Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
Many people (I would argue anybody with common sense) predicted Ring would get used as a surveillance tool. This quote correctly states the nearly-inevitable next step, which will also be ignored.
This was the exact reason.
The ring is an always-on camera. My phone is not that. My phone may leak some information about me, and its basic job (cell phone) provides a record of location data, but that's not the same thing as forcibly making a home security device into part of a police state panopticon.
Please provide a singular credible source for your statement.
My biggest gripe right now is when you get a notification and tap it on Android, you get such a cut down UI, it doesn't even have a scrubber and you can't fast forward or rewind. Just a completely barebones player you can't control. Once you exit that and go to the camera history, you get a normal player with controls. Makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Anything the integrates with homekit secure video will be e2e encrypted
The one exception I've found so far is that the UNVR-4 system software in older models is stored on a very cheap USB flash drive, and I believe they write logs to it too. Mine failed a few months before warranty expired so I just replaced it with an SSD and SATA->USB 3 adapter I had laying around. Works great, is snappy, and should hopefully last quite a bit longer.
A fairly cheap NAS from them for local storage, and then basically any ip camera you can find will mostly just work. (NAS I'm using: https://www.amazon.com/Synology-Bay-DiskStation-DS220-Diskle...)
They offer surveillance station (https://www.synology.com/en-us/surveillance) as a free app for most of their models.
My entire setup (3 cameras, NAS, hdds, POE switch) cost me under $1000, and I get pretty much every feature that most of these cloud camera services offer.
- Remote viewing on my phone (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.synology.D...)
- Activity alerts and optional triggers for recording
- Viewing through any browser
- Multiple user accounts
Plus if I want it, Surveillance station has a whole host of other features that I currently don't need, but are nice to have (ex: automated cloud backups, offsite storage, CMS, Action rules, etc)
As a nice little bonus - I pay zero in monthly costs for this outside of the power to run the cameras & NAS
My initial setup cost ran slightly higher than something like Nest or Google Home (ex: I paid 1k vs the roughly 400 it would have cost to buy the cameras from a cloud service) but 4 years in I'm now in the positive on the investment, since I don't have a recurring 14/month subscription charge.
So long story short - It's still my data, it's costing me less over time, and I get feature parity.
The downside is it requires a little more configuration and setup.
Personally, I live in the valley (SFV of LA) and haven't had issues, but I live in a low-middle class area full of russian/persian immigrants. I wonder if wealthier areas are targeted?
Maybe, but it's also probably still extremely rare and internet discussions oversample people who have been victims. I've only known one person here in LA who's had any of their packages stolen in the past few years, and that one turned out to be due to a bizarre personal vendetta.
I’ve been hearing similar problems in many big cities as well (Portland, SF, LA, Austin, …) but you might be more immune to the trend if you live in a suburb instead (eg Bellevue or Kirkland rather than Seattle, but thefts are beginning to intrude even there).
My personal experience from coming home to a burgled also ended with the same situation. The police came, waited from crime lab to take prints, prints were not recoverable, no follow up. This was even after several attempts at providing the assigned detective detailed information from the bank on how the criminal's attempted to use a stolen checkbook to withdraw money from a bank account. The detective later explained that he's too busy to look at information provided via email.
Middle-class white people in every case, just to eliminate any race angle. Maybe richer folks have a better time, IDK. This isn't even the allegedly-lawless-hellhole of San Francisco or anything remotely like that.
The police know who they work for, and they will expend all the resources they have to go after people they simply just don't like, no matter how petty the crime.
I would never install a smart device INSIDE my home. But I don’t see why people are freaking out about door/driveway cameras.
Anyway I had a few packages thefts over a few years and did nothing about them at all. I haven't had any in about a year though so clearly it's working.
Perhaps Amazon was instructing their drivers to steal packages until they see a Ring installed.
(Even with a Ring camera you should still get recordings of people noticing you have it ...)
What is the problem here?
A girl can dream, can’t she
if the last several years have taught us anything its that police only do there jobs when they feel like it. whether that processing rape kits, stopping gunmen, stopping property theft, doesn't matter that wont do it.
It’s not just the police’s fault that they are ineffective, the politicians (that appoint judges and prosecutors) and the people that vote for the politicians take a lot of the blame also. And even after that it’s just a bad time for labor and crime.
That's adorable.
Ironically and sadly, it becoming such a hated profession means we really don't want the people who are willing to do it. It's a grave they dug themselves, though.
And since when has being weak on crime every gotten a judge of prosecutor elected in this country? Politicians go out of their way as a mater of course to look tough on crime to the point that it a problem of its own.
no offense intended, (maybe you have some inside knowledge and perspective that I don't) but this seems to be a little disingenuous to say the least.
There are a variety of reasons kits are not processed, including the victim not cooperating, the accused confesses or dies in prison, there turns out to not be a case (such as: victim claims Bob raped them, but Bob was at dinner with someone else and his phone/credit card records confirm it, and so on.)
Prosecutors don't just go "fuck women, don't test these kits lying around!" despite what you might be led to believe by a lot of folks trying to generate outrage.
But also because for me the minor inconvenience of not constantly videotaping my house is overwhelmed by the opportunity to stand on a principle. Sure it doesn't do much to Amazon or anyone else but at least I know I am not participating in the Orwellian surveillance state. It also gives me the opportunity that when people notice and ask about it, to inform them about it. A lot of people didn't realize that this information was available to the government to use at their discretion as well.
First, they're taking a stand based on principal. That they're successful in doing so is a win for them. Second, to your point, they're still covered in case of theft because their "home is probably already covered by everyone else's cameras and they can just pull the footage from them". Assuming they're on good terms with their neighbors, this request should be pretty easy and quick to fulfill. If they're not, local PD can still get a warrant for the footage.
I'm all for that, but taking a stand doesn't benefit the individual. Taking a stand is for the benefit of society and requires the collaboration of society
> Assuming they're on good terms with their neighbors, this request should be pretty easy and quick to fulfill. If they're not, local PD can still get a warrant for the footage.
yes and that process is just objectively much more difficult than pulling the data from your own camera, which takes all of five seconds versus an order from a judge. That means they're life is worse.
It doesn't, though. If they are aware of the tradeoff (that in order to have the privacy they want, it will take longer to get any footage they may need), and they find that the tradeoff is worth it, then their life is not "worse". After all, that's why they made the decision to begin with - because they believe that their life is worse with them than without.
Edit: Also, at least according to HowToGeek [1], you lose some significant features if you enable E2EE.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/741180/how-to-enable-end-to-end-en...
(Edit to edit: My Ring app gives me an even more comprehensive list of features that are disabled if you enable E2EE. Since among them is Shared Users, which is how my wife and I can both see our Ring videos, I don't see how this is any kind of actual support for E2EE. Surely a significant portion of Ring's customers have more than one family member who wants to have access to the videos.)
It's here to stay. We just need good rules around its use. The benefits are too compelling.
Maybe the way is to store the footage or a decryption key locally so the police have to physically get it off you (and you can't refuse) if they want access and can't drag-net. That's what's traditionally done with business's surveillance cameras.
People use that word because they think their own biases are realistic, but it doesn’t get more ideological than believing that giving police and courts more surveillance power has benefits that are “too compelling.”
Rules change. The people in power change. They may say "fuck those rules" in the future. The only way to prevent abuses like this is to not surveil unnecessarily.
So the deterrent effect is good for the consumer in that it prevents theft, and good for Amazon because they can contract out to just about anyone to deliver packages, no trust required (or, “trust but verify”)
Amazon proves the delivery and now it’s the local Polive Department’s problem.
They are literally selling customers an excuse they can use later against the very customer that buys it.
I mean, the customers know what they are getting into I guess but it is still bad if the dominant online store doesn't offer any way to securely get their products.
