Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

theintercept.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 532 posts

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#231

Post by thegrimmest »

ironlake wrote: post #179
thegrimmest wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree - if you have the right to observe, listen and record using your meat implements (eyes, ears, brain), then you should have the right to do so using a digital augmentation of the same (cameras, microphones, storage).

And infringing on this imagined-from-first-principles right would cause serious repercussions. No regulation could ever be as beneficial as losing this imagined-from-first-principles right. We must let corporations and the police state that serve them have and use this data.

It's not imagined-from-first-principles, it's in fact attempting to define the very axioms that ought to constrain law in the first place. What does it mean to be "free" do something?

If you avoid this question, you can justify just about any tyranny so long as it can be argued to be "beneficial" (spoiler alert: this is how the worst atrocities in history have been justified). In other words, the ends don't justify the means.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#232

Post by kelnos »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #178
pc86 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US you don't have any expectation of privacy in public (or at least severely limited) and the courts have upheld again and again that recording public areas, even from a private area, is completely find. Some jurisdictions require notification or consent for audio recording, but not all.

Who would want to live next to someone after a lawsuit between you? This is a neighbor-relations issue first and foremost.

Sounds like relations between these two neighbors is already pretty bad -- the guy crosses the street to walk on the other side? Because he was asked not to point his security camera at someone else's property? Some people are just... children.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#233

Post by lacker »

anigbrowl wrote: post #168
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…

If you get convicted of a crime, the police will keep your biometric data forever. What leads you to imagine they don't?

I am not an expert, but right now it seems like the police generally keep around your biometric data, but they don't keep it in a very useful way. I can't walk into the police station, show them a video clip on my phone of someone breaking into my car last night, they scan the video and it says "we found them, this is John Q. Smith". The data is on a piece of paper somewhere, or it's in a database that is rarely used for whatever reason. So in practice it's like they aren't storing it at all.

If the police did keep biometric data in a useful way, I think our society would have to be more explicit about what biometric data we want the police to keep. I don't know what the right answer is, but something like, if you are convicted by a crime then your biometric data is at least kept for a few years, that seems reasonable to me.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#234

Post by pdonis »

mhaymo wrote: post #160
karaterobot wrote: post #8

> “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…

According to the article, users can opt-in to end-to-end encryption, so it's not true that this is "out of our control".

Yes, you can opt in, but the Ring mobile app insists on generating your passphrase for you instead of letting you choose your own. Which means Ring could still perfectly well know what your passphrase is, even though it's supposed to be "private", since it's their code in their app generating it. Sorry, not buying it.

Edit: Also, at least according to HowToGeek [1], you lose some significant features if you enable E2EE.

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/741180/how-to-enable-end-to-end-en...

(Edit to edit: My Ring app gives me an even more comprehensive list of features that are disabled if you enable E2EE. Since among them is Shared Users, which is how my wife and I can both see our Ring videos, I don't see how this is any kind of actual support for E2EE. Surely a significant portion of Ring's customers have more than one family member who wants to have access to the videos.)

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#235

Post by soganess »

dekhn wrote: post #205
hoorible wrote: post #188

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.

Sorry you are not convinced, but looking and recording are different.

If I hear my neighborhood talking - hearsay

If I record my neighbors talking - admissible evidence

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#236

Post by throwaway0a5e »

anigbrowl wrote: post #173
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I worry less about the police than I do about Amazon having this surveillance in the first place. The former head of the NSA sits on the board of directors and they have multi billion dollar contracts for services to the intelligence agencies. That's just being worried about the police with extra steps. An F15 doesn't stand on a street corner and a surveillance dragnet doesn't kick in your door.

Those extra steps are important because they create legal deniability. For example, local jurisdictions (or judicial outcomes) tell police they can't do X, Y, or Z because it's government overreach. So police just look for corporations that engage in those activities and purchase the data from them, with your tax money. So instead of the Stasi you end up with Corpsec.com, but it's OK because there's a middleman makin…

When the local police kick in your door it doesn't matter whether BigPerkyTips.com "made a technical mistake" told them you were a dealer or the glowies shoveled parallel constructed crap at them. In neither case will anyone be held accountable. Until we hold the people closest to the bad outcomes accountable for the bad outcomes nothing will change.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#237

Post by woodruffw »

mlyle wrote: post #225
woodruffw wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Hume showed us you can't get to the normative statement through positive observations.

Hume and I disagree :-)

The original comment was a normative one: I think our current scheme is wrong, in a moral sense. I think it's also wrong in an economic sense, but that's just a cherry on top.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#238

Post by kelnos »

dekhn wrote: post #216
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #213

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.

How is that not fundamentally different?

1) Human stands there and watches your property. A description of what happened on your property is subject to whether or not people believe this human, and the fallibility of human memory. This human cannot be there 24/7, and must -- at minimum -- break to sleep, acquire food, and use the bathroom. In reality, they'll have many other demands on their time that mean they can't (or won't want to) spend much time watching your property.

2) A connected, always-on recording device that captures what's happening in high definition, 24/7 (assuming it has an IR light; if not, ok, more like 12/7). This becomes an indisputable, permanent record that can be replayed as often as anyone wants, and that most reasonable people would believe, without question, as reflecting what is truly going on.

How are these two things not fundamentally different? This is approaching "definition of fundamental" territory.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#239

Post by kelnos »

dekhn wrote: post #224
uoaei wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoted post unavailable.

I don't think we're arguing with you anymore about whether or not you could be bothered, just that you somehow seem to think that there's no (or only a minor or incremental) difference between a human watching your property and a camera recording it, which is objectively false.

And of course no one can resist trying to correct someone who is Wrong On The Internet.

Also I think it's because it sounds like you're refusing to sympathize with people who might be uncomfortable with this sort of thing. Are you the kind of person who would reflect on this issue and say, "this doesn't bother me, but I can see why it might bother someone else, so I wouldn't point a camera at my neighbor's house"? Or are you the kind of person who would say "this doesn't bother me personally, so I'll just do whatever I want and ignore how other people feel about this"? You are definitely giving off the latter vibe here, which is anti-social and selfish (not the kind of neighbor I'd want to live next to, regardless of this particular issue). Hopefully that's not who you are, though, and we've all just gotten caught up in the argument and are appearing one-dimensional.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#240

Post by dekhn »

always2slow wrote: post #223
dekhn wrote: 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.

Quoted post unavailable.

I think it's totally uncalled for to call me a creep. I'm saying other people can point their cameras at my yard. When I point my camera I seriously consider that others don't share my values. And if they came over and asked nicely, I'd move the camera (it currently points at a neighbor's driveway). At least I'm open and honest about it.
Post reply on HN