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Comment by pibaker | Hacker News Reader

There would be less backlash to the Ring ad if the ad was honest about how people actually use it. Show us porch pirates, burglars and stupid neighbor who backs into your car being caught on camera.

But instead, they have to come up with something "wholesome" like finding your lost doggo. The wholesomeness is so forced and cringe that it makes you think they have something to hide. It almost feels like the people who wrote this ad and the people who greenlit it knew something was wrong so they have to come up with a cover story. But like a child smiling at you with his biggest smile while anxiously keeping his hands behind his back, it only makes them more suspicious especially in a time when big tech feels more and more like an adversary than a friend.

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> porch pirates

It absolutely boggles my mind that it's legal in the US for a deliverer to just leave a package out in the open for anyone to pick up and consider it "delivered". Might as well just throw it out of the window of your car, it has the same chance of getting picked up by the recipient. Where I live the package has to be handed over to the recipient. If the recipient is not available it will be handed over to a neighbour and this will be noted on a little card that's placed in the recipient's mail box. If that is not possible it will be taken back to the mail office and the recipient can pick it up in person.

Adding video surveillance is no solution. OK, so you saw a random stranger pick up your package. Now what? What are you going to do with that information? Are the police going to start a manhunt because of your 50$ Amazon order?

No thanks. I want packages delivered when I’m not home. If i want it to be handed to me I can require it be handed to me, picked up, or delivered to a nearby store. If I wanted to go pick up a package I would just go to the store in the first place.

Most stuff doesn’t matter, and is rarely stolen. If something matters I’ll just have the delivery company do what I guess is required in where you live, I can choose.

Do you live somewhere with high crime? The reason deliveries work this way in the US is that porch pirates are uncommon. There is a flurry of them during the holidays, but even then, the vast majority of deliveries are just fine.

> What are you going to do with that information?

Nothing, because by the time I look at my doorbell camera I would already have told the shipper the package was swiped and they will have shipped a replacement. They might take it up with the shipper, or call it a cost of doing business, whatever, but it won't be -my- problem.

Porch pirates are so uncommon that it became a yearly hunt/thing for a major american youtuber and is the only reason people outside the US even know it exists!

Ah yes, porch pirates do not exist anywhere but in the US.

You know that the reason someone can make it newsworthy is because it is uncommon, yeah?

A security firm, which may have a particular interest in the numbers being skewed in a certain direction, pegs the number at 250K packages stolen from porches every day. Sounds like a huge problem! There are 60M packages delivered every day. Even if they are providing accurate numbers, which I doubt, it is uncommon.

If you live somewhere with high property crime and a large fent problem, the problem isn’t that uncommon. But I have lots of cameras and yell them off (and pick up deliveries quickly).

No, they live somewhere with a working postal law like Germany. Hand it directly to the addressed or a person authorised by the addressed (in which case inform the recipient via card or sms) or deposit it in a postbox, post office. This way it is secure that you receive your stuff even if you are not at home: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Post/Regelung...

The US is very rural compared to Germany. If I had to drive to a post office for every package that would be a ridiculous hassle. Plus if the delivery try companies needed to hand it to people in person that’s going to take a lot more time, most of which will be completely wasted as people are at work. That means they’ll need a ton more delivery drivers, they’ll use a ton more gas, and our shipping rates will go up a lot.

Where I live nobody can even see my door from the road. Our laws “work” just fine for our situation.

I was specifically responding to:

Do you live somewhere with high crime?

My bad, should have quoted it.

The post depot boxes are located every couple of kilometers, you could walk there. You can define the people allowed to receive your parcel, don't tell me you don't have at-home neighbours at all in your street/block. I prefer this to total neighbourhood surveillance and laws that work "just fine" except where they need to protect my privacy.

I don't even live in a super rural area, but if you think you could just walk a couple of kms in a couple of foot of snow to get something like a bookcase and bring it over is hilarious. Also, I would rather not receive packages for my neighbors, and I assume they wouldn't for me either. Ring works fine, I don't share the footage but I feel it is a cost of living in high crime regions.

You leave out that they can keep it in a warehouse at the other side of the country for pickup and there is no law saying that it cannot be further away than the point of origin. Fun times.

Sadly I rarely see an option for "place it with a neon sign on my front porch" when I order things online, because the chance of having things stolen would often be preferable to a daytrip to the middle of nowhere.