Ultimately, this is all a zero-sum BS game until we start talking about actual solutions, but I don't know enough about what Amazon offers to have an opinion about who needs to do better. If Amazon offers porch locker delivery and convenient central locker locations, sure, let's push customers to use them -- but if Amazon refuses to deliver to porch lockers and offers central lockers that are 20 miles away and open 10am-3pm, let's push Amazon to do better.
The way I see it, untill i have recieved it, it's the seller's responsebility
People want to live in suburbs, where their residences are separated from commercial areas. This starves city and town centers, leaving only big businesses that are capable of thriving on high volume sales.
But we still want the convenience of walking down to their neighborhood store, so we've constructed an entire economic system built on shipping things in disposable boxes around the globe and getting them to people's doorsteps within two business days.
But, it turns out, this makes it really easy for someone to walk up to your door and steal your package. So we pay the same companies that starve our neighborhood businesses for the privilege of being surveilled, in turn externalizing the cost of their haphazard practices onto law enforcement and the victimized parties.
More middlemen, more theft, more surveillance, more waste. What a farce.
1. Generally they don't come from across the globe to your doorstep after your order, but from a nearby fulfillment center.
2. Getting things quickly from online shopping is just as nice in cities (actually nicer, because you can get a broader variety of goods quickly) as in suburbs.
You're right that it's just as nice in cities, if not nicer. But that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make it not a maladaptation within our economic system.
Yes, the steps before are very similar to fulfillment centers vs. to distribution centers servicing retail and to individual retail stores (not quite the same-- you need somewhat more fulfillment centers). It's just the last step from the fulfillment center to your house that are different.
Right. It's that last step I'm criticizing. But even the former deserves some amount of attention, given the scale and proliferation of disposable consumption that Amazon has encouraged.
OK, then mentioning across the globe was not core to your argument (and thus I picked at it).
Also, please note... a frequent mistake in economics is to conflate positive statements ("Ordering online causes additional emissions and use of cardboard and packaging products") with normative statements ("it is wrong to waste cardboard and emit carbon for the convenience of online shopping"). Every agent in the economic system has their own normative beliefs and utility function. Hume showed us you can't get to the normative statement through positive observations.
Hume and I disagree :-)
The original comment was a normative one: I think our current scheme is wrong, in a moral sense. I think it's also wrong in an economic sense, but that's just a cherry on top.
If we had, say, 1000x the resources that could be used without too adverse of consequences, would it still be wrong in your eyes?
Or are you saying that you don't believe that the resource use is justified within our current constraints?
The more snappy way of saying it: we're maximizing short term advantages (any plastic crap I want in 48 hours, shareholder value) at the cost of long term advantages (cities and towns worth living in, a sense of community rooted in part in supporting local businesses, not needing surveillance in every aspect of our lives because we've automated out the tacit security of being around other humans.)
> cities and towns worth living in
Like-- this is something America has really just not understood how to do. It doesn't have much to do with e-commerce (which is still popular in places that do know how to do it).
> a sense of community rooted in part in supporting local businesses
Sometimes having a strong local business is great. But in the best case, you're limited by the tastes and curation choices of a small number of vendors-- you lose the value of the long tail. And in the worst case, you find yourself beholden to an actively exploitative and/or hostile supplier.
> not needing surveillance in every aspect of our lives because we've automated out the tacit security of being around other humans
We're personally safer and more secure in our effects than in any time before in US history (well, the best point was a decade ago, but still-- we're about the same as then). It has nothing to do with surveillance or e-commerce, and only minimally has to do with suburbia vs. city living.
In the end, I think you've just got "this feels wrong to me". I bet I could look at a choice that you've made and I'd recoil from it as wasteful and repugnant, too.
P.S. Thank you for indulging me in this conversation. I'm going to be teaching AP Microeconomics for the first time next year, and as much as anything I'm practicing being the devil's advocate.
Nope! But I think this is an instance where the long term advantage is much more "important" (morally, sociologically) than the short term one. You're welcome to disagree, naturally, but I think there's a growing sociological/sociopolitical consensus that our current mode of life and consumption is overwhelmingly unsustainable.
You're completely right that this just isn't something the US is good at, full stop. But I see the proliferation of delivery as part-and-parcel of the problem, rather than an unrelated phenomenon that somewhat ameliorates local issues. In other words: e-commerce thrives because we've economically primed it to thrive via other bad social and economic decisionmaking.
> But in the best case, you're limited by the tastes and curation choices of a small number of vendors-- you lose the value of the long tail. And in the worst case, you find yourself beholden to an actively exploitative and/or hostile supplier.
This is true, and it's part of the tradeoff. But I'll note: in sufficiently dense cities, this collapses back in on itself. From my apartment, I can walk to my choice of a dozen independent grocers, hardware stores, &c.
And it's not as if Amazon doesn't reflect this as well: my understanding is that much of the current Amazon experience is sifting through rebrands of the same basic product (especially in the context of consumer electronics, where it's all the same IC/SoC in a different plastic case). If that isn't an exploitation of diminished choice, I don't know what is!
> We're personally safer and more secure in our effects than in any time before in US history (well, the best point was a decade ago, but still-- we're about the same as then). It has nothing to do with surveillance or e-commerce, and only minimally has to do with suburbia vs. city living.
Absolutely right again. I should have said "the perception of safety," which perversely has tracked against actual safety. I lay a lot of the "blame" for that at the feet of forces that encourage civic alienation (again, car-centric living, decline of local businesses, &c.).
> I bet I could look at a choice that you've made and I'd recoil from it as wasteful and repugnant, too.
I'm positive that you could! That's why I'm trying to avoid an individual critique, as such -- I don't blame people living in suburbs, or for shopping on Amazon, or for driving everywhere. The economic incentives are all right for those things, and I have my own economic incentives that push me to do things that are absolutely wasteful and repugnant. The critique instead is directed as the incentive structures themselves which, if we can collapse or undermine them, will hopefully result in better human action without the stress and tears of a blame session.
(I also appreciate your indulgence. I definitely started out with some extra snark, and the fact that you tolerated it is a testament to fairness and levelheadedness when you could have rightfully ignored me.)
Am I missing something? Isn't it significantly more efficient for a van/truck to follow a computer optimized route to deliver 100s-1000s of orders per tank of gas than me driving to and from Home Depot to buy one thing?
Maybe, maybe not. Packaging takes energy. This alone tends to mean the breakeven distance is many miles-- very rural and low density suburban may come out slightly ahead, but most other uses don't.
But beyond that, the trend for e-commerce is many small orders and individual boxes and more trips, while the typical person taking a single purpose trip to Home Depot will buy more. (Or-- has an urgent need for something that can't be satisfied soon enough by e-commerce).
Yes, exactly -- the shipping happens regardless. It's certainly more efficient to ship 20 of each widget to a store than it is to ship 20 widgets to 20 homes, though. But then people have to get to the store to buy those widgets, and often they will drive to get there (not everything is going to be available within walking distance).
> but the waste of individual boxes [...] is obscene.
Yes, this is bad. Personally I try to mitigate this by batching my purchases so more things arrive per box (admittedly, sometimes I don't do this), but some shippers will still break up a single order into multiple boxes spread over several days, which sucks. I do occasionally end up with an item that's shipped directly in its own packaging (that is, no extra box around the item, and it arrives in the same box that I would have picked up off a store shelf), but this is pretty rare, and of course there are many items where this wouldn't work (and would be more wasteful, not less).
