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Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

I am a self-hosted partisan, so I obviously avoid Ring. But this article feels disingenuous in implying that there is something uniquely nefarious about Ring here, aside from perhaps the relative ease by which the authorities are able to request video. The police also can and do ask those who run self-hosted surveillance systems for video of events; I know because I've been asked before for video from mine.

So, yes, it's very easy to request video from Ring users. But they still do need to ask. The only way I am going to be genuinely upset about this is if they are able to get video without asking the individual owners.

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Owners have to op into "Neighborhood Watch" for their neighborhoods but they are opting into package thieves, not protest monitoring. And it's all or nothing, not a per video request.

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

By tapping into “a perceived need for more self-surveillance and by playing on consumer fears about crime and security,” he added, Ring has found “a clever workaround for the development of a wholly new surveillance network, without the kind of scrutiny that would happen if it was coming from the police or government.”

So the request here is that Amazon makes it more possible to be more specific about what use you allow for the cameras and give users flexibility to not be all-or-nothing.

Seems reasonable.

When someone says, "perceived" I usually receive that as, "someone thinks they need this but they don't"

Just some hasty research:

https://www.crresearch.com/blog/2019-package-theft-statistic...

https://www.security.org/resources/stolen-packages-survey/

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/01/10/package-theft-how-amazon...

> With one single package potentially containing hundreds of dollars worth of goods, package thieves, or “porch pirates,” see an Amazon box as a ripe opportunity to steal. More than one-third (36%) have been a victim of package theft. Of those, 44% have had a package stolen at least twice. Most package theft victims (83%) said they contacted the seller or Amazon immediately after finding out their package had been stolen, while only 13% called the police right away. Overall, very few (11%) said the porch pirate was caught, but thankfully, 73% of package theft victims said they eventually received a refund.

This seems to substantiate that package theft is at the very least a common problem for the people they polled. Whether Ring engineered a national surveillance network on purpose sounds like something that needs to be proven. Just talking about outcomes without examining what (legitimate) problem they're trying to solve does not help inform the public.

The way I end up reading the situation is that some people want to aid the police to find package thieves but they don't want to aid police in finding people suspected of crimes during protests.

Personally, I'll take this debate a step further: I don't think it should be legal to film anyone without their consent because that practice will always be abused by bad actors. Whether you're antagonizing people by recording them in public or you're surveiling a protest. My idea would be to craft laws saying you can't capture any video for anything off of your property. You could also encourage users to relocate their cameras to positions that only capture the front door vicinity.

Probably started that way, because it's a real problem. But then some enterprising DA understood the potential, and some BizDev ppl heard that lovely Kah Ching ringing in their ears. The rest is history.

That's certainly a possible explanation based on speculation and you'd probably have fanfare on a technology forum for warning against it. The problem is that nobody has determined that has happened (unless I'm missing something) and it was asserted as fact anyway.

Not only that, in Seattle - Amazon's home city - package theft is seen as a significant problem. So, I would imagine that deterring package theft is a real concern and a real quality of life issue for many Amazon ICs.

I would argue a key root solution here is to for police to prioritize addressing property crime, rather than for private citizens to attempt to address the civic policing concerns on their own - which is what these cameras are doing, at their core.

Or, don’t “deliver” a package by just leaving it out in the open on the person’s property somewhere. It’s always seemed bizarre to me that this counts as delivery in the USA. We should normalize bigger and more secure mailboxes or require an actual person to be available to receive a package.

Indeed, in Europe it is normal that people be home to receive the package. There are alternatives, but leaving it in front of the door is not one of them.

What about people without doormen or stay-at-home spouses? If you're single and go to work daily, having to be home is the biggest headache pre-pandemic.

So, bigger, more secure mailboxes, then.

What we do in Japan. They don't deliver, you call the delivery service to reorganise delivery at a convenient time for you

In order to avoid a 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 chance of a package being stolen, I don't want to have to have an extra interaction for every delivery.

Leave it on the porch; if one gets stolen every few years, that's still wildly more convenient than rescheduling most deliveries.

I had 2700 dollars of computer equipment stolen from my porch (behind a gate). I used the camera footage to get the police to write a report that NewEgg needed to refund me.

Depends on your neighborhood. Some neighborhoods have a 1 in 2 chance. The footage showed that the culprit tailed the USPS delivery person on foot and waited about 15 minutes.

At my old job, I used to get stuff delivered to my office. It was a big office building and we had a logistics department with a loading bay out the back. A lot of other people at my office used to do the same thing. Until work announced that they were getting sick of handling personal deliveries, and from now on only work-related deliveries would be allowed. (I think they didn't mind in the beginning handling the occasional personal delivery, but then it escalated in volume to the point that they had to put a stop to it.)

Nowadays (even pre-pandemic) I work from home full-time so there is usually someone here. But actually I used to get stuff delivered to the office even when my wife was at home full-time. There is always the chance she would go out, whereas there was someone down in logistics 8am-6pm.

Are there any Amazon lockers in your area? I usually drop by the University which has a staffed Amazon store since it's a distribution center and packages get there a day early usually. There's a series of lockers at a near by 7-11.

> I don't think it should be legal to film anyone without their consent ... My idea would be to craft laws saying you can't capture any video for anything off of your property.

