Good. But people should not have pointed cameras into public spaces and live streamed everything to the cloud to begin with. Walking past a house with a camera doorbell makes me really uncomfortable, like I'm being watched.
My armchair take is that we need to start going after those who provide the systems. If a regular person buys a streaming doorbell or a car with a sentrycam, it should be up to whoever takes his money and handles those streams to ensure that they're not doing illegal surveillance of public spaces, IMHO.
It’s against the law to post cctv onto things like Facebook in the U.K. but people donor all the time. Early on the law could have banned cloud cameras but it’s too late now, far too many people like to answer front their phones. So glad I no ln get deliver pizzas.
I agree. And that's sensible. We don't want the law and culture to diverge too much. The former is meant to serve the latter.
But I do still think it would be possible to start going after the suppliers of the services.
Bear in mind europe is known for millennia of pogroms and ethnic cleansing (like, I'm sure, many other parts of the world). Sometimes the culture must bend towards the needs of a stable culture.
Of course. I'm absolutely not saying that culture shouldn't bend. I'm just saying the law must bend to follow culture to some degree.
And let's be clear: it wasn't a change of law that ended the millennia of pogroms and ethnic cleansing. It was culture that changed. Once culture was enough changed for enough people, the law followed and took care of the stragglers.
I live in the UK and first time I'm hearing about this - it's definitely illegal to record your neighbours or members of the public without permission, but AFAIK if you are recording videos of your own driveway you can post those anywhere you like since there is no privacy issue there.
Have you got any more info about this?
Edit: let me clarify - sure, there are _circumstances_ under which it's illegal to post a video on facebook, whether it's recorded with CCTV or your phone doesn't matter. But there is no blanket ban on posting CCTV footage anywhere, and your post makes it sound like it is.
Would love to hear more from a lawyer on this!
https://sprintlaw.co.uk/articles/can-you-film-people-in-publ...
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/domestic-cctv-usi...
Data protection laws are very rarely enforced though
>>(for example it will not be appropriate to share any recordings on social media sites)
Again, that's not what the legislation itself says and it's not so black and white. Posting a video from your own driveway of you parking your car would be perfectly legal even if taken from your own CCTV system. Posting a video of a postie that comes to your door every day for no reason other than to identify them would be not.
No. In Poland it's legal to record everything, only when you publish the recordings you need the recorded people to agree.
The core issue is that "nothing to hide nothing to fear" argument is correct as long as the government is trustworthy. Not only that, but mass-surveilance greatly improves life because it allows much better crowd management. Case in point - speed cameras. Would you support the removal of all speed cameras in Norway?
Interesting. Thanks for this perspective. But for the sake of this debate it's still more or less the same situation.
> The core issue is that "nothing to hide nothing to fear" argument is correct as long as the government is trustworthy.
The government and everyone else who might have access to the data.
> Not only that, but mass-surveilance greatly improves life because it allows much better crowd management.
Hard disagree.
> Case in point - speed cameras. Would you support the removal of all speed cameras in Norway?
No. Speed cameras are different. They do more or less not record people who are not reasonably suspected of committing the crime of speeding. They are more analogous to a doorbell camera (or car sentry system) that only actually starts storing/sharing/streaming data when very good evidence of a crime is in progress. I would, for example, be OK with a camera pointed at a public area if the operator of the camera can prove that the data is only stored whenever say the house's burglary alarm trips (this is equivalent to speed cameras when the induction loop in the ground says that a car passed faster than the speed limit). That minute of recording that may include innocent people in public areas is something I would consider to be in the public good. It's at least very different from a system that monitors continuously.
The fact that nothing is stored in normal circumstances of course needs to be backed up by very public audits. For example the operator would need to release source code and be liable to an enormous fine if state inspectors find that different code actually runs on the device. At least that seems like the ideal situation to me.
So basically your entire argument revolves around the government pinky-promising that it won't use the data from speed cameras to track innocent citizens. Because when the network is dense enough, you can tell who went exactly when and where. This isn't any different from Amazon pinky-promising that it will only use data to improve customer experience.
The bigger point I'm making is that mass-surveilance technology does have benefits to the society, and any absolutist "but but but my privacy" who fails to acknowledge them is doomed to lose the debate.
This isn't how many speed cameras work in Europe. They work by having a speed camera at location Y on the highway that snaps a photo of your car/license plate read, and then another one 5km down the road that also snaps such a photo and plate read.
If you average more than the speed limit in that distance between photo timestamps, you get a ticket mailed to you.
Due to the way it works, it's taking a snapshot of every single vehicle that passes each camera. How long that data is stored/etc. I suppose is a matter of how much you trust the government.
This system is considered better most of the time since it allows for brief excursions of the limit for overtaking, and doesn't just set up a situation where everyone slows down for the one known speed camera point (or slam on the brakes when they notice a mobile speed camera van on the side of the road).
Either way, the public auditing procedure I outline could apply to time-between-two-photos-cameras too.