>No, they live somewhere with a working postal law like Germany. Hand it directly to the addressed or a person authorised by the addressed (in which case inform the recipient via card or sms) or deposit it in a postbox, post office. This way it is secure that you receive your stuff even if you are not at home: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Post/Regelung...

Sure. And that's great. But we're not talking about Deutsche Post, or even the US Postal Service.

We're talking about Amazon Logistics subcontractors who are so over-scheduled that they routinely need to urinate in bottles[0] rather than stop to use a restroom or they won't be able to fulfill their delivery quota for the day.

Those folks are assuredly not going to do anything more than the bare minimum (and not necessarily because they don't want to) because their delivery quotas don't allow for anything more than dumping a package on a porch (or in an unattended apartment building lobby) and maybe ringing the doorbell/intercom.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/amazon-depot-s-huge-pi...

Those folks are assuredly not going to do anything more than the bare minimum (and not necessarily because they don't want to) because their delivery quotas don't allow for anything more than dumping a package on a porch (or in an unattended apartment building lobby) and maybe ringing the doorbell/intercom.

So, implement surveillance of all, not only for the fracture of a percent of dogs returned but also because there are no functioning labour laws. Right. Got it. (/s)

>So, implement surveillance of all, not only for the fracture of a percent of dogs returned but also because there are no functioning labour laws. Right. Got it. (/s)

Why stop there? People actually lie once in a while and say they never received a package that was supposedly delivered. We need to put those cameras inside peoples' homes, especially in the bathrooms and bedrooms where they hide the packages that were "never delivered." And why stop there? if we find that folks are lying about that, they should be tased, beaten and sent to prison (or just shot dead on the spot) for many years because they tried to defraud the powers-that-be ^H^H^H megacorps, and we can't allow that now can we? /s[0]

On a more serious note, there actually are labor (but without that extraneous 'u', friend!) laws in the US. But those generally only apply to "employees" and not subcontractors. Here's a page from Amazon about how to become a "delivery service partner"[1] (read: subcontractor so Amazon can avoid pesky things like labor laws, minimum wages, health care coverage, etc.), so you too can spend thousands and finally be allowed to urinate in plastic bottles. Good times!

[0] My '/s' is much broader and more absurd than yours. Please get ready for round two of the /s-waving contest :)

[1] https://logistics.amazon.com/

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/labour

Touche!

I will say that we don't use those limey flavoured spellings over here across the pond, nor do we allow such things in our adverts either, even if we're filling our caravans up with petrol.

It's an honour to be singled out for this, especially as I was whinging about it. ;)

https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=labor

> It absolutely boggles my mind that it's legal in the US for a deliverer to just leave a package out in the open for anyone to pick up and consider it "delivered".

The actual answer to your conundrum here is that the package isn't actually considered delivered.

When you order something, it's the seller's responsibility to get it to you. They have the choice of having their deliveries require a signature to be delivered but that costs more so they consider stolen packages as a cost of business.

If a package is stolen, it hasn't been delivered. You report to the company you bought from and they send you a new one. They can negotiate with the shipping company if they are at fault.

The reason for the practice of leaving packages at your door is that it's cheaper to replace the few stolen packages for free than it is to pay a driver to require signatures for each package.

High value or non-replaceable items can be shipped more securely.

> Show us porch pirates, burglars and stupid neighbor who backs into your car being caught on camera.

This is what their ads have been showing for the last many years.

The dog thing is the new feature they're hawking.

You can use this to track down the guy who just stole your Amazon package and is still making the rounds in your hood.

The infrastructure is still there. It's the infrastructure that's the problem, the marketing is kind of whatever...

Ring has been a problem and it has only gotten worse now.

Isn't the whole point of the ad that they have a new feature and they want people to know about it? They're not making up the idea of finding lost dogs. They have a new feature where you upload a photo of your lost dog and it automatically looks for the dog in camera feeds.

The ad states that 1 million dogs are lost every year and that Ring returns 1 dog every day. Could the uselessness of the feature be any more prominent?

It’ll probably be significantly more now that people know about it.

And I doubt those 365 families a year think it’s useless.

If you cannot take care/train of your dog maybe you shouldn't have one. Total neighbourhood surveillance for the benefit of the 0.03% is way out of proportion.

What's the threshold for it being worthwhile to build a ubiquitous surveillance system? 365 dogs saved per year is apparently enough. How about 100? 10? 1?

I'll also note that this is just a count of the dogs found by the system, not a count of dogs that otherwise would not have been found.

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