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Comment by iso1631 | Hacker News Reader

It's the automation that worries me. I'm not too concerned about proper companies using CCTV to record, as it's well managed and gets deleted unseen, unless something happens. I'm not too concerned about the police pulling those CCTV pictures to investigate a crime either.

Things like ring doorbells on the other hand should be cracked down - the number of times I see people in the UK posting pictures of public areas on facebook is shocking, but if they're just sat there, being deleted unless pulled for a proper reason, that's fine too.

What really does concern me is when things like image recognition come into the picture. A corporation can't montior me by paying someone to sift through CCTV pictures. They can montior me by using automation to process everything though.

This is a good thing, how successful it is remains to be seen.

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The other matter of concern is how many of these bits of data end up on servers outside of the EU, if you want something done about it you are essentially powerless.

At the end of the day, does it even really matter where the data is stored?

It shouldn't be recorded in the first place.

Not always true. It depends on the circumstances.

That being said, I will never get a Ring doorbell or something similar. I also believe that the tech companies should not be allowed to hoard data about people’s private or public lives at all.

Should CC processors be allowed to hard data about people's purchase and spending? What about merchants?

If yes, why them, and not tech firms?

What about no?

No, absolutely not.

So, a store can't record that you bought something from them.

That's the way it used to work.

Why should they record that?

Is there an equivalent to the AML/CFT regulations?

I don't think that's true.

We had abusive neighbours who damaged our belongings before so we essentially had to install a CCTV system. They were coax cameras hooked up to a DVR with no internet functionality (and that data had to be overridden regularly due to the size of the disk).

At the end of the day, if you're under threat of damage to your things, I would recommend a CCTV system. You won't see me recommending Amazon's offerings (or any other "cloud" solution rolls eyes), though.

If a law says a company doing buisness in EU may not track users with face recognition, then you surely could charge them, if they merely outsource to outside of the EU as they are still the ones ordering the illegal surveillance.

I believe you can complain to your local data commissioner, eg https://ico.org.uk. They should cover this and the right to have an automated decision reviewed manually.

.uk is not European

Not the EU*

Unless I'm mistaken the UK hasn't drifted off and become and independent island chain separate from Europe

European means different things in different contexts. Sometimes it is used as the adjective form of EU member state. Discussion of an aarticle in which Germany is calling for a Eurpean ban is such a context, since that is the form the title is using.

It doesn’t help that this has been codified into the names of various organizations, like the Council of Europe (ECHR, etc.), EEA, EU, and others that all refer to different subsets of countries on the continent. I suppose this renders any straightforward alternative relatively limited in scope even if a term to refer to one of these memberships was agreed upon.

> Sometimes it is used as the adjective form of EU member state.

Sometimes people make mistakes, sometimes outright errors. Sometimes people use language to push ideas they like, such as "the EU is Europe" and thus not being a part of the EU is somehow an offence against nature. I'm not sure why these mistakes, errors, and mendacities should go unchallenged and uncorrected.

Every use of "Europe" in that article could be replaced with "EU" and it would be the better for it.

People outside the EU do not realize this: “Not European” is used colloquially by people in the European Union to refer to EU countries, institutions, etc.

Many countries/languages use versions of “The US” and USA to avoid confusing the US with America. So it’s only reasonable that we make the distinction for Europe and the EU.

The problem is the there’s no specific term for the people living in either the US or the EU, so we “wrongly” use Americans and European.

European Union citizens and United States citizens are an extremely heterogeneous group of people, which is the situation at hand. Besides being a citizen, there is truly no shared identity in this situation.

Note: I say this as both a US|EU citizen.

In my experience it's mostly people outside of Europe who confuse the EU with Europe, whereas Europeans are less likely to make that error.

> Unless I'm mistaken the UK hasn't drifted off and become and independent island chain separate from Europe

Some would argue that's exactly what happened but your point is valid, EU != 'Europe the continent'. The problem is that such imprecise usage is rampant.

At least it's not up for grabs by the EU as easily there

I wouldn't care about that at all. A foreign government has far less possibility for abuse. It shouldn't happen either, but the domestic player should be the focus here. Mass surveillance doesn't improve anything aside from paranoia. We don't suffer crime or terrorism waves, so why even increase security at all? For some property damage? I get that data protection get in the way sometimes, but for this case I want to be meticulously excluded.

Any yes, I have been victim of vandalism multiple times. Doesn't mean I want to be surveilled forever. There is no absolute security.

> if you want something done about it you are essentially powerless.

I wouldn't say people are "essentially powerless", especially in the EU with GDPR. I can't speak for other parts of the world of course (CCPA is the only thing remotely similar to GDPR that I'm aware of in America).

> I'm not too concerned about proper companies using CCTV to record, as it's well managed and gets deleted unseen, unless something happens. I'm not too concerned about the police pulling those CCTV pictures to investigate a crime either.

Question: Wouldn't it be reasonable to have a law that recordings of public areas for the sake of investigation of serious crime be immediately encrypted such that they could only be decrypted by a court order? (Such a law might be enforced by random inspections and huge fines.)

Probably not reasonable. You will get into problems deciding whose keys to use, key distribution, people not being able to use their equipment correctly...

But banning devices from automatically posting everything to the manufacturer's computers without any user intervention is easy, and quite probably enough for the near future.

> You will get into problems deciding whose keys to use

How about a secret-sharing scheme that requires keys from a certain number of judges?

I don't know what problem you are trying to solve? To stay with the example: Germany already bans CCTV except for specific locations such as train stations. People follow the law reasonably well, and the police just does it because any law-breaking would be revealed at trial. I'm sure there are ways for them to set up temporary cameras for specific purposes. Maybe it would be nice to restrict the possibility of distribution, but I can't remember any cases of abuse.