Derek Chauvin would appreciate that.

Police bodycams would probably be the exception there (I imagine there's others, even simple laws are never as simple as what I wrote.)

That said, the tone of your comment is entirely unconstructive.

If the only people who can legally film cops are cops, that's going to have some pretty serious knock-on effects.

The video relevant to Chauvin was recorded by a bystander.

Yeap, I definitely understood the argument, and it's quite valid. What I took issue with was the dismissive tone that it takes rather than adding to or building onto the discourse.

I think the point it adds to the discourse, regardless of tone, is that your suggestion of outlawaing public recordings is very much at odds with the past twenty years or more of experience, where we've seen that public recordings of the misdeeds of those in power are often the only way that such abuses are recognized as happening. Outlawing the things that make that possible is one of the easiest ways to make sure that such behavior never gets punished, as evidenced by how many times we've seen that police "forget" to turn their body cameras on, or "lose" the footage.

> I don't think it should be legal to film anyone without their consent because that practice will always be abused by bad actors.

If a technology is developed allowing me to extract video from my hippocampus, will you require me to walk around my life with my eyes closed?

> The way I end up reading the situation is that some people want to aid the police to find package thieves but they don't want to aid police in finding people suspected of crimes during protests.

Well that depends highly on what's considered a crime in a protest, who determines that, and whether or not the person in question agrees with the protest.

I have no problem at all catching porch pirates. I have big, big ethical concerns with surveillance footage being used to track public organizers who haven't committed any crimes.

I think these sticky situations are always going to be a problem as long as the Police insist on operating in opposition to the people they claim to want to protect. Police do not feel like they are part of my community, they feel like an upper class of citizen who are permitted to, well, police the community by any means necessary up to and including violence, with basically no oversight.

That's not someone to look to for help. That's someone to fear.

> My idea would be to craft laws saying you can't capture any video for anything off of your property

Which would mean no more dashcams. Dashcams are very useful in assigning blame in accidents and helping to determine their causes (not only in cases of human negligence, but even accidents due to mechanical failures/design flaws/etc)

And dashcams do pick up pedestrians on the sidewalk, etc.

No more Google Streetview either, which a lot of people (myself included) find very useful – it lets me familiarise myself with how a place looks before I visit it

If I take my children to the park to play, would I be allowed to take a video of their play to send to my wife? What if a stranger is visible in the distance in the background of the video?

It would do nothing about the immense quantity of CCTV footage of privately owned public places such as shopping malls. And it might even encourage moving public property into private ownership – if the local government aren't allowed to perform CCTV surveillance of a street, but if it were privately owned its private owner could, then transferring public streets into private ownership might be promoted as enhancing public safety/security. Transfers of public streets into private ownership have already happened – in 1999, the Salt Lake City government sold a portion of Main Street to the LDS Church, which has since used its ownership of that section of street to remove protestors from it [0]. But your proposed law might make such moves more popular

[0] http://www.thisweekinmormons.com/2017/02/remember-controvers...

Transferring things like roads into private property for no reason at all seems dubious and certainly circumvents the spirit of what I'm going after.

My main concerns are the US becoming a surveillance state (probably first and foremost - not to say we haven't already arrived or are well on our way) and secondarily the way average citizens are allowed to violate each other's privacy. Some can argue that when you are in public you assume zero privacy, but in a world where a local incident that be dealt with at a local level occurs, is recorded, and then goes viral multinationally or where bad actors want to be lazy we start to face issues where this simple understanding of privacy breaks down and has intersections like this one.

> and then goes viral multinationally

Maybe if we could (somehow) create some kind of cultural norm against that?

Maybe the real solution to the problem you raise is cultural rather than legal?

Maybe sometimes journalists and editors need to stop and say "no, we're not running this story, we are going to ignore it, some random nobody doing some offensive thing in some small town that nobody has ever heard of – that isn't news"

A lot of these social media viral things get greatly amplified by the traditional media. Indeed, sometimes the two seem to act in a mutually reinforcing loop – traditional media coverage produces more social media which in turn encourages more coverage from the traditional media

It's most certainly behavioral. I can look at the George Floyd case and say, "Here's an instance where whipping out your camera phone is beneficial" but the vast majority of cases are people just trying to embarrass each other via the metaphorical internet army. 4chan, when I was a kid, had a saying that went "not your personal army" that was organic from what I could tell and for precisely this purpose. I don't think you'll get that level of awareness out of post-2007 internet denizens.

> My idea would be to craft laws saying you can't capture any video for anything off of your property.

Given the documented failure rate of eyewitnesses to be accurate (worse than AI face recognition), we should also ban relaying something you've seen. That way we can make a just society.

> My idea would be to craft laws saying you can't capture any video for anything off of your property.

That's a terrible idea. That would make video taping police brutality illegal. Or what if you watched a bank robbery take place and wanted to record the getaway vehicle? Under your ideal law, any hero who catches the criminal would also be a criminal.

>they are opting into package thieves, not protest monitoring

This is not explained in ToS?

> This is not explained in ToS?

Show me someone who reads (and fully internalizes) the ToS for their purchases, and I'll show you a liar!

Fair point. I guess we've seen a lot of surprised people on Twitter lately, for a similar reason.

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