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Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

theintercept.com

221–230 of 532 posts

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#221
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we still want the convenience of walking down to their neighborhood store, so we've constructed an entire economic system built on shipping things in disposable boxes around the globe and getting them to people's doorsteps within two business days. 1. Generally they don't come from across the globe to your doorstep after your order, but from a nearby fulfillment center. 2. Getting things quickly from online sho…

Where, pray tell, does the fulfillment center receive them from? Shipping happens regardless (I know my local hardware store doesn't make vacuum cleaners), but the waste of individual boxes and delivery for every single item on demand is obscene. You're right that it's just as nice in cities, if not nicer. But that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make it not a maladaptation within our economic system.

> Where, pray tell, does the fulfillment center receive them from? Shipping happens regardless (I know my local hardware store doesn't make vacuum cleaners),

Yes, the steps before are very similar to fulfillment centers vs. to distribution centers servicing retail and to individual retail stores (not quite the same-- you need somewhat more fulfillment centers). It's just the last step from the fulfillment center to your house that are different.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#222
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think main differentiator is that an individual human is unlikely to stand in one place just watching for an extended period of time. It actually was very expensive to do that kind of surveillance not that long ago, which is why it was not deployed without a good reason. Camera, on the other hand, is cheap. Individual creep is preferable to a panopticon.

None of these things really bother/worry me. This is mainly a threshold argument- a thing that was hard got easier, but didn't fundamentally change what is possible for a dedicated adversary.

The scale of difference between $25/hr for a human and less than $0.01/day (amortized over the lifespan of the camera/service) changes the economics entirely. The circumstances before and after are paradigmatically different.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#223
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your trash analogy doesn’t hold up because trash becomes “public” once it’s on the street which isn’t part of your property. “Publicly visible spot on my property” is a meaningless phrase; it’s still my property, and I’m legally (here at least) allowed to raise an objection to the recording of it. I can’t and wouldn’t object to someone recoding the sidewalk in front of my house. I can, and absolutely will, object to…

I can't ask the people who drop their kids at the school across the street not to look at my yard, so why would I complain about a camera? Because it's always on and recording? Still not convincing to me. My exterior yard (the part not surrounded by a tall fence) is for everybody to look at. In fact lots of people stop by my house to look at our amazing maple tree and start conversations with us.

No post body was provided.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#224
post #222
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these things really bother/worry me. This is mainly a threshold argument- a thing that was hard got easier, but didn't fundamentally change what is possible for a dedicated adversary.

The scale of difference between $25/hr for a human and less than $0.01/day (amortized over the lifespan of the camera/service) changes the economics entirely. The circumstances before and after are paradigmatically different.

No post body was provided.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#225
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we still want the convenience of walking down to their neighborhood store, so we've constructed an entire economic system built on shipping things in disposable boxes around the globe and getting them to people's doorsteps within two business days. 1. Generally they don't come from across the globe to your doorstep after your order, but from a nearby fulfillment center. 2. Getting things quickly from online sho…

Where, pray tell, does the fulfillment center receive them from? Shipping happens regardless (I know my local hardware store doesn't make vacuum cleaners), but the waste of individual boxes and delivery for every single item on demand is obscene. You're right that it's just as nice in cities, if not nicer. But that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make it not a maladaptation within our economic system.

> You're right that it's just as nice in cities, if not nicer. But that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make it not a maladaptation within our economic system.

Also, please note... a frequent mistake in economics is to conflate positive statements ("Ordering online causes additional emissions and use of cardboard and packaging products") with normative statements ("it is wrong to waste cardboard and emit carbon for the convenience of online shopping"). Every agent in the economic system has their own normative beliefs and utility function. Hume showed us you can't get to the normative statement through positive observations.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#227
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also no fan of Ring or similar, though the reasons are slightly different. We lost our cat recently, and I went round my neighbourhood knocking/ringing on every door to ask around. It was a strange experience as around 30% had these ring doorbells. It was unpleasant to know I was being recorded and judged, and often as a result, not answered. I vowed at that point we would never consider one, if only because I d…

>"It was a strange experience as around 30% had these ring doorbells. It was unpleasant to know I was being recorded and judged, and often as a result, not answered." Ugh, the idea that these things would be encouraging neighbors to become unneighborly by using Ring cameras as screening devices is truly dystopian. Helping neighbors with pets that have gone astray seems like one of the most basic neighborly and and po…

Thank you, my cat mysteriously returned one day :) It was a weird experience, and I don't even look 'weird' (at least as far as I'm aware!).

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#228
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't ask the people who drop their kids at the school across the street not to look at my yard, so why would I complain about a camera? Because it's always on and recording? Still not convincing to me. My exterior yard (the part not surrounded by a tall fence) is for everybody to look at. In fact lots of people stop by my house to look at our amazing maple tree and start conversations with us.

I think main differentiator is that an individual human is unlikely to stand in one place just watching for an extended period of time. It actually was very expensive to do that kind of surveillance not that long ago, which is why it was not deployed without a good reason. Camera, on the other hand, is cheap. Individual creep is preferable to a panopticon.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#229

> “If there is the infrastructure, if there is the channel by which police can request footage without a warrant or consent of the user, under what circumstances they get it is out of our control. I worry that because it’s decided by the police and by somebody at Ring, there will be temptation to use that for increasingly less urgent situations.” Many people (I would argue anybody with common sense) predicted Ring wo…

My view on this is that we're not going back and it would be silly to try to do so. Once you have the technology to record, track, and ultimately apprehend criminals, simply not doing so in the name of ideological purity becomes increasingly obscene. What we need are courts that understand the technology, prosecutors who fear censure for overreach, and fair laws about standards of access to the data. It's here to sta…

There are vendors who provide exactly the same service that Ring does, but allow you to retain sovereignty over the data. Ubiquity, for example.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#230
post #22

I fear for the day when someone comes knocking on my door because my government-approved surveillance doorbell has been offline for too long. The very first thing I did when I moved into my new house was completely disconnect/disable all networked security & "smart" home systems. I have a Ring doorbell, but it is not receiving any power. I figure the simple sight of it may still serve as a deterrent. Most of the "sma…

Burglars are not deterred by cameras or alarm systems, especially in the age of face masks. They know they will only be in the house for 5 mins or less and face masks make it harder to identify them.

This makes me wonder, what is a burglar in 2022 stealing? We have no jewelry or cash in our house. We have a nice TV, but in the age of $250 4k TVs I can't imagine most burglars would chance breaking into a house to get a valuable TV. The kid's iPads are ancient and mostly worthless, we've got no game systems, no fancy cameras, no stereo.

The small handful of valuables we have are either stored in an obscure enough place that the thief would have to devote longer than 5 minutes to finding it, or so esoteric that I doubt a random burglar would recognize its value.

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