> But if you keep reading, you realize that it's calling for Ring to block the owners from streaming to law enforcement with their own PC.
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.