End Amazon’s Surveillance Partnership with Police
endringpartnerships.com
endringpartnerships.com
Disclaimer: My wife runs a police intelligence unit that catches actual criminals from ring info, like those people stealing the packages from your front door or breaking into your house.
Disclaimer2: I fully do not trust Amazon with the info, but I do trust the police having the info to catch criminals, as thats what they do with it.
Disclaimer3: The police only get ring videos that are forwarded to them from ring users, they have no generic access to ring data. The victims of crime tend to forward videos of the criminals in hopes the police can catch them.
My wife actually wrote her thesis on the win win aspects of this for fighting crime [1]
Yes, that’s how it works: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/ring-changed-how-polic...
> Police should not be free to pull footage without asking or telling the owner of the camera.
They are not free to do that.
You shouldn't trust a 3rd party with your personal privacy. Please don't draft all of your neighbors into the digital dragnet.
Are you positive ring wouldn't tell you that your footage was subpoenaed?
Wouldn't they subpoena Amazon directly, who by virtue of this partnership is likely to oblige? The owner of the camera would have no agency in that transaction.
- the right to not be obligated to testify against themselves
- the right to a speedy trial
- the right to a lawyer
- the ability to appeal judgments against them
- the ability to walk away free when the police have gathered evidence illegally, even when that evidence clearly proves they did it (the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine)
- the very idea that certain methods of gathering intelligence are illegal
- the idea that it's better for them and their nine buddies to go free than that one innocent person be punished
- the deprecation of the rack as a method of extracting confessions
and so forth. It's uninteresting that criminals support a justice system that is not fully skewed in favor of the government - people who care about a free and just society also care about those things, and those are the arguments to engage with.
This is even more critical in a jurisdiction where criminals, either those still serving their sentences or even those who have completed them, have their voting rights removed.
You have a good comment here, but this line really hurts its credibility IMO.
> As a part of the partnership, police promote Ring products and engage with Amazon’s neighborhood watch app, Neighbors. In exchange, Amazon provides police departments with an easy way to request and store footage from thousands of residents at one time
You have no expectation of privacy in public or in someone else’s domicile with some specific exclusions (like bathrooms or bedrooms). And sure, maybe you could argue this for basically any indoor residential camera (though I would disagree)
But here is where I lost him
> Amazon + Police surveillance partnerships function with no oversight or accountability.
This statement and the one above it are completely incompatible. The oversight is literally done by the owner of the camera.
It seems built into the application. And I will admit I myself have avoided these, and instead used Wyze cams with rtsp only specifically because of that mistrust (and the principle that Amazon can comply without my consent, even if they don’t currently)
> The oversight is literally done by the owner of the camera.
Not if the footage is subpoenad.
And the "lack of accountability" was the Amazon Neighbors app, where users are given specific agency on whether they want to provide recordings/access to LEO's or not.
>Not if the footage is subpoenad.
Again not really called into question within the article and is a thing for any hosted service. Or for that matter...something you also self host. Similar to a warrant.
This is the sort of black-and-white attitude that allows corruption and abuse of police resources to go unpunished.
I disagree with you because police don't go after criminals. They go after suspects. The duty to determine if a person has committed a crime falls on a judge and jury.
It takes a certain amount of stunted moral development to so fully invest yourself into this binary. A total lack of caution around unlimited state power. A total lack of awareness of the privilege you have to be able to ignore or encourage that unchecked power.
"If you aren't for frictionless sharing of your home video feeds with police, you must support criminals" is something straight out of an Orwellian dystopia.
You see nothing wrong with an intimate relationship between the violent, white-supremacist infiltrated[1] arm of the state and a monopolistic corporation that imposes such severe time constraints on its workers that they regularly have to pee into bottles[2].
1. https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist...
2. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-drivers-peeing-in-bottle...
In many cases police are also criminals and because of their job they are above the law, which to me is much scarier than other criminals out there.
It doesn't (necessarily) apply when you want the police to catch a criminal who committed a crime against you.
If someone has stolen something off your porch and you have identifying evidence, get the video yourself, and select the portion that identifies the thief. Give them a still photograph of the thief's face and/or their vehicle. Giving them a lengthy video that captures your own activities is "talking to the police" in the bad sense.
they may not be able to catch the guy that stole your tools, or fuel, but they will easily turn on you for any low hanging fruit evidence they perceive while in contact with you
What jurisdiction actually takes this kind of thing seriously? Petty theft, even by organized groups, is routinely ignored.
Amusingly enough, my wife's response to the website in the OP was "Gee, that's some pretty good ad copy for Ring. Should we get one?"
