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Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

theintercept.com

351–360 of 532 posts

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#351

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.

For what it's worth, that same neighbor could have called the cops to harass you after seeing you walking with their own eyeballs, or the ancient art of lying to the cops that they saw anything at all. The presence of the Ring in this story adds nothing to the risk scenario

I've been walking in the neighborhoods I've lived in everyday for literal decades, and this only became a problem recently.

The difference here is that Ring and its companion apps like Neighbors continuously send their users scary alerts and video clips of innocuous neighborhood activities they'd otherwise miss entirely, or just ignore. I see this all the time with such apps like Nextdoor and Neighbors, where in the past loud sounds in the summer would be written off as fireworks and ignored, but now we have legions of people working themselves into frenzies about how "gun shots" were detected, with calls to action for video evidence of the "perpetrators". What then happens is that people start sharing clips of their neighbors doing essentially nothing and accusing them of actually committing crimes.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#352
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect people who buy them haven't personally witnessed what it looks like to report property crime—even fairly major property crime—to the police. Which is to say, they don't realize that there's almost no chance they'll do anything about it at all except issue a report for insurance (if you want one, and probably for a fee just to add insult to injury) even if you come to them with all kinds of evidence, up to an…

My personal experience from a home invasion where the individual caused a not insignificant amount of damage to the home resulted in nothing more than the police merely filing in a form and handing me a receipt. 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 s…

I'm shocked that the police even took prints. When my house was burglarized, they looked around and then told us to file a report and left.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#353
post #185
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it really unfortunate that the US is so blatantly disregarding data privacy. In a world of eroding freedom, lack of data privacy can become a severe safety risk. The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the reversal of Roe v. Wade and Russia's recent moves give me an idea of dynamics that can turn dark quickly.

RvW is an interesting point here - I routinely saw people camped out recording every entry point of a Planned Parenthood for example, including separate cameras pointed lower to capture licence plates. I'm assuming they later post these online or run some kind of ALPR on it for harassment.

Yup, and the same people are outraged that people are posting home address details of Supreme Court Justices. The same court that ruled it was legal to post the home address of obstetricians so people could protest in front of their homes.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#354

IMO the primary utility of Ring is for Amazon to surveil their delivery contractors, without a doorbell cam it’s trivial for a delivery person to set the package on the porch, photograph it as “proof of delivery”, and then walk away with said package. So the deterrent effect is good for the consumer in that it prevents theft, and good for Amazon because they can contract out to just about anyone to deliver packages,…

This will maybe be too snide, but I want to say it: what an utterly ridiculous system we've contrived for ourselves. People want to live in suburbs, where their residences are separated from commercial areas. This starves city and town centers, leaving only big businesses that are capable of thriving on high volume sales. But we still want the convenience of walking down to their neighborhood store, so we've construc…

>> People want to live in suburbs, where their residences are separated from commercial areas. This starves city and town centers, leaving only big businesses that are capable of thriving on high volume sales.

What are you supposed to do really? I grew up in an urban environment (NYC) and embraced urban living. The reality was that it wasnt sustainable w/o being a multi-millionaire. I'll give real examples.

I take a 20min subway/bus to a store purchase a terracotta planter, or perhaps a box of cat litter. You then have to carry that 5 or 10 pound item. You realize the subway isnt working, today. You need to take an express subway. Now you have to switch trains but you realize the escalator and elevator also isnt working. So you drag it up the stairs, across the tunnel, and back down the other side. You could hitch a ride on a friend's car, but there is congestion pricing, or a $11 toll on the tunnel, and throw in another $40 for parking. These things used to work in the 1990s, also in the 2000s, but eventually things all failed in a big way (and the failure of public transport was a big part of it.)

Good luck if you are disabled, or have knee problems, or have a baby+stroller also.

I tried really, really hard to live in an urban environment, but it was eventually a failure. I now live in the suburbs. We order cat litter and have it delivered to our doorstep.

No, i dont want to live in the suburb. But I cannot afford to live in the city. If I could freely take cabs everywhere like a multi-millionaire I would live in the city. Short of that, i didnt see much option to stay.

People say crazy things like "oh you should just bike everywhere." OK, how does my mom with osteoporosis bike? How does a disabled person bike? Where on the bike do you place the 10lb cat litter box?

Cat litter is just one aspect.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#355
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its more than reasonable. It's called respect. Their house and their drive and just because voice could travel 100-feet sill doesn't mean they have the right to record it. If the speed limit is twenty and someone is driving thirty, does that give you the right to drive thirty too?

You're comparing apples and oranges. One is legal and the other isn't. They absolutely have the right to record audio that is audible on their property. It used to be the norm that if you don't want your neighbors hearing you the onus is on you to speak quietly in a private place. With the increase in such devices the norm too will shift to "know that a device is recording audio in certain zones"

That's not exactly true. Many states have laws outlawing recording "private" conversations without the consent of all parties. As far as I know that would even include recording someone having a private conversation with you on your own property. Whether or not someone talking on their own property and their voice carrying over their property line would qualify is up for debate.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a block-long grouping of condos in Brooklyn. Every so often the management company sends out exterminators and one day as I was talking to him he pointed to these environmental monitors installed on a lamppost on our block. He says “what’s with that, the government spying on us?” and I explained it’s just some environmental data collectors, but pointed to my neighbor’s Ring and mentioned “although that thin…

The difference is that one of those things has a benefit. When there's a mysterious box that does some vague thing that you don't care about, it's safe to hate it. It's not helping you in any observable way, so opposing its existence is a safe, easy decision. But the Ring camera is providing him with a benefit, so evaluating whether to oppose it requires putting a cost on "spying on us" and weighing that against the…

"When there's a mysterious box that does some vague thing that you don't care about, it's safe to hate it. It's not helping you in any observable way, so opposing its existence is a safe, easy decision"

This sounds like the justification of stupidity. If you don't know what it does it ignoring may or may not be safe. If you can't observe a benefit to you (I assume you mean obvious and causual observation) doesn't mean it doesn't benefit you.

It's like you've codified ignorance to make it sound reasonable. This is the same level of thought my cat uses to interact with the world.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#357
post #224
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 think it takes as long as you continue to believe your opinion deserves no counterbalance in a public forum setting.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The neighbor isn't a party to the conversation though?

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#359
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single party recording is legal in 38 states. https://fireflies.ai/blog/call-recording-laws-in-50-states-3...

First-- this is a summary of statutes for recording phone calls; the laws are not always the same in each jurisdiction for making an audio recording in public. And we're in a thread where someone is describing a scenario where neighbor A records person B talking to child C. Neighbor A is not a party to the conversation. Whether a state has a one party or two party statute, this behavior would likely violate it.

>> Whether a state has a one party or two party statute, this behavior would likely violate it.

Fascinating. How does Ring get around this? Has no one tried to sue to force the issue?

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#360
post #308

I'll change my tune when news like this breaks about Apple, but I paid extra for a HomeKit video camera because Amazon's data policies give me heebie-jeebies. I get a notification and a live video on my TV when someone shows up on my doorstep, but not when someone walks by on the sidewalk. It's easy.

Why wait? host your own...

If I host my own, I know how to get openCV to only get notifications when a particular feature is detected, but can I get a live preview as a picture-in-picture on my TV while I'm watching NBA basketball? Or while my girlfriend is watching college basketball? I don't think there's a reasonable solution for that.

Buying a HomeKit hosted camera, and AppleTV, and the prerequisite WiFi network upgrade costs about two hours of my time. Could a standalone camera, ethernet/wifi connection, server, and software be stood up for fewer dollars or less time? I really doubt it.

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