> But that doesn't make it right
I'm curious as to how you're defining "right" and "wrong" here, and it does feel like some of your argument is based on "this feels icky and anti-social", and not entirely on objectively-bad externalities. I think the transportation aspect of these deliveries is a bit overblown, as transportation has to happen regardless, and people driving to a store to buy things is probably not much better (and is sometimes worse) than a box truck or van stopping door-to-door to drop things off (walking to a store would be the ideal, but I suspect this wouldn't replace as much driving or online ordering as we'd expect, even in places where it's possible). The packaging waste is definitely a consideration, but I've seen this getting better over time, with more reusable/recyclable paper products being used, and less plastic. We still have a ways to go here, though. To be clear: I do agree with you that much of this is objectively worse than visiting a store to make the same purchase, but I think calling it "obscene" is an overreaction.
I'd almost swear Amazon does this maliciously. One item per box.
Unless you have a small delicate item and a large heavy item, in which case they put them in the same box with no void fill.
Usually doesn't obviously damage the small delicate item, but I have to wonder if it's subtly damaged, etc, for the experience.
I usually get my groceries delivered. It saves me an hour of driving to the grocery store, shopping, paying, driving home, and making several trips up and down four flights of stairs to bring the items home. I'm totally happy to pay a delivery charge and a tip to not have to deal with that. Yes, I do walk to the local grocery if I just need a couple items, but I usually do a larger delivery grocery order around once a month.
Neighborhood stores can't stock everything, especially in a city where space is expensive. Looking through my last 3 months of Amazon orders (24 orders), I see only three items that I could have gotten by walking somewhere locally, and they were all things that were part of a larger order that was mostly stuff I could not get locally. And that's just Amazon; I definitely have purchases from other online retailers over the past three months, and for the most part I'd guess they're all things I couldn't get within walking distance either.
My neighborhood shines when it comes to restaurants, bars, parks, and personal services (hair cuts, mani/pedi, that sort of thing). A good variety of groceries are available within walking distance, and even some more exotic stuff (there's a high-end cake bakery a couple blocks away, for example), but otherwise most regular purchases aren't easily fulfilled with a short walk. Most of those other purchases would require a 45-60 minute bus ride, or a 15-20 minute drive (with no guarantee of finding what I want). And if I need to do that, I'll probably just order it online instead.
I do agree that the situation isn't ideal. I generate a lot of cardboard and paper recycling waste, though fortunately not that much plastic. I'm not sure about fuel usage: if I have to drive somewhere to buy something, it might be a wash compared to a delivery vehicle bringing it to me. And the package theft problem (and the "solutions") we've created for ourselves is ridiculous.
What are you supposed to do really? I grew up in an urban environment (NYC) and embraced urban living. The reality was that it wasnt sustainable w/o being a multi-millionaire. I'll give real examples.
I take a 20min subway/bus to a store purchase a terracotta planter, or perhaps a box of cat litter. You then have to carry that 5 or 10 pound item. You realize the subway isnt working, today. You need to take an express subway. Now you have to switch trains but you realize the escalator and elevator also isnt working. So you drag it up the stairs, across the tunnel, and back down the other side. You could hitch a ride on a friend's car, but there is congestion pricing, or a $11 toll on the tunnel, and throw in another $40 for parking. These things used to work in the 1990s, also in the 2000s, but eventually things all failed in a big way (and the failure of public transport was a big part of it.)
Good luck if you are disabled, or have knee problems, or have a baby+stroller also.
I tried really, really hard to live in an urban environment, but it was eventually a failure. I now live in the suburbs. We order cat litter and have it delivered to our doorstep.
No, i dont want to live in the suburb. But I cannot afford to live in the city. If I could freely take cabs everywhere like a multi-millionaire I would live in the city. Short of that, i didnt see much option to stay.
People say crazy things like "oh you should just bike everywhere." OK, how does my mom with osteoporosis bike? How does a disabled person bike? Where on the bike do you place the 10lb cat litter box?
Cat litter is just one aspect.
What you're describing is the pathological case. The similar pathological case for the suburbs is a 20 minute trip to Costco, only to get stuck in an extra hour of traffic, do your shopping and return home, only to realize you forgot the one thing you really needed. That, like yours, is a real example (from the few years I spent in college, in a suburban area).
(For what it's worth, I agree completely about disabilities, and it's shameful that NYC has continued to ignore basic accessibility needs in the subways. That being said, the NYCT buses are pretty great about accessibility, and serve a corresponding demographic.)
I have both children and happened to have a knee injury for several years. That turns a huge number of seemingly normal things into "pathological cases." Ever try bringing a stroller up and down a subway stairwell? Ever try bringing a stroller into a usually crowded bus? Ever try literally anything mass transit related with a child or knee injury? I dont think children are that uncommon here. Sure, if I had a full-time nanny that would solve the problem, but then as I said, its all easy with money.
Also, not sure if you live in the wealthier areas of NYC (read: those with multiple subways), but things magically become easier and easier in wealthier areas. Now try living in a neighborhood with a single train line. Now see what happens when the train just randomly starts skipping your stop all the time and going express. Poor-people problems.
Groceries with a child...not hard. Groceries in the winter with a child? Hard. Groceries in the rain with a child? Hard. Possible, of course, but its also possible to live in a tent in the forest.
At some point, practical starts to overtake merely possible. Interestingly in the suburbs, all these things are possible for those on mere mortal salaries. Hence, despite literally having "NYC" in my username I no longer live in NYC.
Finally. Suppose I did get a stuck in traffic job for an hour with a baby in tow on the way to Costco...it isnt really the end of the world...you turn on the radio and spend the time. Its not like its freezing and i'm standing on a subway platform praying the next train is not going to skip my stop while my baby cries from weather exposure or while my knee gives in.
- 100x more livable sqft, so it can be affordable for everyone.
- 3000sqft condos that rival lux family homes in the suburbs for space.
- All building should become mixed use. Parking underground, retail on street level, offices on the first N floors of the building, and residential higher up for the views.
- More vertical green space on the buildings.
- More horizontal green space between the buildings.
I'm also partial to building walk/bike ways above current roads such that roads are covered / "underground" i.e. don't cause noise or pedestrian deaths. Retail would be located where people walk.
Amazon, as any other carrier, depends on the insurance (self-insurance in this case) and statistics. Some % of package theft will happen, and it's all priced in into their business cost.
They do seem common, but not that ubiquitous, yet.
My parents have a Ring camera, my sister has a Nest, and I have DIY raspberry pi cameras. My parents immediate neighbors have none.
What I realized, is they use it to keep track of their kids, funny cat videos that trigger the recording, and most importantly, as a 2 way radio to talk or listen to the kids. That last point, well, I found out they can also listen to my conversations an my kids.
I asked them to point their front porch camera so that it doesn't record my front driveway, just theirs. and they lost their shit. They confirmed they record audio and video. They asked if there was a problem. I said no problem with them. I'm not comfortable with the audio/video recording me or my friends conversations if company comes over to talk to me on my porch or driveway.
I really didn't need to tell them anything, it's self evident why someone wants a camera point away. Needless to say, after I asked them in the winter, one of them refuses to speak to me and crosses the street and avoids me.
These people use surveillance to supervise their kids, and don't care about the fact that their neighbors (me) could be recorded, and they could be hacked or footage access by random people, because Amazon isn't exactly the king of privacy.
I believe these cameras haven't decreased crime. They also don't really add more security. It's a shame though they are everywhere, with disregard for privacy right on people's property. So yes, I'm biased. I have no love for Ring.
Their house and their drive and just because voice could travel 100-feet sill doesn't mean they have the right to record it.
If the speed limit is twenty and someone is driving thirty, does that give you the right to drive thirty too?
They absolutely have the right to record audio that is audible on their property. It used to be the norm that if you don't want your neighbors hearing you the onus is on you to speak quietly in a private place. With the increase in such devices the norm too will shift to "know that a device is recording audio in certain zones"
One should travel about the same speed as all the other traffic and one should not record people without their express consent regardless of the law.
