Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Unlike eBay, Amazon goes to great lengths to sow confusion about what it sells versus its marketplace participants. The average user thinks that when they buy something off Amazon, they're buying something procured and vetted by Amazon, when it's really a marketplace seller using Amazon's logistics services.
Well, they can't have it both ways, either Amazon is a well vetted marketplace or the wild west. They can't project one image to their customers and claim another in court.
> 【Motion Detection Mode】 When you turn on its motion detection mode, the camera will automatically start to record a video when motion is detected. You do not need to worry about missing any important moments, ensure the security of your home, garage or anywhere you want.
Every line they're sure to end like this is being used for home security, but idk that someone could read this and think that was true
I don't think it's wise to try to end the wild west. At the end of the day, we've been able to send money overseas and get things of questionable quality practically forever; some of the earliest writings are complaints about quality of foreign sellers. It's unreasonable to expect a courier to accept full responsibility for the packages it delivers, and it's usually not feasible to take effective action against a foreign seller.
It might be reasonable to require a registered agent for a seller who is realistically subject to the legal jurisdiction(s) where products are warehoused/shipping originates though. It's generally pretty easy and inexpensive to find registered agents for incorporation requirements, but I imagine if there were real consequences for registered agents of products being warehoused, costs would be real as well. If that drives people to Aliexpress, so be it?
Getting scammed on Amazon is different. Amazon should be fully liable since very sophisticated customers can be confused by commingling, marketplace settlers, algorithmic recommendations, etc. all designed to look legitimate to the unwary while being completely unsafe.
I stopped buying food and medical products on Amazon because... scams.
People forget how bad it was before Amazon, packages took weeks to deliver with even less accountability than Amazon (i.e no reviews). I remember the days of paying $40 for a 3 foot HDMI cable. Bought an unsafe or defective product at a “Trusted” retailer? Enjoy your $3.50 check from the class action lawsuit 3 years later.
Given that Amazon reviews are utterly worthless, I'm not sure that's an example of Amazon having more accountability.
Only if you needed it right away, though? And even then, back when Google search actually worked, I was able to get an HDMI cable within walking distance (in Beverly Hills, no less) by searching for "cheap HDMI cable Beverly Hills". You'd only pay full freight if you were buying for something important, like a business meeting, that meant you needed it right now and didn't have time to look. That was over a decade ago. I bought most of my stuff from two local businesses that have, unfortunately, discontinued their retail sales in one case (it was never a big part of their business, they mostly do bespoke projects to wire auditoriums, churches, schools, etc. for AV gear) and gone out of business in the other.
eBay is buying from Some Guy. AliExpress is buying from a sketchy unlicensed and unregulated warehouse in China. Amazon is a store. These are the reputations they cultivated for themselves.
They got rid of it to compete with Wish.com et al who had huge product selections. But the product quality on Amazon has been awful ever since then.
They've also been happy with making it harder for the customer to choose a particular seller (especially one w/o Amazon Storefront site)
I searched "lego" on amazon. Numerous knock off non lego products all over the place, many with very similar boxes, even lego numbers and fonts and all.
It's just one ongoing scam site now.
I can get my weekly groceries, soap, toilet paper, a TV, and socks with a handful of clicks. On my doorstep. The same day I click. No driving to a store, no walking around, just grab off my doorstep. This is the entire reason I find Amazon worth it (even a steal!). I don’t care for millions and millions of items, of which many are duplicitous clones.
This marketplace trend has been completely ridiculous and I hope Amazon (among others!) are found to be just as responsible for what’s sold. A lot of electronics I’ve seen are dodgy at best, but very clearly dangerous at their worst. If there’s a problem, just spin up a new nonsense “brand name” to mask the problems of the former one.
This marketplace trend has completely turned me off from other websites. Target and Walmart’s websites are immensely frustrating. I haven’t used Newegg in ages.
If I can't find what I want in a local store, I order directly from manufacturer's websites instead of using any online marketplace (when possible -- which is the majority of the time).
Spycams are legal to sell in the US, and it is the responsibility of owners of cameras to use them legally. I wouldn't expect a brick and mortar store to certify that the products they sell are impossible to be 'used to “infringe privacy,” “surreptitiously record others for sexual purposes,” or “create and store child sex abuse material”' and be held liable when one of their products is used as such. Perhaps the sale of such cameras should be more regulated, but it shouldn't be Amazon's place to decide that the law is insufficient and fix it.
But the question here doesn't seem to be about whether Amazon should have certified that; according to the article, they did, obviously falsely:
> Amazon's Product Safety Team specifically inspected the camera to "ensure" that Amazon wasn't platforming a product being used to “infringe privacy,” “surreptitiously record others for sexual purposes,” or “create and store child sex abuse material.”
