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Comment by helen___keller | Hacker News Reader

TLDR:

> 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.

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In your situation, the police should be asking YOU not Amazon for the footage.

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.

In an emergency, you might not be home, or you might be shot.

None of which precludes them from asking first, or attempting to.

You might be off on holiday, or asleep, or in hospital under anaesthesia, and the police might not be able to get in touch with you quickly.

I’m saying that if the “emergency” standard was well described and followed consistently (and I agree with it), then I would OK granting amazon the power to manage this permission on my behalf.

Similarly, as a citizen of the country, I’m OK that judges can sign a warrant and manage permission on my behalf as well.

Another big distinction would be whether they told people when they sent police their camera's footage. Nothing suggest they're doing that, which makes it harder to trust their judgement.

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.

Police will fight the release of basically any information that sheds a light on their activities. In many states, there are no publicly available statistics on things like how much SWAT teams are used, and what for. When some states tried passing laws to require PDs to capture such stats, police unions pushed back hard.

11 emergencies a year across the US sounds perfectly reasonable.

Sure. What were the emergencies though? Police knew a ring cam had evidence of a murder on it? Or police knew ring cam had some footage of where they dropped their keys last night?

Who defines emergency? If its the police then anything they need it for is an emergency.

Also if it’s really an “emergency” then they should be able to use the existing warrant process

Getting a warrant from a judge typically takes a few hours.

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.

In what situation does previously recorded footage on a ring camera need to be accessed as evidence in sooner than a few hours? This footage isnt being used in crime prevention.

I think there was also similar reports with Apple recently. There was some kind of emergency hotline contact or something like that where authorities could request information where it was extremely time sensitive (I think the example given was human trafficking? although my memory was hazy), and they would be provided information without a warrant.

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