The behavior both you and the person you replying to are advocating for are just examples of being a jerk within the letter of the law.
Will we then just have to always assume that a device is recording audio in all zones?
Countermeasures will be figured out, but it's an interesting thought process.
Sure, one can have laws, but these kinds of laws are incredibly hard to enforce when it becomes trivial for everyone and their grandmother to break the law. It's frankly much easier to police Lyft/Uber usage than this.
[1] Cone of Silence from Get Smart...?
- Whether the recording was intentional (i.e. if I set up cameras for security, and it so happens to record all your conversations on your front porch, this is unintentional, but if I set up a microphone by the wall, it's intentional).
- The type of communication - most resources I'm finding discuss phones and similar channels.
From what I could find:
I just checked one state: Video recordings are fine, but if they capture the audio of the conversation, then it's a violation of the law.
Other places define a violation of reasonable expectation of privacy to require an explicit intent to eavesdrop - so if it's a side effect of my security system, it's not illegal.
In a number of states, your front porch or backyard are not considered private places. If the conversation is between you and someone else (not the neighbor), then by federal law, intentionally recording the conversation is illegal (neither party consented). When it's unintentional, it'll probably vary from state to state.
In most places they can point the cameras onto the exterior of your property. But if it can see inside a bedroom (even if the window is open and no curtains are drawn), it can be a violation.
Interesting side effect of searching for this: Video monitoring of your baby may be illegal!
That‘s not at all the case in many other legal contexts.
Clearly it's impolite to peer into your neighbours windows with binoculars, and gossip about all the conversations you overhear with your hearing aids, but you've got the right to do so, don't you?
What about observing your neighbours through a peep hole in your door (or wall)? What about setting up a camera instead of a peep hole? And what if you want to see the camera feed from your phone? Reference it for later? Where is the line? All of these, including pens and paper, are technological augmentations to our innate capabilities. I'm not against banning them per se, I'd just like a clear idea of why we ban some and not others.
Can you think of any reasons why we would want to ban some and not others? It reminds a bit of something that Emma Goldman might say: people have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.
Say in 1000 years from now everyone has cameras and storage media implanted in their persons, I suspect the public consciousness surrounding what is and isn't expected to be recorded would change. I don't however think that your fundamental liberty as a human being should depend on the public consciousness, but rather be derived from principles/axioms.
If you avoid this question, you can justify just about any tyranny so long as it can be argued to be "beneficial" (spoiler alert: this is how the worst atrocities in history have been justified). In other words, the ends don't justify the means.
I've learned my lesson and now invite people to our backyard, which is free of any cameras.
It’s valid to question the value of laws. Sometimes I wish I did have more privacy in public.
But more importantly, technology has completely changed what non-privacy looks like and is tragic to me that laws haven’t caught up.
There’s a huge practical difference between “someone within 100ft, probably a neighbour who I know, might hear me and probably instantly forget what I said, but 99% of the time no one is there” and “100% of your conversations are recorded, transcribed, and stored forever by a profit-maximising behemoth with various other unavoidable tentacles into my life, and also they might sell or give that data to other companies also the police”.
I'm curious what others think of the ethics of a non-internet connected camera? Does that really resolve the issue or do you still consider it wrong to have residential security cameras that capture the sidewalk/street outside the house?
If you share a wall with a neighbor, it's always best to try and resolve things through direct communication. Our kids still play together, and they still come over and vice versa.
I made my point, and they actually engaged in helping mitigate my concerns. I certainly can't ask them to remove their camera, so that's why we took this approach. They met us half way, but clearly felt something more when one of them over reacted.
I also the think there is a practical difference between occasionally/potentially being observed when entering/leaving your property, and having your comings and goings surveilled 24/7/365
Dystopian doorbells: how the humble door buzzer turned into mass surveillance network
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32079896
https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/property-news/vi...
A very interesting piece of info is that «microphones that can pick up audio from up to 25 feet away». The Evening Standard is a British newspaper, and the article tackles the legal matters, but does not mention audio recording. Maybe an overlook, or maybe concerned people should check the audio related regulations further.
> Video doorbell owners must be careful not to place their cameras in areas where they might breach neighbours’ privacy. Any footage detected outside of your property is likely to breach UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws
[1] https://ico.org.uk/your-data-matters/domestic-cctv-systems-g...
[2] https://www.icaew.com/library/subject-gateways/law/legal-ale...
It was a strange experience as around 30% had these ring doorbells. It was unpleasant to know I was being recorded and judged, and often as a result, not answered.
I vowed at that point we would never consider one, if only because I don't agree that everyone should be treated with suspicion by default.
I've also had two cases of salespeople who didn't understand the phrase "not interested". One escalated to me threatening a trespass call before he left. (This is with No Soliciting signs clearly visible)
I worry my wife would not get the same effect.
Are they wearing a uniform? If they are pretending to be part of a company and not wearing a uniform, that is suspicious.
What about the time of day? ADT sales people don't knock on my door at 8pm at night.
How are they acting? Are they waiting calmly? Are they checking their pockets or waistline? Are they glancing around seeing if other people are around?
Are they hiding their face?
Did they ignore a no soliciting sign?
Did they walk by and check out the property before approaching the door?
Did they knock on my neighbors door first? Or did they come straight to my door?
Did they park? Where did they park? Was it a company vehicle?
How many people is it? Are those people dressed in a similar way? Are they all standing together or did one of them wander off?
If you don't answer immediately, how do they act? Do they get annoyed and wander off or do they become insistant? Do they escalate to knocking or shouting?
Ugh, the idea that these things would be encouraging neighbors to become unneighborly by using Ring cameras as screening devices is truly dystopian. Helping neighbors with pets that have gone astray seems like one of the most basic neighborly and and potentially reciprocal interactions. I really hope you found your cat. I agree with commenter above that the prime utility of these for Amazon is as a form of delivery receipt mechanism for the army of Amazon's last mile contractors. The panopticon eye effect of the Ring network appears to be just another externality foisted on society by Mega Corp.
If you had asked your neighbors nicely to view their Ring history, you would have mostly likely gotten even more clues or even found your cat.
And it’s hard to ask something nicely to someone that doesn’t even answer based on your looks or whatever.
What if people were just...doing something else? At work? At the movies? Driving? Pooping?
Do you feel judged when you walk up to doors with peepholes?
The story about the cat was just a background line to give context for why I was calling on my neighbours, but it could be any number of reasons, I might even have been saying hello after moving into the area. That's not enough information for you to judge, or to know that we picked up the cat as a stray and took it in, but it is very much an outdoor cat and we're ok with that - it is after all, where we found it.
Are you always so judgemental and critical?
I was against Ring cameras because of the privacy implications, but the neighbors that own Ring cameras being the ones that managed to avoid being interrogated about a "lost" stray cat is the most convincing argument in support of them that I can imagine.
Friend: Have you any success bringing your neighbors on board.
Me: There's been a setback. They're currently not speaking with me.
Friend: That is unfortunate. We're talking a lot of money.
Me: I know. I'll fix it.
Friend: You better.
On the other hand, I've personally had success with the police and court systems based on video evidence I could provide from my doorbell camera. Also, previously I had a long-lasting issue with a neighbor at my old house who would get really nasty about my yard and other issues (I suspected old age and mental issues) that completely ended once I put up a security camera to record the area he was doing this from.
If I do end up ever getting more security cameras, my plan is to show my neighbors exactly what angle they're recording and make sure they're OK with it. While I technically have the right to record whatever I want to in my state, I'd rather not make anyone feel uncomfortable. I recently came across a video where someone ended up pointing IR lasers at their neighbor's cameras and it was an effective way to disable the cameras without breaking any laws [1]
I have to do that or I get notifications constantly. I told my front cameras to only say something if someone shows up on my front step, or drives into my driveway. I don't want to get a notification every time someone walks down the sidewalk, or when the neighbors get home.
