Why We Don’t Recommend Ring Cameras | Hacker News Reader

Why We Don’t Recommend Ring Cameras

wired.com

51 pointsfraXis42 comments

what a dystopian article and idea. Homeowners should be prevented from sending Ring video footage to police because there is a risk that these videos might be used to report innocent racial minorities to the police. The presence of this risk apparently outweighs the obvious benefit that one can send videos of real criminals to police. What's next, not being able to call 911?

Criminals are victimizers, not victims. It is UNETHICAL to coerce people into not reporting a crime because of perceived identity-politics based risks. It causes increased harm in the world because criminals who escape are free to victimize again, and do. The authors of this article, and editors at Wired, are participating in unethical, immoral behavior and they should be ashamed of themselves!

By that logic, anything that could potentially ever help catch a criminal is worth any potential cost to anyone who isn't you.

I think I see where you’re coming from here. Presuming that the police are incapable of performing their job without killing innocent people. We see a lot of that on the tv these days, so I understand your perspective. But if we presume that the police are incapable of performing their jobs, then you’re saying it’s never really worth involving them at all. And that’s an even bigger problem.

>you’re saying it’s never really worth involving them at all.

This is the reality for many millions of Americans. I have people in my own family for whom police interaction of virtually any kind will make their situation worse time. There are neighborhoods and communities where the idea of calling the police and actually expecting to receive help will get you laughed out of the room, as everyone in the room knows from actual experience it isn't true. A third of their local taxes go to a thing that will at best never help them.

It isn't by accident that nations have travel advisories warning their citizens about American police.

So how do we fix the actual problem? A functional police service is a useful thing to have and a moral imperative.

American police are sub optimal so we have to stop working with them and get rid of them is a non-sequiter

The idea that policing (or at least anything we would recognize as policing today) is necessary in society is from a universal opinion and certainly has not been the reality for most of human civilization.

"Abolish the Police" is not rhetorical. https://archive.ph/6E7mY

Maybe not having police worked when the population density was like half a person per square kilometer, but with people packed up into tight spaces as they do now, I think you’re living a dream.

In that case, I can’t think of a better advertisement for Ring. A doorbell camera with police on speed dial. Criminals know not to mess around because if Ring sees them doing anything funny an internationally recognized death squad will come knocking.

You missed my entire point. The ring owner in this case is not exempt from being death squad'ed.

The problem isn't the videos of actual crimes. You have deeply misunderstood the article.

And in the important and much rarer situation you do have such a video, you can get it to police without the help of a one-click share button.

I think I understand that you want to make it harder for people to report a video to the police, because you believe these people will call in false reports on racial minorities. There will be some people who will not be able to figure out how to get a video of a crime to police because of that change. That is unethical.

> There will be some people who will not be able to figure out how to get a video of a crime to police because of that change. That is unethical.

No matter how rare that is? It has to be as easy as we can possibly make it, otherwise it's immoral? That other comment is right, by that logic we should share all information with police always.

I don’t think the “logic” you’re pointing out really tracks, to be honest. We should share information with police when we have reasonable belief that a crime is being committed.

But if you make it too easy to share information, less and less of the shared information will be tied to a reasonable belief of a crime.

If it has to be as easy as possible, the oversharing explodes.

If you overshare with the police and none of it is evidence of an actual crime they are going to stop looking. They simply don't have time to watch thousands of videos sent in by paranoid old folks.

They'll stop looking at all of it, but if you give police access to giant databases of information they will search through it to get info they shouldn't have.

You can. Can the average Ring system user? My wife, bless her, struggles with tech and wouldn’t know what to do. Maybe there’s a video save button, then what? You email it to a police station email address? Where would she find a police station’s email address? Maybe she calls them and they tell her. What if the video file is too large for her email client? That’s a road block right there for her, she’d come to me for help with. What if I’m not available? What if there’s simply not much time for me to trim the video file and send it in pieces?

This is mostly whataboutism, but then again, the other side of this argument kind of is too. Sure maybe I send the cops a video, and maybe they recognize the person and go to their home. What are then the odds that the person is discriminated against or presumed guilty by the officer?