Now id yo could restrict the police's use of databases to send hate mail to anyone left of the clan (as in Bernie Sanders, not as in left over), that would be a worthy endeavor. But if I have a choice, I'll take a law with teeth and a prosecutor who cares over technology.

> I don't know what problem you are trying to solve?

The problem is that it is impossible to use public spaces without being recorded -- which is uncomfortable in itself -- and that various people who do not need to have access to the recordings -- which is extra uncomfortable. There is also the unnecessarily large potential for abuse. The default should be that noone has access, and, as far as I can see, it could be.

It would be interesting to send these things to whatever the equivalent to NZ's office of the privacy comissioner is, for example, which would probably lead to sound oversight (until pressure to replace privacy-focused staff with compliant ones eventually kicked in).

> Things like ring doorbells on the other hand should be cracked down - the number of times I see people in the UK posting pictures of public areas on facebook is shocking.

While I do share your concern, the current rule of thumb - at least in the USA - is that privacy is not expected in public spaces. I can see that since, by definition, that's what makes public public.

Sure, but perhaps this could be seen to come under the purview of stalking legislation, or a similar principle?

There is a difference between incidentally public (someone can see you, snap a picture, but only on occasion) and surveilence public (someone can track your location and activity continously in public). If someone does the latter, and I know about it, I can still sue them for harassment, and maybe get a restraining order. Can I get a restraining order against Nest or similar?

I understand that this might not be the law, but I'm interested in if it should be.

Again, I agree and empathize.

But the counter argument would be "Harassed by a doorbell, how so?" and "I have a right to protect my property and my family. My camera allows this to happen."

Unless the legal definition of "in public" changes, the surveillance will continue.

In the UK we have guidance about how to use CCTV to protect your property and family

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/domestic-cctv-usi...

For example

"you should make sure that the information recorded is used only for the purpose for which your system was installed (for example it will not be appropriate to share any recordings on social media sites)"

This is of course routinely ignored and unenforced

> used only for the purpose for which your system was installed

So install it for the purpose of sharing on social media. Problem solved!

(I'm only half joking)

I most often see Nest recordings posted to local community groups warning against and seeing to track down porch pirates. I recently saw extensive footage of young people breaking into a house to have a party while the owner was out. All of their parents were notified and they'll be doing community service.

I think if you're in public, you should assume you're going to be recorded. I don't think it should be this way, but it is.

I think the inflection point between surveillance and home security is "cloud." The footage should not be accessible to third parties without a warrant, and it should be under the individual's control. Questions of life, limb, and liberty should not be offloaded to unelected, self-interested, profit seeking corporations like Amazon and Google.

Both arguments are valid though imo.

If you take a photo in town square and I'm in the background no worries, that's fine. If you follow me around taking photos of me in town square then that's harassment - not fine.

If your Nest doorbell watches me walk past your house that's also fine. However if your entire street has Nest then has Amazon identified me as having walked down your entire street? If so, that should also be harassment.

The issue isn't that the photo or video was taken, it's the correlation that happens after the fact.

I mostly agree, but disagree with the "taking a photo of me on the pavement" part. It's actually illegal in Sweden. We have some of the strictest camera regulations I know of, and I'm very pleased with that.

I'm NOT a fan of Teslas sentry mode.

> disagree with the "taking a photo of me on the pavement" part. It's actually illegal in Sweden.

It is? Since how long; when was that law changed?

Fixed installations has been regulated since forever.

But "taking a photo of me on the pavement" doesn't sound like "fixed installations"; it sounds like me as a tourist not being allowed to take a snapshot of a picturesque street just because you happen to be standing on the pavement.

I think I wasn't clear enough that I was referring to the nest camera the parent was talking about.

Ah, yeah, good. Because I've taken quite a few snapshots when I've been out and about, always under the impression that what I was doing was perfectly legal. :-)

My understanding was that correlation after the fact with ai is what also allows you to obfuscate identifiers so its technically anonymized until "extracted and inspected". Completely unrelated- you might dig this satellite tracker visualization :) https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization

Could be stalking. It is known that employees at cloud services access customer data from time to time. Complete data protection is nearly impossible here.

Just because you can't expect privacy doesn't mean you can exploit it and record everything.

If you can site a law / legal decision that would help.

I can't imagine any civilized jurisdiction not making that distinction.

You typically have to ask for a permit to surveillance any public space and the difficulty of getting one often ranges from hard to illegal.

Will you also be requiring people to avert their eyes when you are nearby such that they dont mistakenly observe you?

Nothing I wrote even hints at that, so obviously no.

My understanding is that in Finland only the Government (or an other democratic entity such as the Municipality or the City) can execute surveillance on a public space. For example the bike parking area next to my office is deemed a public space, the office building next to it cannot point its security cameras to that direction. Which is a shame since there is a lot of bike theft and vandalism, but the city doesn't want to install their own cameras.

People are allowed to take photos and videos on a public area, but aren't allowed to leave a recording device there.

Yes, and it shows how US[1] interpretations of the constitution and general lawmaking hasn't really evolved. It's one thing to say, "you're in public, deal with it" when (say) taking a photo of me and publishing it is likely to be time-consuming and local and scope; it is another to be able to follow me all day, publish globally, and for essentially zero cost.

[1] The US is hardly alone in this - they just happen to be the point here.

There are about 5 different Ring and security cameras that point into my private property, and one pointing directly into one of my windows. None of them are my cameras.

But in the UK it's not allowed, however nor is that "not allowed" enforced.

Alas US cultural hegemony pushes strongly the the rest of the world, especially the western anglosphere

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