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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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