices when crimes occur in those areas.
Only be able to access it when a crime occurs how? They’ll get a warrant or an officer says a crime occurred and asks for access?
Look at your local PD's crime map and you will discover that this is a recipe for perpetual mass surveillance. Good luck keeping this footage from the NSA and FBI. I'm counting down the days to the first person who'll be busted and their Ring will be the first hostile "witness"
People don't understand this (clearly). Most of us just choose not to record others because we don't give a shit about you, or have any sort of vested interest in you.
The article says this is just owners allowing access to the company that manages it for the police. How can Ring stop that?
Sounds like Mozilla is for user freedom with their purchased hardware only when users behave as Mozilla wants them to.
The Foundation is and always has been focused on the greater mission of privacy and freedom on the web.
You need access to an account but that's exactly what we are discussing here.
Your argument is kinda like saying if you prevent someone from hitting someone else your are against fredome because that person should be free to hit anyone they want to hit. Just that's a more subtle topic then hitting someone.
I want the freedom to walk down my driveway and check my mail without being automatically recorded. That's the type of freedom being stepped on, here.
Okay, let's do that:
> [paraphrasing] We've published an app that will live-stream your phone's camera to the police, you should use it.
...yeah, that actually seems worse to me.
> Lumumba said the city would only be able to access the devices when crimes occur in those areas.
Further, they haven't provided any details on how they will effectively control access, the area a crime would allow access to, how long the cameras could be accessed, or how they would handle false reports. Saying they won't abuse it isn't enough.
There is a difference in incentives and scale between those two circumstances, however.
I know that the normal Ring user doesn't have the ability to store all the video being streamed, and isn't incentivised to care about random people walking by their house. Most people are selfish, they care about recording interactions with their property, not every innocuous event.
The same is not true for a government body. They have incentives and capability to store everything, for an unreasonable timeframe. They have reason to not just care who might approach the house, but to track every single passerby.
This sort of mass collection of information generally requires a warrant, for good reason. This kind of project is designed to skirt the law without violating it, to further increase the power differential between the police, and those they claim to be protecting by these measures.
> Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? And is it legal for you to live-stream it? Those are rights you'll need to trample on to do something about this Ring/police thing.
It's already been establish that it's legal for the normal civilian to do that. Public square stuff. However, the police are on the receiving end, in this case. They've found a little loophole that may or may not be quite legal, and are intent on exploiting it.
Ring are assisting them in this.
You don't need to trample on public square laws to end this. You just need to require police to get a warrant, even for publicly available information, because it should be acknowledged that _what_ they can do with that information is vastly different than what you or I could.
Don't sue the cops, sue the people shooting the video and indiscriminately distributing it.
For a little background, I built a system to share video exactly like this around 1995 in a very popular restaurant I worked at. I also interned at a local ISP, so I had unlimited dial-up and FTP/WWW space for free, so I set up the accounting laptop in the back office with a Snappy video capture device that would take a crappy still image every 10 minutes from the security cams, dial into the ISP on one of the 3 telephone lines, and FTP the image so it would show on the restaurant homepage to let people know how busy it was. It was very common to get shoulder to shoulder crowded, so I figured people would like to know in advance and wait 20 minutes to make everyone's lives easier. This was like 320x200 resolution on crappy multiplexed security cameras. You couldn't make out faces. I contacted the local media to let them know that the website was going to launch soon. There were other features for other local businesses to create their own pages, sort of like geocities or myspace. They called me back and said they never do website announcements, but the live video stream was very interesting to them. We did an interview, and they sent me the article they were going to run after I launched, it painted the still image service as "1984 is here", and you would give up your privacy if you went to the restaurant. They must have told other people, because by the end of the week I had lawyers contacting me and threatening me with lawsuits if I launched. The website launched without the live image.
No one cares anymore. All of the people the media were trying to scare are the same people uploading their entire lives to for-profit corporations like facebook and instagram, and they're doing it in full HD with their names attached.
So, I completely see how cool this technology is, and some good that can be done with it, but anyone involved is setting themselves up for trouble.
Most people don't understand the significance of what they're forking over. I wish someone would do a documentary where some creep follows you around all day writing down where you go, who you look at, what you buy, what you say, read, etc. and connect the dots for people about how today's major web properties are doing exactly that.
It's like how nobody really cares if some guy they can't see in a back room at the airport can see through your clothes but if they were instructed to strip naked it would never fly.
Once upon a time it was bad manners to even take a picture of someone without asking. I hate it when people indiscriminately point their damn cameraphones at me.
/end old fogey rant here.
/start old fogey revolution here
Well, someone I am tangentially acquainted with got drunk a while back and fired a gun into some houses.
Turns out shooting into a house is a separate crime regardless of whether you hit anyone, which I am fine with.
Is the physical world going post-privacy? There's a future where every public space is live-streamed, 24/7 on the internet.
What I'd really like to see is ubiquitous cameras everywhere, live streaming online with free (or nominal fee) access for everyone.
What if it offers a view of the house across the street? Or into their window?
Also, it's one thing to have a camera record 24/7 so footage can be reviewed later. It's very different to add motion detection and face recognition to ubiquitous live streams that include views of other peoples property.
Edit.
I stand corrected. This cannot be used by police at all. A police officer would have to be present at the time of the video and not reliant upon that video for observation of the criminal act. If the officer requires use of the video then that video would require a warrant prior to its viewing by law enforcement.
More likely, they'd figure out some kind of parallel construction.