And Amazon often seems to label random products "Amazon recommended" including those from completely made-up Chinese brands.
> Amazon has been happy to rake in commissions for years from dodgy products sold by third party sellers (uncertified electrical equipment, scam flash drives/SSDs, spycams, etc)...
Kinda wondering what the product actually looks like, and how Amazon allowed it to be presented.
Edit: whoa, @navels how'd you do that?! Thank you, amazing: https://web.archive.org/web/20230527030738/https://www.amazo...
The product reviews are creepy.
--
Rest of my comment for posterity:
There's an image in TFA, though it's only a partial, limited view: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/MS-v-...
Another article from yesterday contains a zoomed in image but no description: https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/12/amazon-may-be-...
If we knew the product ID it could be checked for existence on archive.org.
Anyhow, the research link I used is: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22it+wont+attract+attention...
It was sold as a nanny cam which is really a legitimate, if slightly distasteful, function. There is an image of it shown with towels on the hook, but it isn't stated or implied that it should be used to spy on people as they use the bathroom.
I'm a big fan of holding tech companies to the same standards as other industries, but not a big fan of holding them to unreasonably high standards.
If they are a legitimate product, how do we tell the legitimate product from this (in your words) "crappy attempt at covering the seller's ass?"
If they are a legitimate product and we can't reasonably tell the difference, why should Amazon have banned this product?
And even a towel bar or clothes hanger does not automatically mean bedroom or bathroom either.
Closets and towel bars can and do exist anywhere, like kitchens, laundry rooms, front and rear entrances, mud rooms, workshops, offices, stock rooms, really anywhere.
They are even legitimate IN bedrooms, if it's your own bedroom. It's wrong obviously to peeping-tom on a guest or tenant, but if I want to monitor my own bedroom when I'm not in it, I certainly can, and that means the product can't be automatically invalid to exist.
So maybe competitive shitting?
1. Weight participants, feed them equally. Whomever has the shortest time time from start to end of defecation wins. 2. Highest weight of of single, uninterrupted mass. 3. Best form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzXPyCY7jbs
According to Slavoj Žižek, Germans love Hermeneutic stool diagnostics.
>Žižek on toilets. Slavoj Žižek during an architecture congress in Pamplona, Spain.
>The German toilets, the old kind -- now they are disappearing, but you still find them. It's the opposite. The hole is in front, so that when you produce excrement, they are displayed in the back, they don't disappear in water. This is the German ritual, you know? Use it every morning. Sniff, inspect your shits for traces of illness. It's high Hermeneutic. I think the original meaning of Hermeneutic may be this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics
>Hermeneutics (/ˌhɜːrməˈnjuːtɪks/)[1] is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than interpretive principles or methods we resort to when immediate comprehension fails. Rather, hermeneutics is the art of understanding and of making oneself understood.
>“In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. [...] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. [...] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.” -Slavoj Žižek
An in-toilet shelf-cam paired with a mobile xitter app would be the shit: a Hermeneutic tool for "the art of understanding and of making oneself understood"!
This one (https://web.archive.org/web/20231204210803/https://m.media-a...) shows hooks in what looks like a mudroom catching an image of a person in black clothing in a ski-mask, indicating a use case of the hook would be to surreptitiously record a thief.
On the archive, it is advertised as a "Hidden Clothes Hook Camera, Mini Spy Camera HD 1080P, Nanny Cam with Motion Detection, Wireless Security Camera for Home/Office/Pet Monitor, Video Recorder No WiFi Needed, No Audio" with no mention of it being a "bathroom spycam."
There is actually one person who left a review and seems to have bought it with a less nefarious purpose than spying on someone in the bathroom:
> I set this up on my back window to keep an eye out for any suspicious activity in the area behind our house. We share a communal back yard area and people tend to walk through quite often. I love how this camera is disguised and I can place it anywhere!
However, it does appear to be marketed for the nefarious purposes despite the comical "bad guy with ski mask" you need to hide the camera from for some reason.
The product description is... wild.
Should I be shocked?
LMAO I hate it when thieves steal my hot water
It seems perfectly reasonable to hold Amazon legally responsible for selling this product even if it was a 3rd party seller (not clear from the article). A product whose intended use is to secretly record videos of people in settings where they will probably not be wearing clothes should be unlawful to sell just as it is (or should be) unlawful to knowingly record such videos without informed consent.
i think what's happening here is really the ideal solution: you can sell a camera that looks like anything, but if somebody uses the towel-hook spy cam that you sold for it's obvious intended purpose, you're liable for the damages.
