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Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

theintercept.com

471–480 of 532 posts

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#471

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Can you recommend some?

Synology has some fairly strong products in this space. A fairly cheap NAS from them for local storage, and then basically any ip camera you can find will mostly just work. (NAS I'm using: https://www.amazon.com/Synology-Bay-DiskStation-DS220-Diskle... ) They offer surveillance station ( https://www.synology.com/en-us/surveillance ) as a free app for most of their models. My entire setup (3 cameras, NAS, hdds, POE sw…

I actually own a Synology NAS. Weird. Never cared about the app but is sounds really nice. Thank you. I'll check it out.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#472

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You don’t have to pick a dystopian spyware camera to deter porch theft. This attitude is why we can’t have nice things.

What is the issue with a porch camera looking out into a low traffic public space like my own personal driveway? I seriously don't understand the complaint here, and I say this as someone who has a Faraday pouch for my phone and a policy of no AI "assistants" WITHIN the house.

There isn’t any issue with a camera. The issue is that you lazily picked the spyware camera from Amazon.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#474

Is this sort of thing a boiled frog type slide to surveillance powered totalitarianism or will everyone eventually catch on and demand ubiquitous privacy everywhere?

The frog's been slowly boiling for decades now, so the former.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#475
post #71

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Wild, don't you have any laws against this? Here in CZ(EU), you can't put camera facing public property just like that, I don't even mention facing private property of somebody else, lol. Even camera facing your property and like corner of view is public property, I can send formal complaint to "GDPR" bureau, they will warn the property owner, if nothing happens, fine incoming which can be pretty huge.

Absurd. The right to record in public, which this is, should be respected.

I don't know about your US "rights". But here it's illegal to record somebody without permission and store it somewhere. Basically against GDPR.

Of course, as a property owner you can request cameras facing public space, but you must be GDPR compliant then and you're put into register and anybody can requests deletion. Also you must provide valid reason for this request.

To me(us) is absurd that you can record private citizens and do whatever you want with it. Ridiculous.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#476
post #104

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Depending on your state and country, you may have a legal angle here if you care, see: https://recordinglaw.com/party-two-party-consent-states/ I believe it's the reason Nest defaults to not recording audio, because the law various by state, and even mixed within some states. For 2-party (all-party) states, you can't record audio on security cameras (or at least it's a bad idea, and likely illegal).

>>For 2-party (all-party) states, you can't record audio on security cameras (or at least it's a bad idea, and likely illegal). You can record audio in public, and a street facing audio recording is low risk, unless the microphone is so sensitive that there is an argument you are picking up audio from, for example, a neighbor's back yard. I think a sign indicating audio and video recording is sensible. That said, a b…

No, I'm quite certain the parent comment is correct. I'm only familiar with Florida's laws on the subject but I've personally had to deal with setting up intermittent audio recording in a "public" area (private business but not a room that anyone would think is "private") and state law was very clear that we had to make sure there was some reasonable signage to notify anyone entering the area that audio recording was being used.

A sign indicating audio recording was taking place is directly comparable to the standard "This call is being recorded for quality assurance" that's ubiquitous on corporate call queues. That's reasonable enough for consent in the context of security cams. If someone wants to talk on your doorstep after seeing the notice that's reasonable enough, if you don't consent then don't go up to the camera and talk about some private subject.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#477
post #423

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They own it legally, and they are absolutely unsuccessful in stopping unauthorized copies. Same with the Ring videos, no? The owner of camera owns the recordings, maybe, but they can't really control disclosure.

> Same with the Ring videos, no? I wonder if they could sue using copyright laws

I wonder too. I suppose it's not straightforward, maybe there are something written in the ToS and EULA, maybe those things are invalid... the people writing this article weren't sure either. They say that in case you record to a medium locally, you have the copyright, but in case of cloud services, it's unclear.

https://www.securitysales.com/surveillance/who-owns-home-sur...

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#478

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So moved into a newly built house, by default everyone gets a smart doorbell in this house. They looked at me like I was crazy when I said I didn't want it or any of the other the "smart" devices. This was the exact reason.

I guess if you don’t have prowler or package theft problems, they aren’t really necessary. I personally have found my Nest cameras indispensable. Ironically, if police would just do their job on property crime, they wouldn’t be so needed.

>Ironically, if police would just do their job on property crime, they wouldn’t be so needed.

if the last several years have taught us anything its that police only do there jobs when they feel like it. whether that processing rape kits, stopping gunmen, stopping property theft, doesn't matter that wont do it.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use HomeKit cameras or HomeKit Secure Video cameras?

HomeKit Secure Video on a Logitech Circle View. It is decidedly aight . It's expensive, but it works well enough. The video was high enough quality that the local police could ID the guy who stole letters from my mailbox a few months ago. But it's easy and reliable and notifies us when somebody drops a package on our doorstep.

My biggest gripe is the searching. Other systems let you say "search for videos with an animal".

HKSV is basically just a long list of videos that are hard to search through. Sure hope they fix that.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#480
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess if you don’t have prowler or package theft problems, they aren’t really necessary. I personally have found my Nest cameras indispensable. Ironically, if police would just do their job on property crime, they wouldn’t be so needed.

What’s the point? Even if you have a great video of a dude stealing your packages nobody will arrest or do anything about it.

You also know very quickly you have a package at your door, or someone has entered your drive way. If you are home, you can “greet” them which usually scares them off. Even if aren’t home, you can greet them with the speaker. I wake up pretty quickly at night when my nest person detected alert goes off. I live in the back town house, so fortunately I don’t get much random person passing by traffic to set off false alarms.
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