Amazon's Home Surveillance Chief Declared War on “Dirtbag Criminals” • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon's Home Surveillance Chief Declared War on “Dirtbag Criminals”

#21

Post by masonic » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 10:17 AM UTC

mimixco wrote: post #18

mc32 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theft = vernacular porch piracy. Prevention = happy shoppers. Happy shoppers = more sales. More sales = happy company.

Shoppers do not care about package theft or any other loss- making properties of a business. Show me one place where package theft is even mentioned on Ring's website or in their doc. Is isn't. It naive to think that Amazon is worried about package theft and that's why they bought Ring. Too many other tech companies have signed up for the surveillance economy for that to be true. What's the real reason?

  Shoppers do not care about package theft

Collectively, shoppers pay for all package theft.

Re: Amazon's Home Surveillance Chief Declared War on “Dirtbag Criminals”

#22

Post by mimixco » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

masonic wrote: post #21

mimixco wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shoppers do not care about package theft or any other loss- making properties of a business. Show me one place where package theft is even mentioned on Ring's website or in their doc. Is isn't. It naive to think that Amazon is worried about package theft and that's why they bought Ring. Too many other tech companies have signed up for the surveillance economy for that to be true. What's the real reason?

Shoppers do not care about package theft Collectively, shoppers pay for all package theft.

That is true. But we also pay for pensions, profits, advertising, union-busting, pollution, and countless other things we may not want to pay for.

Ultimately, the consumer only cares about what product he is getting and what price he has to pay. How the company juggles its losses or where they come from is of no interest to the product purchaser.

Re: Amazon's Home Surveillance Chief Declared War on “Dirtbag Criminals”

#23

Post by tracker1 » Mon, Feb 18, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

mimixco wrote: post #15

tracker1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy.. package theft alone probably costs Amazon millions every year. If more customers have a doorbell camera that captures motion activity, more thieves can be caught, and the less theft will happen. It's actually a very good pairing.

That's a facile answer and doesn't explain why so many other big tech companies are signing up for the survelliance economy. Package theft is a drop in the bucket for Amazon and can't amount to more than the equivalent losses from shoplifting if they ran retail stores.

I was only answering for the Amazon case... the rest comes down to two things, in terms of home security, it's mostly driven by the consumer demand. As to general surveillance at larger levels part of it is maximizing the fractions of a penny. I mean, if you can sell a piece of data for a fraction of a cent, but have 50 billion fractions to sell, that's a pretty big hunk of change.

There are also those genuinely concerned over $STATE$ security and working towards that as a goal.

I'm not condoning or supporting or rejecting for that matter any of the above. But it really doesn't take too much to see several reasons why this stuff happens.

As to the losses in relation to retail stores... retail stores generally have higher margins, and they still hire security staff and put up cameras.