I definitely don't agree with "thing I don't like should be illegal".
And I can't really agree with "People who sold something I don't like should be liable for it's use".
I think the "blame" for objects should lie in the people that misuse them. Now, obviously, it's a little hard to come up with legitimate reasons to have a towel hook camera. However... All you're asking for is smaller cameras.
To which we restart this whole thing with "These super small cameras should be illegal".
Because with a small camera, what are you going to do? Ban mounts that can hold a camera? You going to ban a towel holder with a pin hole?
Someone is always going to unhappy.
The simple rule for anyone who says “there aught to be law against” is “no there shouldn’t”. There is nothing truly new under the sun. We have broader laws that restrict bad behavior. We do not need to narrowly control life to ever tightening degrees of control.
The bar is lower for a product that some creeper can order something on Amazon and install it with a screwdriver, vs something that requires woodworking (or 3d-printing or injection molding or papier-mâché or whatever) skill in order to disguise.
Edit: the thread here is about selling on Amazon, but I see your response a few levels up mentions legality period. IMO the law should treat marketplaces like Amazon differently than individual possession. And of course, there’s a muddy line in between the two. Which is why I think law should be judged by humans rather than code.
Also, a lot of sold products can be used lawfully as well as unlawfully.
In the end, Amazon's reputation is at stake. It seems like they are cannabalising their reputation that took years to build, by selling questionable items. Hopefully getting bad attention by lawsuits will incentivise them to scrutinize the products they sell or let sell on their platform.
So yes, unfortunately there is no way out of the mechanics of free market/capitalism for this problem.
Most laws could be reduced in the same way, but a lot of dangerous illegal activities have proactive protections, like regulations on purchasing and selling guns, etc.
Small cameras as a class are probably too broad not to sell as a rule, but cameras sold with a specifically designed case to pass them off as other objects might be a step too much. Of course one could always drill a small hole into anything and add a camera, but we shouldn't just be giving the offenders the tools so easily right off the shelf.
I can come up with a few legal uses for this, though. Not many, and I doubt the primary use of this thing is legal. But it means any law would have to involve some kind of balancing test.
I remember people trying to make various open source software illegal under this kind of argument. Debuggers, tool suites, and so on. Because obviously only evil hackers used them, and open source development was a negligible fringe activity.
the case here specifically isn't about misusing things though, it's about using things for exactly the purpose it was advertised for.
"these super small cameras should be illegal" is, again, vague and has probably unintended consequences. for example, an ESPCam has all sorts of legitimate uses, but could easily be turned into a spy cam. should that be illegal?
I imagine that the advertising pictures of the camera holding a towel made this a rather easy decision.
Is the suggestion that should be "marketing that should be illegal"?
I know someone who put a spy camera in their kitchen to catch a person drugging their beverages. Could've just as easily been a coat hook spy camera.
To go at it from another angle, how about those snake cameras that bomb detection units sometimes use. You can use that for illicit purposes and good purposes.
I'm not saying the wrong thing is to ban these things, all I'm saying is that it's not quite so black and white as some people are making this out to be.
That's what's great about the case. They can't claim that they're not liable because it is meant for legitimate use because they advertise specifically for an illegal use.
By their own admission, they have to find a legitimate use of a bathroom spy cam.
Its kinda nasty, actually. stretching it, there might be legitimate reasons for a camera in a bathroom (say the elderly, or making sure a drug test is done honestly). But a hidden camera? No way.
But that's a BS answer IMO. If you actually want to prevent the crime, the criminals have to know the surveillance is there. Make the cameras visible, or take the doors off the bathroom stalls[1]. People will be outraged at that; but hidden surveillance is even worse.
1: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/some-water...
Here is the first result: "1080P Bathroom spy Shower Nozzle Hidden Spy Security Cameras Mini Camera DVR 32GB,Mini Nanny Cam Smart Home, Indoor Outdoor Baby Camera"
https://www.amazon.com/Bathroom-Shower-Security-Cameras-Outd...
Kind of incredible that this still continues. They at least give some kind of cover for the use case of a "baby camera" but honestly even that feels so flimsy. This is disturbing.
I don't know who buys their "Shower shelves" in cans but this whole blurb makes no sense. The picture shows a shower head, not a shelf or a can.
The malicious intent is clear at the end of the quoted paragraph though. Not to mention that I wouldn't know where else to use a shower head other than "even in the bathroom".
For example, pretty early in Web history (before WiFi and then IoT were popular), "X10" cameras were advertised heavily: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kuan/x10.html
I'm not even sure it's humanly possible to look at one of these and not realise the primary use case is criminal.
