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Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

These are mappable in OpenStreetMap with the tags surveillance:type=camera + camera:mount=doorbell

Data query around the Netherlands shows about a hundred are mapped so far as specifically doorbell cameras: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2dQw (the tag does not yet seem established in the USA). There are also many thousands of cameras mapped that are either not doorbell-mounted, or simply not tagged to such detail. This is a convenient map to see all of them: https://sunders.intri.cat/

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And (several times previously on HN), Flock and other ALPR cameras are mappable too.

https://deflock.me/identify

Seems like a fairly impractical thing to map unless you're getting volunteers to walk up to and inspect people's front doors. I know there is an app for a sort of gamified version of this where people take tasks to verify street signs or even how many stories a building has, I used that app for a while, but doorbell mapping seems a lot leas casual.

Walk up to door with stack of papers with a stock photo of a puppy on it that says lost puppy. Check if there's a camera. If the owner comes outside, ask them if they have seen this puppy.

And then at door 125,000 you finally reach the home of the puppy that’s in the stock photo you printed. And they say “Why yes, we have seen this puppy. How did you know??”

So use one that you know to now be dead.

Well this is taking a dark turn

We live in the age of generative AI.. can't you just use one of those instead?

See https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/ for some ideas!

"That puppy is an AI fake, you must be casing the neighborhood."

And then remember you live in America and you get shot for walking on someone's property.

Joking, a little, but seriously: the culture in the US has rotted to such an insane degree. Not only are we not friends with our neighbors, I'm actually scared to talk to them!

I participate in Nextdoor.com because of a community group I work with.

The fear in people’s hearts is insane. One memorable one was a Little boy who decided to sell candy bars. I knew the kid from my son’s school. Some psycho followed him for a few hours, tracked down to his home and called the sales tax authorities and the city clerk as he didn’t have a peddler permit. She documented her “investigation”, complete with photos.

Can you share more? Why was this person upset with kids selling candies?

They dont have any better to do. When I was living in south bay (nice suburb area) during short contract role the " nextdoor nanny state stay at home drunk soccer moms " would record out the front window, call the police in anyone POC, keep notes of what time you car leave and join

its like HOA mental illness. Different people had chased my amazon driver with a phone accusing them of being illegal, calling police for while I was cooking indian food... Ide rather have the crime in the city in contrast to this nonsense

I genuinely believe if I had dog at the time they would had poisoned it for barking once

> Why was this person upset with kids selling candies?

Because they didn't "follow the rules" or whatever. You see this personality type all up and down HN but usually not so extreme as to call the city about a lemonade stand or whatever.

The city clerk is also the same type of evil. They should have told that person there weren't resources available to enforce or some other lie.

Some people are psychopaths when people ring their doorbell.

apparently Ring LLC has their own OUI [0]. I wonder if you could wardrive around and identify cameras by their MAC address

[0] https://maclookup.app/vendors/ring-llc

Yes

That's fun. If you have an account you can use https://wigle.net/mapsearch to search for bluetooth devices with that prefix from other people's wardrives. There are definitely some results coming up. A wildcard search for bluetooth devices named "Ring %" also seems to work

Maybe less common in America, but in Europe it's not uncommon to have multiple people going around town delivering various things to your mailbox: a postman for letters, some poor student delivering grocery store brochures once a week, somebody delivering the local newspaper at the break of dawn, somebody else delivering the local church newspaper once a month, etc. And all of them are going door to door. If just one of them is an openstreetmap fan you quickly have all doorbell cameras in their delivery district mapped

To expand on this - Evri, DPD, and my Postie all come regularly to the door and are the same person nearly every time for me - and have been for years. Amazon, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. are irregular and often different people.

Then the leaflet drop guys are maybe three different people.

Then there is food delivery, which is rare (because we rarely order) bit still another group of people.

Oh and then there are the Jehovah's witnesses.

You don't need to walk up: 1. You can do wardriving and identify them by MAC address. 2. You can use object recognition on google street view photos or your own photos while you're wardriving.

Wouldn't identifying them via MAC address be very inaccurate, as you can't pinpoint them to a specific house very easily?

Would cameras like these emit any sort of IR light or anything that might be detected from a distance?

Object recognition would depend on them being very obvious from the outside - which Rings do appear to be (I've never seen one in person) but I imagine there will be less-obvious options soon enough, if there isn't already.

War driving will give you multiple sightings + signal strength, you can triangulate. https://wigle.net/

If I can see them, they can see me. No need to walk onto anyone's property, the whole point (for me at least) is to map things that surveil public spaces

It's more casual than surveying e.g. addresses that may be hard to see if the building is recessed, but you'd still want to capture it because someone will want to route there sooner or later. Not so for cameras that only capture own property

StreetComplete has a "things" overlay that makes it very quick to add these at the position of a front door

A lot of doorbell cameras use infrared for night vision and motion detection. You could probably just drive down a street at night with a camera tuned to show infrared and they would all be bright beacons.

That doesn't seem to work for me. Can you correct my query/URL?

https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=surveillance%3Aty...

The search directly on osm.org is optimzied for address things.

For a "complete" search in the OpenStreetMap-data I suggest [Overpass Turbo](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_turbo).

In this specific case I'd take a little detour over taginfo (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Taginfo), e.g. search for `surveillance` (https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=surveillance) there. A little bit of clicking (Type > Values > ALPR) leads to https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/surveillance%3Atype=A... If you click on 'Overpass turbo' on the top right, you get to a pre-filled search on Overpass turbo. Scroll the map to the region you want to search (start small), and click 'Run' on the top left.

Voila.

Fantastic! Thank you :)

However, even ALPR doesn't show any devices for me:

I'm glad citizens in the EU are more on top of this. I really wish we as USA citizens had access to the same database of GPS coordinates for each Blink, Ring, and Amazon Key device that police do. Does anyone know how/if something like that could be FOIA'd? This seems it would be particularly fruitful if FBI/DHS has a comprehensive dataset for the entire nation.

Though I do worry that they may not "have" the dataset, but rather just have "access" to it via a queryable Amazon/Palantir database/API.

> However, even ALPR doesn't show any devices for me

I've panned the map over several parts of the US, and see many ALPRs mapped in OpenStreetMap. You can also use the 'Wizard' of Overpass turbo, and enter ""surveillance:type"=ALPR around Miami" (or any other city (e.g. your home town), with quotation marks around surveillance:type) and increase the `radius` in the query until you'll find some. As an example, here are the ALPRs 25km around Miami: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2dVP

In most of EU doorbell cameras that point to public places are not covered by GDPR's household exception so if you use them you would be classified as data controller which come with it's own set of duties, responsibilities & limits. Is that not the case in Netherlands?

It is not legal to film the public street. But there is no enforcement, and the police is all too happy with each new camera that is out there. People think more camera's means higher safety. Privacy aware tech-savvy people see more camera's and get less warm vibes.

I don't think GDPR violations are normally handled by police. It might be if there is separate a crime (in Finland illicit observation can probably be both GDPR violation and crime though that probably doesn't apply here).

GDPR violations would normally be handled by the national DPA. They can investigate things by their own decision but normally you need to try to exercise your rights (in this case probably ask copies of your data, information regarding processing & recipients of your personal data), get denial from data controller or find issues on their reply and then make complaint to DPA. They will then investigate & give decision. You or data controller can then appeal it to court if either disagrees.

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