For example Seattle has lost hundreds of police officers in the last year due to the push for defunding, hostile attitudes towards police from activists/local politicians, and the opportunity to have a less stressful/better paying job elsewhere after a very rough year dealing with near-daily rioting. At present, the city has only around 1000 officers and it is expected to lose some more due to the vaccine mandate. This is around half of what the average city has per capita, and in the last decade the effects of a lenient city attorney, crime-friendly local government focused on "restorative justice", and falling per capita officer counts has led to a massive increase in crimes. Just like in SF, people have given up on even reporting them since even if someone is arrested, the city attorney will just release them anyways, and insurance claims require a deductible. Even businesses have given up on crime reporting (example: https://tinyurl.com/4nhn45bw).
A good overview of the Seattle situation can be found in a couple documentaries, "Seattle is Dying" (https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw) and "The Fight for the Soul of Seattle" (https://youtu.be/WijoL3Hy_Bw). The city's transformation from a safe clean city to what it is today took place in a decade. I expect it can also be fixed just as quickly with only a small set of changes like a) doubling the staff counts at the police department b) replacing the activist city attorney with a moderate c) enforcing existing laws d) cleaning up drug dens and theft rings masquerading as homeless encampments e) increasing the number of patrols and beat cops f) using technologies like facial recognition.
Users have to volunteer their footage of incidents to the police.
That’s fascinating. How exactly are you so intimately familiar with Amazon’s inner workings? You’re fully confident that this system can’t be abused because of… what experience, exactly?
Edit: yes. I fully and unequivocally support criminals. I figure if a silly cop propagandist is going to respond to this post, that will be the first silly vague salvo against not wanting to give cops full control of society, so skip to rebuttal(2)
Edit:typos
Is your wife the head of the police intelligence unit of The World?
Are you of the opinion that it does?
Do you think that that’s the goal? I personally view “tech that makes cops’ jobs incredibly easier” as a thing that doesn’t lead to “cops quit in droves to support newfound theoretical efficiency”
Police unions (who entirely derive their power from their memberships) will decide that they want less power?
I guess this could come off as a loaded question, but I'm genuinely interested in the perspectives of actual users.
Privacy is an afterthought.
The article mentions this:
> In exchange, Amazon provides police departments with an easy way to request and store footage from thousands of residents at one time––allowing for massive warrantless surveillance.
“Massive warrantless surveillance” doesn’t make sense because police don’t need a warrant to ask people if they’d like to volunteer footage of an incident.
I am confused by this, though I'm pretty sure it is the author who is intentionally combining verbage though?
The link this post connects to is about how people submit their own photos/videos of porch thieves + suspicious people to the police. You could argue this is bad on its own but certainly not what "massive warrantless surveillance" invokes. Everyone reading that line without scrutiny will assume it means police departments are somehow watching your own Ring without permission.
Why would anyone pay for these things to publish a feed from your front door to anyone Amazon wants to share it with?
If your CEO thought they could just access Ring camera feeds at random, they were misinformed.
They lost me right there.
There's a liberal tendency to hyper-focus on race and see everything in the lens of race only. Ironically, I don't think this helps racial injustice that they are set out to resolve.
However, I do so hate when people clearly use a maligned group and exploit them in their language to further their own agenda.
I've seen similar language used by groups to advocate for the wildest things like remote work, or bike lanes.
Not a conspiracy, they are just a bit clumsy about it.
The only thing I find more threatening than Amazon's pervasive surveillance is the intended audience this site is catering to.
Is anyone in this thread cognizant of some data that shows whether divestment has a correlation to actual crime data? I would really like to know.
There have been a lot of people talking about divesting. But, I wonder how much has actually occurred. And, whether in places where it has occurred, there has been demonstrated uptick in crime, or whether there are places where crime has risen alongside a marginal reduction in police forces (due to attrition, or whatever).
I would really like to see a factual discussion because it feels like the arguments are generally coming from a bias on both sides and the crime wave happening could be occurring because of number of contributing factors, not just divestment.
If incidents like this [0] don't get any conviction, I have little faith that Ring footage of vandalism and package theft will get anything done.
In other parts of the USA and world, they are very much perused, enforced and law enforcement likes the proof.
But then we only have 1-2 murders per year so of course they'll gravitate towards smaller crimes.
Same with donations, if X asks for donations, but I don't agree with X, I wish there was a way to find an opposite of X, and donate there instead.
Startup opportunity?
No worries - I tracked it. It was on it's way up the M40 motorway. I called the local police. But it was already out of their jurisdiction.
An hour later, it stopped. It had ended up in the back-garden of a house in Aston, a suburb of Birmingham. Jurisdiction: West Midlands Police (I think). So I rang them - I gave them the actual address.