The only conclusion I'm left to draw from this is either that no actual review takes place, or that the review is merely there to ascertain "is this product literally illegal right now?"
You may disagree with that assertion, but I'd put to you that maybe you just haven't seen some of the top-end products where the only clue is pin-hole sized, or even invisible like hidden behind the LCD screen of a set top box/clock/etc.
OK, I'll see myself out :)
Miniaturization has and will lead to these devices becoming more powerful and everywhere in our environment.
Whatever does develop as a response, one thing is certain:the victims bear the cost for defending themselves once again. thanks to an often overweening, at best misguided, and to be blunt, possibly self-interested motivation to protect the special interests of aggressors, predators and assholes at the victim's expense.
See also: people whose response to someone pointing out that many aftermarket ( and increasingly, factory stock) headlamps are becoming bright enough to blind other drivers is to tell them, with a straight face, to wear sunglasses or get their windows tinted, or look away. At night. While driving.
https://www.kxan.com/investigations/son-of-buc-ees-co-founde...
>The son of a co-founder of the nationally renowned Buc-ee’s convenience store was arrested Tuesday in Travis County and faces 28 separate state jail felony charges of invasive visual recordings. A woman reported she and a few friends were visiting the lake house with Mitchell Wasek when one friend, who works cybersecurity for the Department of Defense, noticed a charging port with a hidden camera plugged into the wall of their bathroom, court records state. The group of friends left with the camera and on its micro-card found dozens of videos of themselves and other people in bathrooms and bedrooms at the lake house as well as at Mitchell Wasek’s Dallas apartment, according to court records.
Another story reports...
>Amazon records linked purchases of a half-dozen spy cameras and hidden cameras to Mitchell Wasek, the affidavit says.
The reality of it is probably that reviewers can only spend ~1 minute per item before flagging it or not, the reviewer was a bit on "autopilot" and didn't flag it because it doesn't look like a camera at all.
Amazon might be able to get out of this if they can show the court a long enough checklist of things they did look for that this does pass. If that list is long enough (a term I specifically did not define!) they can argue they did due diligence, this is just different from everything they thought of and so it slipped threw the cracks. Of course the checklist better have a clear procedure for "something else not on this list" and a it needs to be clear anytime something not on the list is thought of that the process gets that new thing on the list. This is NOT easy or cheap.
I didn't mean to imply that you can. It's more that at Amazon's scale, they are surely constrained by how many new items are put up for sale every second. If even just 1/100 needs to be reviewed, then that's a considerable amount of work. Once the pipeline is setup their workforce probably got progressively better so they increase the review/day targets to match. That loop does not have a lot of feedback so they probably raised it too high at some point and this is the result.
All of that to say, it's much more likely to be a process failure than anything else. They probably tried to optimize that process but cut too close to the bone and this is the result.
But they don't. They could though.
https://www.amazon.com/Bathroom-Shower-Security-Cameras-Outd...
SpyCam
Disclaimer: should not be used for spying
My favorite were winemaking kits sold during Prohibition that told you what you needed to avoid doing, because doing that would make wine.
https://grapecollective.com/articles/prohibitions-grape-bric...
It's worth to point out that the article tells it was legal to make wine in your own home during the prohibition because of a loophole.
Not sure to what extent this is still the case, but when I was messing around with greyzone drugs about a decade ago, they tended to be sold on technically legal, UK, Swedish, Polish etc web stores. They'd have names similar to illegal drugs they were analogues of and like descriptions of the effects. But have the disclaimer "not for human consumption. Research purposes only".
Of course even the purportedly pure chemical products were unsuitable for actual research or standards use due to lack of attestation to purity(at least with most vendors) and so on.
It didn't affect the legality, probably just a weak attempt to avoid potential liability.
The way that I see it if someone is harmed then they are due justice. If Amazon lets dodgy international third party sellers run hog wild and harm consumers then Amazon should be at fault here. Otherwise there is no incentive to police these things, there are victims, Amazon makes money, and sellers aren't held to account. It's ridiculous.
TIL there is a whole "spy cam industry".
Well, good that they are being ruled against. There is no legit use case for this product.
pretty low hanging
but it is federal district court, a bit more serious than a West Virginia state court
fun stakes
After all, do you really want a jury of 6 men (ie dads of little girls), a 6 women (ie identifying with the victim) adjudicating this? When you're one of the most despised companies in America?
Settle Amazon. Settle quickly.
I believe China banned them. There are still spycams from chinese vendors, but I think they only supply foreign customers. Anyone can confirm or has more insight?
What I think is evil is that the firing squad isn't on the table for the marketing department.