Although honestly, I get lots of notifications for the neighbors anyway. Because they seem to think a 30 foot wide road is narrow and they end up using my driveway regularly when getting into and out of their own. Not really a camera problem though.
But they're all cool with it, so there's that.
People often care about these sorts of high level, idealistic concerns like "privacy" and "freedom" right until you offer them the smallest "concrete" benefit. Look at 23andme. Hey, can we take your blood, analyze your DNA, and send it to the police? No? What if we also told you what percentage Western European you are, would that convince you to pay us for the service?
This sounds like the justification of stupidity. If you don't know what it does it ignoring may or may not be safe. If you can't observe a benefit to you (I assume you mean obvious and causual observation) doesn't mean it doesn't benefit you.
It's like you've codified ignorance to make it sound reasonable. This is the same level of thought my cat uses to interact with the world.
He also says " so we ignore the vague costs against the concrete benefits."
Which implies him and people like him or around him. Normally if someone wanted to indicate that they would say "some people think.." or "in their world/mind"
Doesn't read that way at all to me. Reads like a very accurate depiction of reality.
“Thinking is hard work. That may be the reason so few engage in it.”—Henry Ford
" so we ignore the vague costs against the concrete benefits."
At the end of the first paragraph. He could mean "we" as in people though. He also didn't qualify the statement with something like "Some people.." "Many think..". Finally he offers no criticism of why it may be bad to think like this.
However, you're right and reading it now after the comments people made makes that seem more of a possibility than when I first read it.
You'll note from this source that "big technology companies" score above all 3 branches of the federal government. Part of this is how partisan politics has become, so one party will have a majority of people expressing trust in an institution their party controls, the other hardly anybody, resulting in a fairly low score for the presidency and supreme court. Congress, it seems, is so universally despised it doesn't matter who controls it, it sits at single digit trust percentage.
In light of this it becomes understandable why somebody would be fine with big tech spying on them at the behest of the police (another institution with pretty high universal trust, though it does vary depending on political affiliation a bit it's considerably higher than any federal institutions), yet react with suspicion from something set up by bureaucrats from a federal agency.
When Republicans think of Congress they think Nancy Pelosi / AOC.
That's how congress gets low ratings
Of course, as a property owner you can request cameras facing public space, but you must be GDPR compliant then and you're put into register and anybody can requests deletion. Also you must provide valid reason for this request.
To me(us) is absurd that you can record private citizens and do whatever you want with it. Ridiculous.
I even tried to meet them half way and said you can keep recording audio and video, now that I understand the trigger zone, but I was met with hostility the next day when I saw one of them in person.
Although, even with the trigger zone, they can just live stream it anyways, not that they are that kind of people, but clearly, I struck a nerve with them. I am still friends with one of them, and all their kids. So it's just one family member that sees things differently.
Impossible to believe with the ubiquity that they haven't decreased crime. Or at least certain types of crimes.
Prior to this type of video only a small amount of people had security cameras and generally they were easily spotted.
Today anyone committing (again a certain type of) crime knows that if they drive into a neighborhood or walk around they will be on a camera somewhere and multiple times. That has to have an impact even if there isn't data to prove it.
No camera will deter someone like that.
They are the crime
Go to https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ and filter by "CCTV," a few are for residential cases, e.g. https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ETid-1226.
The reason I support people running their own security cameras is because I recently had a woman go off on some wild diatribe about how my property looked (which actually belongs to my landlord) and she became very upset to the point of trying to force my front gate open as I shut it. Since then she's gone on some proxy wars with other people in the neighborhood. Obviously her behavior will continue to escalate and because I have no cameras I have no way to show she was willing to use force and intimidation from step 1.
Ring does have the ability to set "blackout zones" in the camera's FOV, and as a good neighbor the ring owner could have excluded the neighbor's driveway/porch with a few clicks.
Parent commenter is correct. The laws in your area are not the laws in every area. Some states and cities have restrictions on recording, even in public areas.
Illinois is one of the states with laws that prohibit many kinds of incidental audio recordings, while video is allowed. As was explained to me by a downstate communications lawyer, it's because the laws were passed by mobbed-up politicians before video was a thing, in order to protect mobsters from federal investigations.
Even today, when you see undercover recordings taken by local TV news stations in Illinois, there's never any audio.
According to this article [0] by the senior counsel and ethics officer for the Illinois Department of Central Management Services,
> The threshold questions are whether the conversation is private, and whether the recording is done secretly. The law allows recording if the conversation is not private, that is, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy as defined above. Also, there is no violation unless the recording is “surreptitious,” defined as “obtained or made by stealth or deception, or executed through secrecy or concealment.”
[0] https://www.isba.org/committees/governmentlawyers/newsletter...
If you post a video with voice online you are breaking the law in Illinois, unless all parties gave you consent. I don't even know how something like RING camera is legal since it is being uploaded to the cloud and the parties don't consent to it.
Edit: Illinois actually made some changes to the law, that allows recording of voice in public spaces.
I believe it's the reason Nest defaults to not recording audio, because the law various by state, and even mixed within some states. For 2-party (all-party) states, you can't record audio on security cameras (or at least it's a bad idea, and likely illegal).
You can record audio in public, and a street facing audio recording is low risk, unless the microphone is so sensitive that there is an argument you are picking up audio from, for example, a neighbor's back yard. I think a sign indicating audio and video recording is sensible.
That said, a backyard facing camera has real risks about the video and certainly the audio coverage. A reasonable person would not use audio recording and would carefully manage coverage to exclude neighbor's private spaces.
A sign indicating audio recording was taking place is directly comparable to the standard "This call is being recorded for quality assurance" that's ubiquitous on corporate call queues. That's reasonable enough for consent in the context of security cams. If someone wants to talk on your doorstep after seeing the notice that's reasonable enough, if you don't consent then don't go up to the camera and talk about some private subject.
I never would give a neighbor a hard time about a camera pointing at a publicly visible spot on my property- just into windows and other semi-private locations. That includes both audio and video. I ascribe to the "it's legal for journalists to go through your trash, so if you want privacy, shred your trash first" philosophy.
I added a new camera that includes the school across the street and if the cops come by and ask for footage, I generally provide it (they asked for a breakin across the street, but my camera wasn't pointed there).
One important details is that I buy fairly generic cameras that aren't talking to the outside world/cloud services although it's still a risk.
In Germany people have successfully sued their neighbours for that and I fully agree with the courts. Filming others without consent is invasive.
1) acceptable behavior
2) enforceable, practically
I think video recording laws are largely influenced by 2).
I can angle my Ring camera to my smoking hot neighbor so I can record her doing yardwork. Creepy AF (breaks rule 1) but at what angle is it not obviously deliberate? Turned 10 degrees toward her lawn? 30?
Point being, I think US recording laws are too liberal but we need a defineable limit for privacy.
Maybe photon distance? Capturing photons traveling further than 30m into the aperture is invasive? (half kidding)
The nextdoor homeowner probably has a right to setup a tripod, a laser pointer (or a similar bright spot light) and point it directly at the neighbor's Ring camera iris.
Probably too late to add that this was a hypothetical, but I'm glad the voting on this indicates how much we despise what's legally allowed.
The line between "please don't point your camera onto my property" - something I would respect as a courtesy regardless of the law - and "I'm going to cross the street not to interact with this person" goes straight through mental illness in my opinion. Normal, stable people do not behave that way.
It's not clear that "on your property" counts as "in public" in all cases.
Because of this, it's legal for someone to point a camera right inside your window or front door. It's also illegal (public indecency) for you to be naked in your own window or open door.
That's legal in Canada, or at least the police won't arrest you if you do it in your apartment across from a school.