"I'm sorry, we can't just go ringing the doorbells of people based on that, and we certainly can't go searching their back-garden. And we have more important things to do than search for bikes; do you have any idea how many Porsches and Ferraris are stolen in the West Midlands every week?".
Suppose I come to Aston, and ring the doorbell myself? Will you assign an officer to make sure the thieves don't try to kill me? "Nope."
My replacement bike is a Ferrari, with no GPS tracker.
The argument has been made in The Atlantic that Black people have a right to be more successful at petty crime.[1]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/steal...
If anyone has any form letter they recommend, I can add it to a website I'm working on: https://vocalvoters.com/
Other posters have clarified.
1. "Racial profiling is at the heart of Amazon Ring’s business model. In partnership with the police, Amazon profits from and therefore fosters a culture of racist fear mongering."
Nope, what's at the heart of Ring's business model is people's rational and completely legitimate desire to a) be safe, b) not fall victim to crimes, c) be made whole by bringing criminals to justice, and d) deter criminals by those consequences. This requires the cooperation of the police, city prosecution, and local governments of course - but having surveillance footage is a big benefit and peace of mind to residents, and a major aid to those involved in preventing and investigating crime.
2. "Amazon Sells Police Partners Racist Technology"
No, facial surveillance technology is not racist. First off, facial recognition algorithms do not take race as an input factor to make any kind of determination. Disparate outcomes, either in terms of arrests, commission of crimes, or false positives/negatives, does not make this (or any other) system racist as long as explicit discrimination is not being performed based on race. This is the same debate that's had between equity (equality of outcomes) and equality (equality of opportunity) in other situations. For example, college admissions are not racist just because some races have low representation relative to their population size. However, affirmative action is a systemically racist policy because it explicitly discriminates based on race. A similar line of thinking applies here. Secondly, false positives are fixed easily by having a human in the loop to verify matches, which all implementations of facial recognition in America use. Therefore, the false positive rate is no worse than humans and we still get the benefit of locating suspects from a large search space quickly and efficiently, so they can be brought to justice by police departments that have limited staff and resources.
3. "After the murder of George Floyd millions of protesters took to the streets to oppose police violence and systematic racism. Cops used heavily invasive surveillance tools to identify, track, and even arrest activists exercising their First Amendment rights."
There isn't any expectation of privacy in a public place. I can film you, you can film me, we both can film cops, cops can film us, and so on. That seems reasonable. It is also laughable to claim that those being arrested in these "protests" were merely exercising their first amendment rights. In my city, and numerous others across the country, we had mass rioting and people purposely antagonizing the police and looking for violent confrontation. We saw property damage, vandalism, arson, blockades of basic infrastructure, physical violence, many deaths, and even an attempt to seize public land and declare it a separate sovereign nation (CHAZ/CHOP). Just perform a web search for what happened in DC, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, and other cities in the days following the George Floyd incident and the rest of the year. A violent riot is not a protest, and participants in those crimes should have been arrested and prosecuted more quickly, if anything.
4. "While activists call for the defunding of police forces, Amazon is doing everything they can to solidify themselves as an extension of law enforcement."
White leftist activists may be calling for defunding of police forces, but minorities don't want that. An overwhelming majority of Black Americans want to retain local police presence (https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...). The push for defunding is entirely a luxury belief, likely held by those who are shielded from the realities of crime.
5. "Amazon creates dangerous technology marketed to make policing faster, cheaper, and more efficient in social control. This automated surveillance technology enables mass scale policing that can monitor everyone everywhere...Amazon’s surveillance empire will only solidify the police state."
Facial recognition shouldn't be banned. As a tax paying law following resident, I definitely want my local police department to bring criminals to justice and deter crime. I'd like them to do so as effectively and efficiently as possible, which means giving them access to the best technology available. I am OK with some controls that limit use of facial recognition to only situations with either a warrant or some other condition like reasonable suspicion or probable cause. But an outright ban on this technology is ultimately no different than banning the use of electricity at police stations.
The actual nuanced goal - Get police out of the business of non-police tasks, and leave those tasks to professionals who specialize in those areas (mental health, social work, etc) - is something that almost everyone actually agrees with. But it's hard to get past the stupidity of the original slogan.
When less ideologically rigid people use the same slogan, they make sure to explain the slogan doesn’t actually mean what it says.
This definition of racism, and bigotry more generally, is too narrow to be useful. For some well known examples look up how applicants from certain ZIP codes were more likely to be denied financial services. Or how resumes with certain names were less likely to be hired despite the same experience. Race wasn't an input in those decisions yet the end result is obviously racist.
You seem like a critical thinker, so please consider this question:
If companies and government agents generally aren't even unintentionally racist, how do you explain people of color's significantly worse outcomes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...