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Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

theintercept.com

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Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#191

Post by anigbrowl »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #129
salawat wrote: post #3

If the data is not on your hardware, it is not your data.

I dislike these beliefs that idealize a world with no trust or cooperation. Humans are social animals and we do our best when we work together. We don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water and private host everything on our own servers because one company is doing something shady. You can own your data on someone else's hardware with strong encryption and common sense legislation that regulates how its acc…

Reasonable, but your position if taken to extremes can lead to oppressive conformism - eg if you choose not to have or share footage from a security camera, you become an object of suspicion yourself. Relying on 'common sense legislation' assumes a level of probity which is often sadly lacking.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#192

Post by mywittyname »

Miner49er wrote: post #187
unfocused wrote: post #31

My next door neighbor (we share a wall) had their bicycles stolen twice, so they installed Ring (floodlight) cameras in both the backyard and the front porch. After a year, the cameras have yielded no added security, or caught any "bad guys" as far as I can tell and from what they told me. What I realized, is they use it to keep track of their kids, funny cat videos that trigger the recording, and most importantly, a…

It's probably illegal too. It's illegal in most states to record conversations unless you have consent from one or all parties in the conversation.

But will anyone actually enforce the law?

I haven't been following this very closely, but my assumption is that the proliferation of recording devices have rendered these laws impractical to enforce, thus somewhat moot.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#193

Post by pwthornton »

tomkat0789 wrote: post #167
nedwin wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Def sounds like shitty behaviour from your neighbours. In terms of decreasing crime I live in Oakland in a duplex. Downstairs was empty and crooks broke in and stole a bunch of stuff over several hours earlier this year. We only had a camera doorbell for our upstairs unit and I have footage of one of the crooks walking around the corner with a crowbar, seeing the camera and immediately turning around and walking away…

A middle option could be to install a fake ring camera as a deterrent without the privacy hazards.

You could do that. The cheapest and easiest option is just to get yard signs saying that you are recording 24/7. Nest, Ring, and others sell there. There are plenty of generic ones too. If you want to use video cameras as a deterrent, you need to make sure people think you actually have them.

I sometimes see people with their cameras pretty well hidden. That's not going to work as a deterrent!

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#194

Post by iso1631 »

_benedict wrote: post #46
unfocused wrote: post #31

My next door neighbor (we share a wall) had their bicycles stolen twice, so they installed Ring (floodlight) cameras in both the backyard and the front porch. After a year, the cameras have yielded no added security, or caught any "bad guys" as far as I can tell and from what they told me. What I realized, is they use it to keep track of their kids, funny cat videos that trigger the recording, and most importantly, a…

Depending where you live this might be illegal. In the U.K. you have an obligation not to record your neighbour’s property, and not to record conversations of members of the public.

Yet every local facebook group is full of the curtain twitchers posting pictures of "person walking past, looks suspicious, keep save everyone x" in blatant disregard for the law, yet nothing happens

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#195

Post by woofyman »

Miner49er wrote: post #187
unfocused wrote: post #31

My next door neighbor (we share a wall) had their bicycles stolen twice, so they installed Ring (floodlight) cameras in both the backyard and the front porch. After a year, the cameras have yielded no added security, or caught any "bad guys" as far as I can tell and from what they told me. What I realized, is they use it to keep track of their kids, funny cat videos that trigger the recording, and most importantly, a…

It's probably illegal too. It's illegal in most states to record conversations unless you have consent from one or all parties in the conversation.

Single party recording is legal in 38 states.

https://fireflies.ai/blog/call-recording-laws-in-50-states-3...

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#197

Post by bluefirebrand »

Miner49er wrote: post #187
unfocused wrote: post #31

My next door neighbor (we share a wall) had their bicycles stolen twice, so they installed Ring (floodlight) cameras in both the backyard and the front porch. After a year, the cameras have yielded no added security, or caught any "bad guys" as far as I can tell and from what they told me. What I realized, is they use it to keep track of their kids, funny cat videos that trigger the recording, and most importantly, a…

It's probably illegal too. It's illegal in most states to record conversations unless you have consent from one or all parties in the conversation.

My guess is that only applies to private conversations? If you're talking with someone in public (and arguably the outside of your property is public) do they need your permission to record you?

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#198

Post by mywittyname »

unfocused wrote: post #31

My next door neighbor (we share a wall) had their bicycles stolen twice, so they installed Ring (floodlight) cameras in both the backyard and the front porch. After a year, the cameras have yielded no added security, or caught any "bad guys" as far as I can tell and from what they told me. What I realized, is they use it to keep track of their kids, funny cat videos that trigger the recording, and most importantly, a…

Is there a way to trigger this so that it is always on? Something like a white noise generator?

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#199

Post by gffrd »

It blows my mind how quickly people put up home cameras with zero thought to

* (1) what gets captured

* (2) who gets what gets captured

Walk down the street of any middle-class neighborhood in a major suburb: a healthy chunk have cameras. Let's say 60%.

So, you and your family are being passively surveilled on a massive scale … for the benefit of someone who's not you preventing another someone from stealing their bike.

Is this a reasonable tradeoff? Is it fair to others?

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#200

Post by hedora »

lacker wrote: post #123

What I would like to see is for the police to actually track down crime when people give them video evidence. Here's a video of someone stealing a car, stealing a bicycle, breaking into a house. Go arrest them! Instead, the police just ignore reports like this. I think it would be fair to do something like, if you are convicted of a crime, the police keep your face and other biometric data on file for the next five y…

Agreed. I've found the last group that gets access to invasive surveillance data is the local police.

For a while, Google was offering reverse GPS lookups of phones to the police. ("List all phones in this bounding box at this time in the past"). If you had Google Maps installed on your phone, then you were automatically opted in to sharing the data.

(I think this may be illegal in some US jurisdictions now; though Biden is talking about specific carve outs preventing sharing of GPS traces near abortion clinics with state governments, so who knows...)

Someone broke into a remote building at 2AM. We had video of them doing it with a precise start / stop timestamp for the event, and of no one else in the area. The police said they couldn't ask Google to query the database for them.

So, we're in a situation where the data exists on everyone, but only abusive law enforcement types and creepy marketers are willing to use it.

We can't even really have an argument about the tradeoffs between privacy and security, since the data isn't available for the benefit of normal victims of normal crimes.

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