I understand some folks have different privacy standards than me. I'm not asking you to follow my privacy rules, as they are a bit more open about public spaces than many people enjoy.
If somebody wanted me to not point my camera at their driveway, a legal threat would be the absolute worst way to achieve it.
And obviously a legal threat is a last resort after good-faith questioning.
I am not really sure what your objection is to the comment above yours, because these concerns seem misplaced.
Private spaces that are publicly visible do not automatically become public spaces, though.
If you tried pointing a camera over my fence into my backyard, then I start complaining.
Yes, agreed! Your front yard is a private space, even though it is publicly visible. You have every right to afford as much public access to it as you please, but the mere fact that you're the one who has the right to make that decision means it is a private space.
I think a major difference is that a permanent camera allows documenting who is entering and leaving a house at which times, while street view or driving by do not. Even a nosy neighbour behind the curtains would most probably not be able to gather a complete history.
I agree, just asking is always a sensible first step, as well as making proactively sure that your camera does not invade anyone's private space, but I can see how that can happen unintendedly.
Does this school have traffic 24/7 and do you broadcast everything from your front steps via a megaphone (and keep recordings)?
There are many comments here about video/audio recordings from public onto private property however there are various degrees of recording.
If there was a public park across the street from your house and someone setup surveillance-level equipment pointed at your front door, I'm not sure there is a rational judge who would consider this "oh well, they're on public land, nothing we can do here".
These are both, basically, bogeymen. But the German bogeyman is the Nazis returning and the American bogeyman is the transient murderer.
Eastern Germany had another authoritarian surveillance state after the Third Reich. I have no good reason to be confident that it will not happen again. It could as well happen in the US, considering recent history.
An authoritarian surveillance state that is paired with digital surveillance is the grim reality of at least hundreds of millions today and that model seems to be on the rise internationally.
Anyone who thinks that the power of the surveillance state won't be abused is naive. The existence of "benign" surveillance hinges on those with power always acting in good faith and never faltering. There are practically zero repercussions for abusing that power, and little to no checks and balances, either.
It already has.
I do, however think Germany's law goes a bit too far: as I understand it, use of surveillance cameras on private property without warning signs is illegal even if a person would have to be trespassing to be recorded. I do not think trespassers should enjoy a right to privacy with regard to their trespass.
I'm not sure how universal is, and it's not always reasonably possible to know who is listening. You can listen from afar. But I would think most states have eavesdropping laws that include overhearing. Here is an example from my state, Kentucky.
https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/chapter.aspx?id...
This law covers both listening and recording.
A similar law could be written to cover viewing using magnified optics; existing laws in the US are usually written in terms of a reasonable expectation of privacy, which is not always clearly defined. I think anything viewable from a public place with an unaided eye would probably not fall under that category.
When I see people saying "You idiot, of course the earth isn't flat!" or "All religions are stupid.", I just think they haven't understood the value of belief, even, or especially, false beliefs.
This whole philosophy of valuing truth and using science and all that is fairly modern and seemingly unnatural. I wonder if it's creating an emotional cost in all the people who rejected emotionally or biologically valuable beliefs in favor of being right.
I can’t and wouldn’t object to someone recoding the sidewalk in front of my house. I can, and absolutely will, object to someone recording my yard. You might not see a distinction but there absolutely is one.
1) Human stands there and watches your property. A description of what happened on your property is subject to whether or not people believe this human, and the fallibility of human memory. This human cannot be there 24/7, and must -- at minimum -- break to sleep, acquire food, and use the bathroom. In reality, they'll have many other demands on their time that mean they can't (or won't want to) spend much time watching your property.
2) A connected, always-on recording device that captures what's happening in high definition, 24/7 (assuming it has an IR light; if not, ok, more like 12/7). This becomes an indisputable, permanent record that can be replayed as often as anyone wants, and that most reasonable people would believe, without question, as reflecting what is truly going on.
How are these two things not fundamentally different? This is approaching "definition of fundamental" territory.
If I hear my neighborhood talking - hearsay
If I record my neighbors talking - admissible evidence
In the end it's private property and that makes it private by default. Nobody can forbid you from looking at it, but imho filming is just as invasive as parking the car there while having greater potential for abuse. Filming has intent that goes farther than just randomly looking around.
And I don't know why I'd spend money in anticipation of a potential crime in front of my home, donating data to Amazon in the meantime. The police is already tracking phones and using other methods no single camera can match.
Indeed, your property or not, it's still a "publicly visible spot", and the creep is legally (in the US at least) allowed to be creepy in this way over your objections
> I can, and absolutely will, object to someone recording my yard.
The creep can, and absolutely will, object to your objections, and be allowed to continue (in the US at least).
Privacy requires constant vigilance, in terms of electing lawmakers.
Yeah, I see nothing wrong with this: The law has to ask you, the owner of the camera, for the footage. No legal process can circumvent your knowledge of the footage request, and you can review the footage prior to handing it over. This is all possible because you made good non-cloud infrastructure decisions.
This is basically how it should work, but the fact that Amazon is a third party means the government can legally compel them separately from you being aware. There's no fix for this: Cloud storage is a critical failure of the design of the Ring system.
Having said that the cameras only trigger recording action that happens on my property. Other places might appear in view but they don't trigger a recording.
Wear a mask, and smear it with peanut butter. Or spraypaint.
Or, since they are wifi based devices, do a deauth attack against all devices on their network. The Rings don't have much of a local storage buffer.
Although now I’m imagining this taken to the extreme, like if your neighbors set up a 24/7 HD video feed with a hyperbolic microphone etc aimed directly at your front porch. That sort of behavior is certainly weird.
Only your own property is allowed.
In terms of decreasing crime I live in Oakland in a duplex. Downstairs was empty and crooks broke in and stole a bunch of stuff over several hours earlier this year. We only had a camera doorbell for our upstairs unit and I have footage of one of the crooks walking around the corner with a crowbar, seeing the camera and immediately turning around and walking away. The camera was a huge deterrent for them and I believe the only reason our upstairs didn't get broken into where we were fast asleep.
We now have cameras on every door + a floodlight in the backyard.
I sometimes see people with their cameras pretty well hidden. That's not going to work as a deterrent!
what i also suggest is play police radio. nothing scares this demographic than hearing police radio chatter describing what is happening
Shitty = you ask your neighbour not to point their cameras at your house, and they ignore you. Seems unnecessary.
I haven't been following this very closely, but my assumption is that the proliferation of recording devices have rendered these laws impractical to enforce, thus somewhat moot.
https://fireflies.ai/blog/call-recording-laws-in-50-states-3...
And we're in a thread where someone is describing a scenario where neighbor A records person B talking to child C. Neighbor A is not a party to the conversation. Whether a state has a one party or two party statute, this behavior would likely violate it.
Fascinating. How does Ring get around this? Has no one tried to sue to force the issue?
And to sue the neighbor, well, you'd have to know that they actually were capturing your conversation and feel like suing your neighbor.
* Getting a partial face/partial vehicle ID of someone who stole our package
* Seeing the sneaky method in which they stole the package (allowing me to talk to neighbors warning them about the method used)
* Getting a private instant announcement of who exactly is at the door (if they've been here before and they're in my contacts)
* Notifying us while on vacation that someone out of the ordinary is at the door (and being able to speak to them as if we were home)
* Deterring raccoons (bright light on the front of the camera)
Not-so-useful things:
* Seeing the large number of cars that like to use our driveway to make a U-turn
There is an option to turn off audio recording and all footage is encrypted.
Unsurprisingly, I am not a fan of the surveillance state that's found itself at my literal doorstep.