Anyway, the one click button is a feature that I don’t think deserves the flack. If the police are doing their jobs, they won’t just go in guns blazing on a guy just because he was snooping around my parked car in the driveway and I shot the video over.

You can directly show the officer the screen playing the video. That requires zero technological expertise.

That presumes that an officer is present, whereas this is a remote sharing feature, correct? So you’re not really giving a comparable option.

If your issue with surveillance camera footage is that it increases the possibility of racial profiling, guess what? You don’t have a problem with Ring, you have a problem with policing.

It’s interesting that the article goes on to include an affiliate link listicle with many other doorbell cameras. I wonder how those other cameras managed to disable the possibility of racial profiling.

I think the point is that if your home surveillance system encourages you to notify police about about any feels-related issue, then that can add a really nasty edge to your or your neighbors unconscious bias. It’s one thing for me to get freaked out because a black homeless lady comes up on my porch at night, it’s another thing for me to call the police on her. Turns out she’s not actually homeless and is actually very nice and downright hilarious, though she does have drug/alcohol problems.

The author does a good job of explaining that it’s precisely the Neighbors software that is the cause for concern here, which is probably why they are less reticent to suggest other brands of cameras which (presumably) don’t have the one-click police video-feed notification button.

I will say that it’s not an amazing argument, just that you may be misreading why they don’t like Ring.

I'd be pretty freaked out if some druggie comes up to my porch at night.. Problem is you call the cops and she has a pretty good chance of getting shot. High school dropout cops doing as they're trained to do.

Am I an idiot? I genuinely don't understand the chain of logic in this article, and I'm not being deliberately obtuse here. You shouldn't have the ability to proactively provide data to law enforcement to report possible crime, and the seemingly unconnected reasoning is racism. I'm honestly puzzled by this article, it feels incomplete.

Maybe I'm being cynical, but the entire article feels like an excuse to have the last two paragraphs with links to their own reviews of "the best video doorbells".

All of which are full of affiliate links, of course.

It's interesting that so many comments are bewildered at the article's argument - that Ring by default puts too much power in the untrustworthy police - when that's the mainstream argument put forth by privacy advocates on web tracking and data collection, an argument that should be pretty familiar here.

Instead of the potential for Facebook/Google/Amazon to abuse your data, it's the potential for the American police to abuse crime reports. Instead of Facebook/Google/Amazon using their data to spy on and manipulate people, it's the police using Ring surveillance to go after minorities.

Whenever you read "police" and wonder what's wrong with police access, pretend it's actually talking about data bogeyman "Facebook" instead. Maybe that'll help some folks understand the reasoning here: it's a classic "don't help the oppressors" narrative that becomes more familiar when you put a techie spin on it.

They don't like that having cameras provides objective evidence of the race of people who commit crime.

They recommend against being able to prevent/punish these crimes, because that might be mean.

> Why We Don’t Recommend Ring Cameras

> They’re affordable and ubiquitous, but homeowners shouldn’t be able to act as vigilantes.

> Ring owners [are allowed] to send videos they've captured with their Ring video doorbell cameras and outdoor security cameras to law enforcement.

Let's think about this one moment. A "security" camera provides security against what exactly? By definition, crime. Crime is handled by whom? Police.

And now homeowners are somehow labelled as "vigilantes" because they can send footage (presumably of crime) to the authorities? How does that even make sense? By definition, vigilantism is law enforcement undertaken without legal authority -- and the police are the very authorities tasked with law enforcement.

Labeling homeowners "vigilantes" along this line of thought is a very obvious oxymoron.

It is ridiculously absurd that any amount of circumstances should be used as a justification for an attack on such a feature. This Wired staff editor was so determined to write about police reform and social biases that they make an illogical argument that has nothing to do with the Ring cameras themselves.

I am not defending Ring, but rather pointing out that this article is both illogical and mistitled. It has nothing to do with Ring specifically and cites no evidence to suggest that the ability to send videos to police -- presumably, crime footage -- increases the likelihood of racial profiling.

