Food Delivery Robots Are Feeding Camera Footage to the LAPD, Emails Show

It was video footage of people trying to steal the robot. That feels like a weird basis for an article about the privacy implications of sharing video from delivery robots with the government. Like, of course they are going to provide the video in this particular case, why would they hesitate and why would anyone question it?

"The problem is that neither Kashani, nor Thelwell, nor the company’s privacy policy actually explain how long it keeps video for, what its surveillance policies are, or how it intends to uphold these policies in the face of, say, a police subpoena."

Except that's not the problem in this case. It has nothing to do with it. The article goes on to mention more incidents of vandalism against the robots. Also plainly good reasons to share video with the police.

The expansion of the surveillance state is bad - but honestly this is sort of a weak story. They uploaded footage showing the attempted theft of their own robot to the LAPD. That seems…normal? If they streamed all video to a police server live for later digging that’s totally different. Which is basically what a ring cam does, given that Amazon will happily hand over all footage with a simple request.

I think this is a duplicate of a rightly dead post:

[flagged] [dead] Food Delivery Robots Are Feeding Camera Footage to the LAPD (404media.co) 21 points by lxm 2 days ago | 6 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37698428

> The specific incident in question was a grand larceny case where two men tried (and failed) to steal a robot owned and operated by Serve Robotics

I think there should be legal limitations in place to strictly limit police use of camera footage, but even in my ideal world, this would be fine. A possible crime was identified, the crime was targeted at the device that was recording the video, and the footage was provided voluntarily by the intended victim of the crime.

The headline is completely misleading, unless they decided to hide their best evidence deep in the article somewhere. This seems exactly like a driver providing dashcam footage of somebody running into them. I expect the police are very happy for this case to be held up as an example, since it would tend to calm concerns rather than raise them.

What did I miss? Someone stole a robot with a camera. Video from the robot's camera was given to the police about this case. Normally, all video from the robot's camera is deleted per a short retention policy.

While sitting a public area working on my computer minding my own business not interacting with anyone, a drug user who looked like some of the people abusing the robot in the video had threatened to beat me last week. I spoke with the business with a camera to see if they had evidence of this. The camera also recorded the voice. I called the police and made a report submitting evidence of the assault. How is this different. The camera and police acted as they should. Why is this bad? I'm happy there was camera recording.

"subpoena from the LAPD"

Good.

My question is if this robot drives on to my property, is it trespassing? The answer is obviously yes. If yes, I am authorized to defend my property. Scrub all data upon the crime.

Make the owner responsible, financially, criminally, and these violations will be a priority.

Wow 404 Media already jumped the shark?

At this point, is there any public camera that is not feeding footage back to the government?