Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

Unsurprisingly, I am not a fan of the surveillance state that's found itself at my literal doorstep.

My personal experience from coming home to a burgled also ended with the same situation. The police came, waited from crime lab to take prints, prints were not recoverable, no follow up. This was even after several attempts at providing the assigned detective detailed information from the bank on how the criminal's attempted to use a stolen checkbook to withdraw money from a bank account. The detective later explained that he's too busy to look at information provided via email.

No I think it is called for, you clearly aren't getting it. The things you are saying, the behavior you're outlining and the justifications you are giving for it make you a creep.

>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

So you perform an act of intimidation[1], and then expect your neighbors to come to you and ask that you stop? This is not the behavior of a good person, no matter what you've convinced yourself. Good people do not intimidate their neighbors and then expect to be given the benefit of the doubt on top of it. This is the kind of thing a creep does to force interaction with them and then escalate their intimidation tactics.

If you truly weren't a creep and you wanted to put a camera up, you'd ask your neighbors for permission first. Get their consent and then proceed only if they give it. So really at best you're a creep who doesn't see a problem with intimidating their neighbors at worst you're someone who doesn't understand or care about consent.

>move the camera (it currently points at a neighbor's driveway). At least I'm

>open and honest about it.

Seriously, nothing about your responses here are showing that you're open and honest. You sound entitled and presumptuous. I'd invite you to please try to view this from a perspective that isn't your own.

[1] You started out saying this, remember? - "The camera may be acting as a deterrent (if they didn't have any additional thefts) without it being obvious."

The camera is acting as a deterrent by being intimidating, so at least you agree that a camera can be intimidating.

edit: formatting

Yes, exactly -- the shipping happens regardless. It's certainly more efficient to ship 20 of each widget to a store than it is to ship 20 widgets to 20 homes, though. But then people have to get to the store to buy those widgets, and often they will drive to get there (not everything is going to be available within walking distance).

> but the waste of individual boxes [...] is obscene.

Yes, this is bad. Personally I try to mitigate this by batching my purchases so more things arrive per box (admittedly, sometimes I don't do this), but some shippers will still break up a single order into multiple boxes spread over several days, which sucks. I do occasionally end up with an item that's shipped directly in its own packaging (that is, no extra box around the item, and it arrives in the same box that I would have picked up off a store shelf), but this is pretty rare, and of course there are many items where this wouldn't work (and would be more wasteful, not less).

> But that doesn't make it right

I'm curious as to how you're defining "right" and "wrong" here, and it does feel like some of your argument is based on "this feels icky and anti-social", and not entirely on objectively-bad externalities. I think the transportation aspect of these deliveries is a bit overblown, as transportation has to happen regardless, and people driving to a store to buy things is probably not much better (and is sometimes worse) than a box truck or van stopping door-to-door to drop things off (walking to a store would be the ideal, but I suspect this wouldn't replace as much driving or online ordering as we'd expect, even in places where it's possible). The packaging waste is definitely a consideration, but I've seen this getting better over time, with more reusable/recyclable paper products being used, and less plastic. We still have a ways to go here, though. To be clear: I do agree with you that much of this is objectively worse than visiting a store to make the same purchase, but I think calling it "obscene" is an overreaction.