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Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

There is plenty of money to be made selling home layouts to police

Is there?

I can totally imagine the sales pitch to police departments: before you bust down the door of the local journalist who criticized you, look up their home floor plan and review 360 camera footage of each room, so you can get to their laptop before it locks when your surveillance team detects they’ve stepped away to use the bathroom.

Ignoring the OTT scenario premise; if the surveillance team is able to detect movement like that then the surveillance team already knows where the laptop is. Why would you need a floor plan?

If you were just using something kind of remote sensing technology to determine where people were in the building, but you didn’t know the layout, you couldn’t be sure. I’ve seen examples of using WiFi or other radio frequencies to spatially locate people through walls, but it doesn’t let you actually see what’s there.

So if you combine their position in the building with separately collected layout information about the building, you can better infer their activity.

Presumably the surveillance team, and all the police about to bust down the door, are at locus in person? They already know the floor plan, occupants present, and there locations. No need to infer anything because they're under surveillance...

on further reflection, probably not. I have to remember how much home data is already publicly available (as others have noted).

yeah the parent was a rather dumb comment. police don't buy intelligence on the population en mass. how could they afford it snd how could they use it without probable cause? if you are already a target of an investigation they can get a warrant for free with due process.

one paragraph in the three mile long TOS the homeowner clicks OK on and problem solved ?

yeah i was replying to the comment that selling intelligence on private citizens to police would be a revenue driver. not that it couldn't be done, just that it would not make significant money. the median critical thinking level on HN has imploded over the past year.

rofl

I assume you are being tongue-in-cheek, but too subtle

Came here to post exactly this. Is there, really?

I would guess so, they seem interested in the ring cameras https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2025/09/30/ring-police-partn...

The cost of sharing recordings of video you collect anyway is near 0, and this provides videos of public places.

What's the value of a recording inside my house to the police? That requires paying a human to go around recording it?

The cost of sharing recordings of video you collect anyway is near 0. If not police, many stalkers would definitely appreciate this information.

Even if my neighborhood is a public place, I don't agree that most public places should have 24hr video surveillance.

They'd save money if they knew exactly which spot of the wall to shoot through to kill the innocent sleeping person next door, that's at least a few dollars a week in bullets alone.

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