In the Netherlands you can record, but only share it with the cops and otherwise you need some clear exception (e.g. dashcam images with minor accidents to your insurer). In all other cases you can either not store them, at least not publicly and all cloud falls under public, or have to inform everyone about their presence on the images, or blurr every identifiable mark (e.g. faces, number plates, names etc). Pretty sure all cloud door cams violate that. So the cops sometimes ask for people's doorcam images, and they are allowed to do that, but likely the people providing them will have recorded it illegally due to it being stored on some cloud account.
This question has already been answered by security footage videos and as long as they are overwritten withing a certain time, stored non publicly and only shared with allowed officials, it's ok.
There are exceptions, but very limited, like clear public good (e.g. whistleblowers).
Now the cat is out of the bag and it has become an untenable position to be against this type of surveillance. And don't get me wrong, I want rapists and murderers to be caught, but I am at the same time also worried about the effect that this will have down the line, in particular when live AI analysis of footage becomes cheap enough that it gets integrated into these cameras so the cameras can report (what they deem to be) suspicious activity automatically.
"Hmm, should we solve the murder, or, maybe get somebody fined $100 for having an unauthorised video" ?
> "Hmm, should we solve the murder, or, maybe get somebody fined $100 for having an unauthorised video" ?
Don't be surprised to find out the answer is both.
In some states in the US, it is not illegal for a cop to have sex with someone they have arrested. Ain't that just dandy.
The Polish situation could be an upgrade.
That’s why police looks to piece together from a larger surveillance network. Maybe you can’t see the face on the home camera but in another camera down the road, or a license plate on the getaway car down the street, or an accomplice without disguise. They want everyone to have cameras and then they can abuse the system.
Friends showed me high quality close up footage of someone stealing their bike. Absolutely useless, all you saw was an average guy that you wouldn’t recognize if you walked past on the street.
No cloud involved if you run your own VPN.
Or even better, _just a little_ cloud involved if you expose through Cloudflare tunnel for just you and whoever else needs to access it.
Some countries have laws for this, as in you can only point the camera so that you don't catch everyone. This can have downsides, e.g. if you have no (even short) front yard and your (organization's) door is directly on the curb - but I completely agree that this is just tough luck, the privacy of random people walking on public property past private property should not be filmed.
Not only did it give me peace of mind but two specific examples come to mind. One was when the garbage company’s truck picked up my trash can, and never put it back down (the whole thing fell into the back of the truck). I was able to get a replacement can for free, otherwise I wouldn’t have had any clue where it disappeared off to.
The second time was when my first Steam Deck was stolen in-transit. You could tell from the very hollow sound the box made when the delivery person threw the box onto the porch. It helped prove that it wasn’t stolen off my porch (side note, screw UPS, bunch of thieves, I also had another Steam Deck stolen from one of their drop boxes, last time I ever used one, by one of their employees. No recourse at all, I just had to eat the ~$700. Also, Valve, stop shipping the Steam deck in an incredibly obvious box).
Same concept though, local NVR, remote access via WireGuard.
No. Unless your camera is being held by a human being who can take action.
Cameras do not prevent crime. That's just marketing.
All they do is let people watch crimes after they've happened, and share the videos to spread fear to other people, which then sells more cameras.
If doorbell cameras prevented crime, the internet would be full of videos of people trying to steal packages, then changing their minds when they see the camera.
Instead, it's all just recordings of a crime that has already been committed.
I may also have a nice rock for sale, we'll see how it goes.
But I wonder how much of that will wear off once everybody has one.
But we're talking about doorbell cameras here, not giant boxes in the sky with flashing strobe lights on them.
A thief doesn't know if there's a doorbell camera on a particular home until they're already on the porch and recorded.
When a thief wants to steal something, they usually stop trying to steal that thing once they become aware they are being monitored. Even if they only realized once they reached the porch.
It's not a guarantee, but it's something. And it provides a trail to follow if something is stolen (or worse).
Maybe your thief moved away.
Most burglars work in their own neighborhoods.
Working as intended? It’s a wireless CCTV.
I hate it, but you are being recorded everywhere you go. Your plates and your face get scanned every single day, all day long. This is normalized. Privacy is dead.
You will never get access to any of that data when you need it. It is not there to help you. You need to keep your own evidence of the world around you; you never know when you will need it.
Not condoning it; just accepting reality.
> It is not there to help you
It’s like those “This call may be monitored for 'quality' purposes.” service calls.
You can bet, that if the recording helps the company, they’ll have it, but if it helps you, well, they didn’t record that call.
"You didn't try hard enough to sell the customer something else when they called with a major problem."
"How dare you deviate from the script and talk to the caller."
"Why did this take ten minutes? Get those call times down."
In the U.S., municipal vehicles have ALPR scanners on them. They go into a database
Cop cars will ping if a flagged plate is seen (even if the front and back plates don’t match) and the officer will pull you over. Literally happens every day.
Exactly my point but most of the comments here would have you believe you're going to be stupid up against a wall at any moment.