Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#311

Post by alpaca128 » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:49 PM UTC

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.

Would you also be fine with people filming you through your windows? Why not, after all it's visible from a public space with the right angle. And windows are just part of another kind of "fence".

In the end it's private property and that makes it private by default. Nobody can forbid you from looking at it, but imho filming is just as invasive as parking the car there while having greater potential for abuse. Filming has intent that goes farther than just randomly looking around.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#312

Post by ls15 » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:50 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #289

ls15 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never would give a neighbor a hard time about a camera pointing at a publicly visible spot on my property In Germany people have successfully sued their neighbours for that and I fully agree with the courts. Filming others without consent is invasive.

Germany's entire threat model, at a cultural level, is 100% different from the US due to differing histories. Germany is concerned about how networks of tattle-tale can be used by fascists to organize oppression. Americans are concerned about how crime flourishes in the unobserved corners of urban environments. These are both, basically, bogeymen. But the German bogeyman is the Nazis returning and the American bogeym…

> These are both, basically, bogeymen. But the German bogeyman is the Nazis returning and the American bogeyman is the transient murderer.

Eastern Germany had another authoritarian surveillance state after the Third Reich. I have no good reason to be confident that it will not happen again. It could as well happen in the US, considering recent history.

An authoritarian surveillance state that is paired with digital surveillance is the grim reality of at least hundreds of millions today and that model seems to be on the rise internationally.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#313

Post by micromacrofoot » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:51 PM UTC

bckygldstn wrote: post #72

MichaelZuo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your houses are close together I don't think it's reasonable to have an expectation of privacy on the driveway or front porch. After all sound at normal speaking volume can easily travel 100 feet on a quiet day, if there's nothing in-between.

That’s probably legally true in the US, but is that the best we can do? It’s valid to question the value of laws. Sometimes I wish I did have more privacy in public. But more importantly, technology has completely changed what non-privacy looks like and is tragic to me that laws haven’t caught up. There’s a huge practical difference between “someone within 100ft, probably a neighbour who I know, might hear me and pro…

This is a similar problem with data brokers... yes my records are public, but for most of history that meant going down to city hall and putting forth effort... should the law around public records be different when data brokers vacuum up all that public data and resell it digitally? We've lost many practical barriers to privacy.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#314

Post by encryptluks2 » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:51 PM UTC

nedwin wrote: post #145

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…

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…

Shitty behavior how? There is nothing illegal about recordings your neighbors driveway.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#315

Post by ocdtrekkie » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:52 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #107

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…

The camera may be acting as a deterrent (if they didn't have any additional thefts) without it being obvious. I never would give a neighbor a hard time about a camera pointing at a publicly visible spot on my property- just into windows and other semi-private locations. That includes both audio and video. I ascribe to the "it's legal for journalists to go through your trash, so if you want privacy, shred your trash f…

> if the cops come by and ask for footage, I generally provide it

Yeah, I see nothing wrong with this: The law has to ask you, the owner of the camera, for the footage. No legal process can circumvent your knowledge of the footage request, and you can review the footage prior to handing it over. This is all possible because you made good non-cloud infrastructure decisions.

This is basically how it should work, but the fact that Amazon is a third party means the government can legally compel them separately from you being aware. There's no fix for this: Cloud storage is a critical failure of the design of the Ring system.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#316

Post by thewebcount » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:53 PM UTC

I just saw this article[0] about how the constant scams we're subjected to on a daily basis are a big problem for more than just monetary reasons. If companies weren't allowed to collect so much data, and weren't allowed to just share with whomever they wanted to, this would be much less of a problem. Many of these scams are possible because of the huge trove of personal information collected by companies like Amazon, Google, etc. Whether they lose control of their data to hackers or sell it to untrustworthy "partners" doesn't really matter. If they didn't have it, they couldn't sell it or lose it.

[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/13/scam-fr...

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#317

Post by darknavi » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:54 PM UTC

at_a_remove wrote: post #303

Looking at most Ring videos, they don't seem very useful for tracking anyone down, more of a "yes, a porch pirate stole your stuff." Their position is such that the license plate -- assuming they even come in via a vehicle -- is visible. Plate readers need to be in a different place, with a different aim. Plus, Rings are wireless, and too many thieves are just using a wireless jammer.

> too many thieves are just using a wireless jammer.

Is this actually that wide spread? I hardwire all of my cameras but I've never heard of wide-spread wireless jamming in house-hold crime.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#318

Post by sizzle » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

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…

Floodlights are great for security and I like the cams to get a notification when packages arrive or to see if I closed the garage or if there v is any suspicious persons coming on my property, etc. Wyze has great AI person and package detection from my usage. I don’t actively monitor video unless something happened that warranted it. I also do not put it in places that it can pick up neighbors private moments.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#319

Post by dekhn » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

alpaca128 wrote: post #311

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.

Would you also be fine with people filming you through your windows? Why not, after all it's visible from a public space with the right angle. And windows are just part of another kind of "fence". In the end it's private property and that makes it private by default. Nobody can forbid you from looking at it, but imho filming is just as invasive as parking the car there while having greater potential for abuse. Filmin…

I use drapes and shapes to get privacy for my windows. My intent Here is to prevent school shootings and help investigate crimes that occur on my property or my neighbor's property. Definitely not my intent to stare at my neighbors in their private lives and they understand that completely.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#320

Post by heavyset_go » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:56 PM UTC

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #290

heavyset_go wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wrote about it before on HN, but a local busybody saw me committing the crime of walking down the street in my own neighborhood on their Ring camera and used that as pretext for calling the cops on me, who then harassed me for being "suspicious" without having actually looked at the footage themselves at all. Unsurprisingly, I am not a fan of the surveillance state that's found itself at my literal doorstep.

Sounds like your real problem is your neighbor being a jerk. If they didn't have Ring that wouldn't stop them from calling the cops on a "suspicious" person.

I think there's a big difference between a busybody staring out the window sometimes and being upset with what they see versus a busybody with a 24/7 security system that pings them at all hours of the day with alerts and video clips about "suspicious" activity it detects, along with apps like Nextdoor, Citizen and the Ring Neighbors app that allow the paranoid to continuously share said clips and create local echo chambers of paranoia, suspicion and distrust.