The difference here is that Ring and its companion apps like Neighbors continuously send their users scary alerts and video clips of innocuous neighborhood activities they'd otherwise miss entirely, or just ignore. I see this all the time with such apps like Nextdoor and Neighbors, where in the past loud sounds in the summer would be written off as fireworks and ignored, but now we have legions of people working themselves into frenzies about how "gun shots" were detected, with calls to action for video evidence of the "perpetrators". What then happens is that people start sharing clips of their neighbors doing essentially nothing and accusing them of actually committing crimes.
If you're emitting pressure waves or reflecting radiation flux and it crosses into my property, am I allowed to record and analyze it? And both the law and morality basically say "kinda, maybe, I dunno, depends." To wit: it's generally considered gauche to take photographs of you doing harmless things in your backyard, but if you're building a meth lab back there, you can be certain a neighbor will take photos and submit them as evidence. But how do they know it's a meth lab without looking in the first place?
The rights and responsibilities around data storage and analysis are context-specific and complicated.
Ring also lets you set up privacy blocks on recorded footage, so you could ask them to black out your driveway.
I did that with the camera that shows my driveway, due to the curve of the driveway, it also shows part of the neighbor's house, so I blacked out their windows in the camera feed. I sent them a screenshot and asked if they wanted me to black out their entire yard, but they were fine with my video capturing any activity in their little used side yard.
Is there something specific you’re talking about?
You really lose me with this, though:
> I believe these cameras haven't decreased crime. They also don't really add more security.
Based on what?
My sister has cameras on the outside of our house. When neighbors asked her to point them away from their houses, my sister also lost her shit. Even when the police came by, she got so upset that the police re-aimed her cameras when they got her distracted.
For some reason people who get involved in shootings try to hide their guns in our neighborhood (there are some unique cars and unique landscaping in this neighborhood). Her cameras have resulted in the police recovering about a dozen guns during 2021 and several arrests when the perps come by a few hours later to pick them up.
If you are a person that is willing to do crime and you see a camera, you do not stop doing crime. You find another target.
Should something be done about it? Sure. But that's where we are.
The very first thing I did when I moved into my new house was completely disconnect/disable all networked security & "smart" home systems. I have a Ring doorbell, but it is not receiving any power. I figure the simple sight of it may still serve as a deterrent.
Most of the "smart" home things I permit today utilize bimetallic strips for their decision making.
The small handful of valuables we have are either stored in an obscure enough place that the thief would have to devote longer than 5 minutes to finding it, or so esoteric that I doubt a random burglar would recognize its value.
Don't worry, the plutocrats will come knocking on your door long before the government does.
https://www.cartooningforpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/0...
(Jeff Danziger, cartoonist, NY)
from
http://www.cartooningforpeace.org/cartoonotheque/nouvelles-t...
Please if you want to surveil your property and people nearby, choose devices that capture it locally or to your private cloud. You can then choose to hand it over to police when warranted.
That's just being worried about the police with extra steps. An F15 doesn't stand on a street corner and a surveillance dragnet doesn't kick in your door.
I live in a rough neighborhood and am concerned about theft, but I have 0 faith or trust in companies like amazon.
If I want a security camera that I can check remotely, but I want to own my data and have complete privacy (no snooping by the company, no ability for them to give my data to some one else).
Do I have any options for this other than completely rolling my own?
Personally, I moved from BlueIris and I've been incredibly happy with Frigate which is configured to pull from my local IP cameras - none of which have direct access to the internet: https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate
You can check in via browser assuming you have some method of accessing your local network. Paired with a google coral device (or a beefy CPU) alongside local storage, it also has the ability to detect objects in real-time which often is a feature that requires video processing on a company's server.
If you don’t, Ubiquiti makes a good remote system with on premise DVR.
I think it would be fair to do something like, if you are convicted of a crime, the police keep your face and other biometric data on file for the next five years. Then if you get caught on video committing another crime, they can just use face detection to know it's you.
The way it works now, the power dynamics are all wrong. It shouldn't be Amazon listening to the police who ignore the people, it should be the police listening to the people, and Amazon just sells people a data service.
If the police did keep biometric data in a useful way, I think our society would have to be more explicit about what biometric data we want the police to keep. I don't know what the right answer is, but something like, if you are convicted by a crime then your biometric data is at least kept for a few years, that seems reasonable to me.
For a while, Google was offering reverse GPS lookups of phones to the police. ("List all phones in this bounding box at this time in the past"). If you had Google Maps installed on your phone, then you were automatically opted in to sharing the data.
(I think this may be illegal in some US jurisdictions now; though Biden is talking about specific carve outs preventing sharing of GPS traces near abortion clinics with state governments, so who knows...)
Someone broke into a remote building at 2AM. We had video of them doing it with a precise start / stop timestamp for the event, and of no one else in the area. The police said they couldn't ask Google to query the database for them.
So, we're in a situation where the data exists on everyone, but only abusive law enforcement types and creepy marketers are willing to use it.
We can't even really have an argument about the tradeoffs between privacy and security, since the data isn't available for the benefit of normal victims of normal crimes.
But with Ring etc, I think society gets a really poor law and order benefit in exchange for the privacy cost. We should at least be demanding that if our privacy is invaded we get something out of it.
I live in a dense city where minor property crimes are notoriously common. Last year, after multiple package thefts, one neighbor bought a blink camera for the building entrance. It recorded every time me or my neighbors entered or exited, and it recorded when later my neighbor had yet more packages stolen (thieves easily got through a locked gate and front door). But what do you do then? The cops aren't going to do anything with a video of a guy in a hoodie stealing $200 worth of goods. That stuff is never going to be recovered. Nextdoor in our area has tons of these videos. My neighbor still had to learn to be proactive and defensive. A cost in privacy was paid, but no reduction in crime was enjoyed.
Here are some proposals for potentially more equitable arrangements:
- if the police can have at-will access to our cameras, we should get at-will access to their bodycams. No more of this "10 days after a shooting, family members of the deceased were able to watch key clips of footage selected by the PD"
- if the police claim that having access to our cameras makes them more efficient in solving crimes, then let them put numbers on that efficiency so we can reduce police budgets accordingly
- if the police claim that having access to our cameras makes lets them solve more crimes, then anyone coming forward with footage of a crime should be able to demand that the police make a credible effort to investigate. Oh, not enough resources? My city is in the top 10 in per-capita police spending in the US, and I see _so many_ cops doing absolutely nothing all the time. If I'm going to live in a creepy surveillance state we could at least have an industrious and effective police force.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/31/22258856/amazon-ring-part...
Its not an accident, its the entire reason why they make the doorbells
Law enforcement might catch some more bad guys with 11 extra ring videos, but now every ring user has to worry about local police sharing/laughing/perving at their home videos - is it worth it?
It might have been well intentioned, but Amazon's decision seems dubious.
That's not true though, at all. Users prefer convenience over privacy by far, just look at how much people still use Facebook, Google, TikTok, etc despite having terrible privacy practices. Those videos are too addicting. Being able to monitor your home is too convenient.
20 years ago, if the world's biggest online retailer had a particular security camera that was their most recommended, chances are it would just be a pretty good security camera.
Today, that retailer is deliberately pushing its own products that compromise our privacy so they can collect more data on us in hopes of making more money—and, if that weren't enough, providing it to the police with no warrant, no consent, and no recourse.
In my experience, most "average people"—not tech-savvy people, and not conspiracy nuts—fall into one of two camps on privacy: Either they don't understand that their privacy is likely to be violated by something like Ring, or they do, but they've come to the conclusion that there's no hope for privacy and just given up.
In neither of these cases can true informed consent be possible.
I run a script on_event_end to make a backup on my VPS and also, on_event_start, I record audio:
on_event_start ffmpeg -nostdin -f alsa -i pulse -c:a libmp3lame -ar 44100 -b:a 128k -ac 1 -f mp3 /home/user/motion/%Y%m%d%H%M%S.mp3 &
I just wish they would have chosen a different name, it can be hard to find in a web search.