An argument like this is analogous to an article titled "Why We Don't Recommend iPhones" where the author writes something along the lines of:

They're premium and ubiquitous, but people shouldn't be able to call 911... When you set up an iPhone, you're automatically enrolled into cellular service... But it also allows iPhone owners to call 911... We believe this feature should not exist. When we interviewed Apple CEO Tim Cook on steps that his company was doing to reduce racial profiling... et cetera.

This is absurd.

Shouldn't this be up to the owner of the camera? I don't see any reason why you wouldn't want to report certain activity to police. Let's say a series of cameras in a neighborhood caught a man looking into windows. And the last camera caught the same man breaking into a residence. Would not the other videos help put a criminal in jail? And that's bad? How? The writer at wired doesn't own a home, lives with their parents, or never had someone try to victimize them where they lay their head. Theirs is a naive look at the world though an ideological lense. Something that doesn't exist in the real world, and a view that gets real people hurt precisely because it enables criminal behavior. If we, as a society, tolerated crime less, then we'd have less of it.

Sounds a bit like you’re projecting. Property crime gets a shrug or a stern lecture on locking your doors. Whatever security measure you took wasn’t enough or the right one.

Law enforcement is note taking, victim blaming, homeless harassment, and ticketing. All of which could be done cheaper and without maintaining a dangerous armed militia.

> Property crime gets a shrug or a stern lecture on locking your doors.

And that's the fucking problem. People won't be resorting to technology if the police would actually do their jobs.

I don’t argue with people who think more policing will fix poverty. I just see them as having gotten roughed up by different thugs.

Ultimately what we’ve got isn’t working and the underlying problems are getting worse.

Eventually it’ll fail enough people we’ll pass a tipping point. Might as well start brainstorming

Nobody thinks more policing will fix poverty. What it might partially fix is people trying to rob me.

Police are hammer. I'm just asking you to reconsider funding bigger and bigger hammers when we need some other tools.

>Police are hammer. I'm just asking you to reconsider funding bigger and bigger hammers when we need some other tools.

I'm all for increasing spending on other tools but sometimes you still need the hammer. Ever try to hammer a something when you don't have a hammer?

Yeah, its called a rock. I have one. You should too. They're legal.

What am I projecting, exactly? This seems more like you're personally insulted, rather than objectively and critically thinking my comment through.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230709122318/https://www.wired...

Frontline has a great mini-documentary calling out the very real privacy and trust violations Amazon faces today: https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s.

- Ring allowing data access to all employees, and to police, without customer awareness. Amazon also created a special interface for police to access Ring footage, at will, in exchange for police departments pushing Ring devices (https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=4702).

- Alexa as listening devices in very personal and private places, for which Amazon employees can listen and view "for training purposes." Dave Limp is on record explicitly stating this is false; "it's not a listening device." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVVfJVj5z8s&t=4490s) And then ambient intelligence rolls out, right after this interview, where Alexa doesn't actually need a wake word to "hear" requests. See also: Ambient, Proactive Alexa (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/amazons-new-head-of...). Make no mistake, Alexa is always listening.

- Dave Limp also skirts accountability for the "cute indoor Ring device" that was hacked and scared a child to her very core, stating it is an "industry problem" (https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=4783).

Notice how Dave Limp's eyes dart both in the "Alexa is not a listening device" and in the "we've already investigated that [the Ring hack] to make sure what the root cause was," along with the lip bite in the "Alexa is not a listening device" clip. Following the question on Alexa and Ring contributing to a dystopian Orwellian reality, notice the swallow after Limp states that "he doesn't want to invent the technology that would create that world." And then the dismissal statement of "that world happened before Ring or Alexa."

Watching people lie is fun.

- Amazon Rekognition (https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=5002) uses Ring data as training data. And then markets that to law enforcement.

Andy Jassy himself states "with any technology, the people that use the technology have to be responsible for it, and if they use it irresponsibly they have to be held accountable" (https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=5147).

Ironically this convinced me to buy a Ring camera.

"You might pattern match on the people who steal your shit" ok? Then I'd be able to report people who steal my shit?

Is this a joke? Am I missing something?

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