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?