It's an apt and good name, but definitely not search friendly.
* (1) what gets captured
* (2) who gets what gets captured
Walk down the street of any middle-class neighborhood in a major suburb: a healthy chunk have cameras. Let's say 60%.
So, you and your family are being passively surveilled on a massive scale … for the benefit of someone who's not you preventing another someone from stealing their bike.
Is this a reasonable tradeoff? Is it fair to others?
Buying your own and hosting it yourself would pay for itself in just a couple months with something like Reolink RLC-510A and a cheap VPS https://www.lowendstock.com/.
Devils advocate:
You word this in a way that implies it is negative, but the fact so many people do it suggests many or most people don’t agree with you. Maybe having cameras around makes the average person feel safe?
It sucks for you as a privacy minded individual, but ultimately who are you to tell your neighbors they can’t have cameras on their property? The street itself is public, there’s no implied right to privacy for what can be seen from the public road. Truthfully many American suburbs have only ever had privacy by chance, many places in more urban locales there’s always eyes from the public street. It’s just happened that because cars are efficient and convenient, nobody walks by or spends time on the sidewalk in the modern American suburb. That doesn’t mean they have no right to do so.
Interesting point! Attempted interpretation: "I'm a person walking by a house that has a camera, and it makes me feel better knowing there's a recording of what's happening to me … in the event that I'm robbed/harassed/assaulted/etc." Also: no need for an alibi, when there's record of you being pretty much everywhere.
I wonder if anyone has studied whether cameras being present in communities increase the net level of trust with which people operate? I would assume the net benefit would be "everyone's less worried/suspicious, so operates with greater baseline trust."
This feels like similar territory as social media, where we (humans) tend to think the system operates with the same set of rules/principles as normal socialization, but vastly underestimate the scale in which we're now operating.
The same busy-bodies posting long Facebook screeds about how they narrowly avoided a pack of child traffickers at Local Suburbia Shopping Plaza with a picture of two hispanic dudes in work clothes and a work van buying diapers.
I find them to be generally unconcerned with anybody else except for the monthly PFP change.
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/13/scam-fr...
I get a notification and a live video on my TV when someone shows up on my doorstep, but not when someone walks by on the sidewalk. It's easy.
But it's easy and reliable and notifies us when somebody drops a package on our doorstep.
HKSV is basically just a long list of videos that are hard to search through. Sure hope they fix that.
Buying a HomeKit hosted camera, and AppleTV, and the prerequisite WiFi network upgrade costs about two hours of my time. Could a standalone camera, ethernet/wifi connection, server, and software be stood up for fewer dollars or less time? I really doubt it.
But to tell you the truth, I hate looking at the camera footage... I just keep a month worth in my archive and never look at it unless something important happened.
How the fuck did people go this insane?
> Although Ring publicizes its policy of handing over camera footage only if the owner agrees — or if judge signs a search warrant — the company says it also reserves the right to supply police with footage in “emergencies,” defined broadly as “cases involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person.”
(…)
> it has provided police with user footage 11 times this year alone.
I would actually be okay with this if it was more public when the standard was met. For example, there’s an armed shooter at the local elementary school in front of my house? Sure, scoop up my Ring footage.
But without more info I have to assume it’s whenever the police say it’s an emergency, which can be anytime they want.
Who defines emergency? If its the police then anything they need it for is an emergency.
It can be faster in emergencies, but in the “cases involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person” this is about, I don't know that it's practical.
I don’t have a problem with turning over footage, but not without my consent. I want to be able to decide when to give it to police.
Similarly, as a citizen of the country, I’m OK that judges can sign a warrant and manage permission on my behalf as well.
As we saw recently, police/local government will often fight against the release of surveillance footage to the public in cases where it makes them look bad. The Austin Statesman had to fight in court for a month to get the footage from the school in Uvalde which showed police just loitering in a hallway for an hour, in the full knowledge that a gunman who had just massacred a bunch of young children was holed up in a room nearby.
I'm not using the term 'loitering' casually. There's one bit of footage showing an officer idly checking his phone, which has 'Punisher' wallpaper.
For me, I try not to get caught up in the day to day arguments of it all and just donate to organizations like the EFF.
whose data is it anyways?
The Quantum Thief series takes this to its extreme, with a technology called "gevulot" which does exactly that by way of a societal exomemory. You can choose to "reveal" any aspect of your self all the way up to your appearance on a person-by-person basis. Highly recommend the book!
I am not an espouser of that legal philosophy. I draw a hard line. Business with me is no one one else's business but me and the customer in question. I believe there is an expectation of privacy in business affairs.
I call it Professional Discretion.
Yes, before you ask, this makes my life comparatively miserable in today's world. No, I'm not amenable to changing my view on it, because I've seen enough of how the rest of the world treats it to realize just how pathological things become when no one respects anyone else's privacy anymore.
You can ask. But it's up to me to say yes. Everyone else has trouble even grokking the concept of asking anymore.
The only person you can control the affairs and effects of is you.
Big data beat the trust out of me. The bigger the dataset, the more likely it is to attract abuse. I started out my computing career with what others described as a near martyr level of dedication to keeping my customers data private. I'm still that, but after working for everyone else in the industry and finding that the moment you give them a scrap of data, you just kicked off a chain of 3 or 4 bulk transfers to people you aren't even aware of...
I can't control them. I can only echo for people the importance of understanding: no one is nice until proven otherwise. Not even me. Trust only what you have made, or what you yourself have been gifted, and can modify.
Your data in the cloud is the data of the cloud service's.
Your data is protected. Your cloud service resident data is not.
My rule is simple. If I cannot point at the drives my 0's and 1's are ultimately stored on, and the drives I point at do not belong to me, operating in in computers I own, it isn't mine. I don't have a fleet of lawyers to navigate the "technically mine" ToS/EULA minefield.
If I own the hardware, and I own the software on it, it is mine. Otherwise, short of levels of audit I find extremely unpleasant, it's an arms length arrangement I personally am intensely uncomfortable with given the track record humanity has demonstrated with prioritizing short-term self-interest against not doing questionable things in the long term.
I find this simplistic treatment of things, while making my life and software choices fewer in number, and less polished, tends to keep my friends and family out of trouble and harms way. They know the lecture is coming, and they still come see me anyway.
Top level comment was a very general blanket statement. I'm saying there's a middle ground.
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
I agree. Remember, cooperation and trust brought you such gems as:
The Trail of Tears
Jim Crow
Standard Oil
The Holocaust
MKULTRA
COINTELPRO
The War on Drugs
WWII internment camps
The Rwandan Genocide
The Uiyghur genocide
Systemic Human Rights abuses
Plenty of other bits and bobs of nastyness no one wants to admit to.
Cooperation and trust is all good when you're the one watching the local outgroup get curb stomped.
Woe be unto the ingroup that becomes the outgroup due to lack of foresight.
I like humans that aren't focusing on targeting other groups of humans.
And factually available to others.
I wonder if they could sue using copyright laws
https://www.securitysales.com/surveillance/who-owns-home-sur...
Not looking for hypotheticals here; I know most oppose the general principle of cloud-backed surveillance devices, but I personally (for better or for worse) have a better impression of Google's attempts to ensure user privacy and security.
We are due for a new leak though.
Plus, Rings are wireless, and too many thieves are just using a wireless jammer.
Is this actually that wide spread? I hardwire all of my cameras but I've never heard of wide-spread wireless jamming in house-hold crime.
I ended up landing on Eufy as it stores data locally. You're free to back it up, and cloud services are completely optional(I don't use them). No complaints, feel free to ask if anyone has questions.
The law doesn't oblige anyone to provide police with information without a warrant. Amazon is choosing to do this.