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Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

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Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#51

Post by llukas »

jklinger410 wrote: post #41
nepeckman wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it gets more problematic when the data is shared and human judgement is eliminated. What happens if someone is lost in a neighborhood and accidentally displays "suspicious" behavior in multiple locations? They are then logged in a database as a suspicious person and potentially pointed out to law enforcement as a suspect without any chance to explain themselves. I don't think this technology would be quite as…

>What happens if someone is lost in a neighborhood and accidentally displays "suspicious" behavior in multiple locations? They are then logged in a database as a suspicious person and potentially pointed out to law enforcement as a suspect without any chance to explain themselves. Where is the issue here? That we provide suspicious activity reports, or that our police SEEMINGLY can't reliably deal with those reports?

Being lost is not suspicious activity.

Feeding false positives to law enforcement causes them not to work what is important or to redirect resources to filtering reports.

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#52

Post by dvtrn »

laumars wrote: post #36
daveFNbuck wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So under this system if I walk up to your door mistakenly before realizing I'm at the wrong place, the police will be alerted any time I walk past a house.

While that is a valid concern about the abuse of such technology, I couldn't see that ever happening if just because it would generate far too many false positives to render the technology useful (not to mention that most police forces in the world are under funded so they're not going to be the slightest bit interested in people walking past a house). This kind of alerting is a bit like any of the automated alarms w…

I can see how members of some communities might feel like the technology opens them up to more scrutiny than they probably deserve from an overzealous do-gooder (or busybody, depending on your perspective).

Even if statistically the likelihood is low, I wouldn't say the fears of what this technology enables and could result in for someone simply being in the wrong neighborhood 'while black' are overly complicated or historically irrelevant/unfounded for certain areas of the US.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/us/airbnb-black-women-pol...

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#53

Post by ohithereyou »

jklinger410 wrote: post #41
nepeckman wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it gets more problematic when the data is shared and human judgement is eliminated. What happens if someone is lost in a neighborhood and accidentally displays "suspicious" behavior in multiple locations? They are then logged in a database as a suspicious person and potentially pointed out to law enforcement as a suspect without any chance to explain themselves. I don't think this technology would be quite as…

>What happens if someone is lost in a neighborhood and accidentally displays "suspicious" behavior in multiple locations? They are then logged in a database as a suspicious person and potentially pointed out to law enforcement as a suspect without any chance to explain themselves. Where is the issue here? That we provide suspicious activity reports, or that our police SEEMINGLY can't reliably deal with those reports?

If you have no fear that the police will cause you harm when they get a report of suspicious activity involving you then your life has been very privileged.

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#54

Post by Klonoar »

richrichardsson wrote: post #47
daveFNbuck wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So under this system if I walk up to your door mistakenly before realizing I'm at the wrong place, the police will be alerted any time I walk past a house.

Ring their doorbell. When they answer, tell them "Hi, this isn't the house I was looking for, but you've got that surveillance system in place, so I don't want to be registered as 'suspicious'. OK, sorry not sorry for wasting your time, goodbye."

...for every house? I don't go up to random houses and ring their doorbells to begin with, because nobody does that anymore.

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#56

Post by eeZah7Ux »

llukas wrote: post #51
jklinger410 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What happens if someone is lost in a neighborhood and accidentally displays "suspicious" behavior in multiple locations? They are then logged in a database as a suspicious person and potentially pointed out to law enforcement as a suspect without any chance to explain themselves. Where is the issue here? That we provide suspicious activity reports, or that our police SEEMINGLY can't reliably deal with those reports?

Being lost is not suspicious activity. Feeding false positives to law enforcement causes them not to work what is important or to redirect resources to filtering reports.

False positive can very well lead to innocent people being beaten for "looking suspicious".

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#57

Post by imgabe »

This article is needlessly histrionic. Companies will patent anything they can just so they can have the patent and not somebody else. Jumping from that to "Amazon's plan to bring about a nightmarish dystopia" is a bit much.

Could this bring about a police state? Yes absolutely. But the technology is possible to build, so someone will build it, or at least patent it. There's no preventing the technology from existing.

We don't prevent a police state from happening by freaking out about the technology that enables it. We prevent it by voting for responsible leaders. So let's just assume that the technology for government oppression is going to exist and make sure we structure our government in such a way that it doesn't oppress us.

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#58

Post by freehunter »

whoisjuan wrote: post #31
jbigelow76 wrote: post #27

Likewise, homeowners can also add photos of “suspicious” people into the system and then the doorbell’s facial recognition program will scan anyone passing their home. This has to be the worst part of it, if you've ever been part of a suburban neighborhood that uses NextDoor as a community tool you'll know that Ring doorbell videos of "others" crank the pearl-clutching paranoia of bored homeowners up to 11. The comme…

I get why this could be problematic under the wrong context. But if I have video footage of someone approaching my door, not knocking and just looking aroud to then leave; and I'm given the option to track if that person shows up again in future video footage, you bet I would use that option. This is not because I'm paranoic and I think right away that anyone showing up to my door will murder or rob me, but because s…

I work in information security and basically every IS system does exactly that. Tracks potentially suspicious behavior but doesn't act on it unless it becomes a pattern or something bad happens. As soon as something bad happens, the system has a history of all the suspicious behavior that actor had done before the actual crime.

It doesn't matter if it's an IP address scanning your network then hitting one system, then logging in and scooping up all your data versus a human staring at your house for a few days then walking up while you're not home and stealing your TV. You should know if someone is scoping out your perimeter in preparation for a breach, and post-breach you should know the history of the attack.

I know nothing about Next Door but from reading the comments it seems like the problem is having this information in untrained hands.

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#59

Post by yalogin »

Ring automatically enrolls you into a community program and you don't have an option. In fact you cannot even use Ring without signing up with your address and signing up for the community feature. They suck up your data by force. You know its amazon, they don't have any qualms and reservations about how they use it.

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#60

Post by Shivetya »

drb91 wrote: post #43
whoisjuan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get why this could be problematic under the wrong context. But if I have video footage of someone approaching my door, not knocking and just looking aroud to then leave; and I'm given the option to track if that person shows up again in future video footage, you bet I would use that option. This is not because I'm paranoic and I think right away that anyone showing up to my door will murder or rob me, but because s…

It is paranoid to think that the people outside your house want to rob or kill you. It is not paranoid to see that the “wrong context” is just a matter of time.

There is no more paranoia in having a camera security feature than locking your door. if people are checking out your house repeatedly then you might have a problem so a precaution is fine.

considering that it is easy to surf news sites and find video captured by home surveillance systems showing people taking packages, trying to get in, or having broke in, it is not unreasonable to install such a device.

the issue is that the data would be available to the police without the homeowners permission. people coming to the door have no expectation of privacy on property they do not own and if need be a simple sign on the property can declare as such.

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