In some countries, yes. It is illegal to point a camera at a public place without alerting people that there is a camera there.
Here in Sweden our version of the FCC (I gues, PTS) have actually written permission to apartment owners that they're allowed to have peep hole cameras in their doors. For example a lot of senior citizens have this so they don't have to get up to see who's at the door.
So that was an exception they had to make because otherwise you're not allowed to point a camera at a public place willy nilly.
In the US, anyway[0], yes it is. You do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy when you're on a street, sidewalk, or yard (whether it's your yard or not).
[0] Every state is different; this is to say there is no national law prohibiting it (I'm not sure the federal government has jurisdiction for this kind of thing), and to my knowledge no state has a law explicitly prohibiting having a personally owned camera facing a public area like this.
I am so frustrated with the continued alarmist reporting from the EFF around Ring cameras. Can't we get information without all the fear mongering? Look at the title of this article and look at the comments. People don't read the content-- they just read the title.
The body cameras worn by police officers record a lot more than would be legally allowed to share to the public.
That's the key difference. In the US, public places aren't generally afforded any privacy protections and thus video can be recorded and shared. Police go many places that aren't public, so a significant portion of body cam footage is likely illegal to share.
Of course in this particular case (Ring live streaming) there's a question about whether it's legal or acceptable for police to engage in such practices on a wide scale. An end user doing something once simply isn't the same as a large government agency doing it many times over.
Please no :(
But humans are humans, and the urge to control other humans trumps all culture.
It's a system by which bystanders are footing the bill themselves to add nodes to surveillance networks that may be used in an authoritarian function with little permission from the node owner in the unforeseeable future.
Not live streamed to police. Warrant required for location data last I checked.
> computers
Don't generally share anything other than analytics data. Might upload content to one or more clouds with user permission. Data certainly not easily available to police without a warrant.
> commercial CTV
Again, not live streamed to police. Access often requested (and typically granted) in person during the course of an investigation.
> commercial data
And again, not live streamed to police. Warrant typically required.
Commerical data is definately being provided to police and other government agencies without warrants.
I never claimed they were.
> Commerical data is definately being provided to police and other government agencies without warrants.
Obviously that claim is true because someone somewhere has almost certainly done so at some point. However, it is a misrepresentation of the overall situation. The vast majority of large tech companies have public policies clearly stating that they require a warrant or subpoena in order to hand over data. Moreover, court records would appear to indicate that this really is the case.
Many of your comments on this article contain non sequiturs and false equivalencies. Honestly, you don't appear to be engaging in this discussion in good faith.
And either way, something being legal does not stop it from being a big problem.
Have you actually ever visited China? The US incarcerates, bombs and has more murders (^apart from a few 3rd world hellholes) per capita than anywhere else. What type of government do you call that? "Glorious Democracy"?
This hyperbole helps no one and this forum deserves better. 1 in 5 people on Earth live there, ascribing all the bad things to that many people is disingenuous at best and malicious jingoism at worst.
Similarly, it seems a democratic hellhole would still be democratic.
Not quite everywhere else... unless you are adding # of bombs + number of prisoners + number of murders... not sure that is a meaningful number though :)
The other keep eroding rights slowly while people fail to notice just how much power they're amassing.
It's just that the people without this urge wind up living in BFE or the ghetto (because why would you pay big bucks to live in a suburb if not for the conformism/homogeneity) and the net result is most of the people living in high class suburbs where there's a Ring on every other door have this urge.
As-if we're not paying for it anyway through our taxes?
> ensure active resident participation in the process
Seems like this requires participation of the residents? The existing Amazon/Ring partnership sure does, and, I don't see how (with Amazon/Ring not being directly involved) this could work without the resident agreeing to share the footage?
> This is not a drill. Red alert:
Ugh, this kind of hyperbole doesn't help anything.
Police officers record a lot of people in a lot of very bad situations. Those people have a right to their privacy. They didn't give it up just by virtue of them encountering a police officer that was recording them with their body camera. Especially not just because a police officer entered their home and was wearing a body cam recording everything they saw. The courts decide what bodycam footage gets made public.
(For bonus points, the drone could paint blood on the top and sides of doorframes of every house without a live-streaming ring camera, so the destroyer will not enter those houses...)
Like I said, if you're _not_ live-streaming your Ring footage, I'll blood your door so the destroyer passes over you. Even if you have a Ring camera.
All feeds, from their door bell, from their self driving car, possibly their smart speakers, and any other place where machine vision provides a service to an individual. The reward will confuse people on what's good and bad for the whole community.
> Same, watching my neighbor on Ring TV.
> What's Joe doing today?
> Watching someone watch Ring TV on Ring TV
> Lol same
Ring is an Amazon product. Ring videos stream to AWS s3 servers. Video is processed through AI and used in an unlimited number of ways for Amazon's purposes and not just policing. We're going to wind up paying Amazon through taxes for an unnecessary neighborhood surveillance platform that it gets to monetize in countless ways. Politicians, whose greatest contributor to re-election campaigns will be an anonymous source affiliated with a lobbying outfit contracted by Amazon, will insist that the program is valuable but never substantiate the claims with much else than anecdotal evidence. Society functions well enough today without these services and it costs us far less than it will tomorrow. Don't forget that.
Mozilla Foundation is ringing the alarm bells about public surveillance when it should be alarming us about paying more taxes. We'll be paying taxes for unnecessary technology services. The programs will involve long-term contracts, too, so forget about voting in a new mayor to change things.