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

521–530 of 532 posts

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#521

Post by archon810 »

sebazzz wrote: post #36
RNAlfons wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you recommend some?

Eufy, which records locally. Doesn't have as much "AI" though.

I have several Eufy cams and while their hardware is excellent, the software leaves much to be desired.

My biggest gripe right now is when you get a notification and tap it on Android, you get such a cut down UI, it doesn't even have a scrubber and you can't fast forward or rewind. Just a completely barebones player you can't control. Once you exit that and go to the camera history, you get a normal player with controls. Makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#522

Post by archon810 »

bob1029 wrote: post #22

I fear for the day when someone comes knocking on my door because my government-approved surveillance doorbell has been offline for too long. The very first thing I did when I moved into my new house was completely disconnect/disable all networked security & "smart" home systems. I have a Ring doorbell, but it is not receiving any power. I figure the simple sight of it may still serve as a deterrent. Most of the "sma…

How does one ring your door bell if it's there but without power?

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#525

Post by [deleted] »

dekhn wrote: post #345
sdoering wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only second this. If this were my neighbor I would get a restraining order against them. Recording your neighbors kids in the yard to me sounds borderline problematic. I just can't find any sane justification for behavior like that.

If you tried to get a restraining order for my camera which incidentally overlooks the neighbor's driveway (no kids playing there), you would be laughed at. I'm not breaking any law, nor do I have any ill intent. The kids I incidentally tape are in a school yard across the street from me, and after Uvalde, both the cops and the school admins would welcome another source of information to help them prevent school kill…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#526

Post by sacrosancty »

usrn wrote: post #459
sacrosancty wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard that when cameras were first invented, some cultures rejected them because they believed they were stealing their souls. Sounds like some silly superstition but I have a feeling that what both them and you are really worried about is the fact that people looking at a photo of you are only seeing a small slice of your "soul" or personhood disconnected from the social interactions that would normally occur if t…

The older I get the more superstition makes sense. I used to think older people were superstitious because they were more likely to have existential crises (since they were closer to death) but now that I'm middle aged I've realized that it's because human reason is surprisingly slow and the universe is surprisingly big and there's just too much to work through from first principles.

I've been having a similar change but it's not only about there being too much for us to work out from first principles but also an awareness that human minds seem to have a need to believe things which is orthogonal to knowing the truth or being logical. We don't believe in superstitions and religions because we want to make practical use of that knowledge or because it's the logical conclusion from some reasoning - we do it because the act of believing satisfies some biological need. It's easier to believe things when they're not obviously false but truth isn't really what's important about it.

When I see people saying "You idiot, of course the earth isn't flat!" or "All religions are stupid.", I just think they haven't understood the value of belief, even, or especially, false beliefs.

This whole philosophy of valuing truth and using science and all that is fairly modern and seemingly unnatural. I wonder if it's creating an emotional cost in all the people who rejected emotionally or biologically valuable beliefs in favor of being right.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#527

Post by KevinGlass »

zrail wrote: post #337
KevinGlass wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UniFi cameras are amazing. Superb video quality (better then so called "professional" cameras from the regular security companies), easy to setup (but still an order of magnitude more work then a Ring), self hostable, and from my experience highly reliable.

Agreed. I have a UniFi Protect setup and almost all of the equipment is top notch. I don't appreciate the lock-in inherent in the system (Protect NVR only works with Protect cameras, cameras only work with their NVR, and you can't self-host the NVR on your own hardware), but I'll gladly take it in trade for excellent spousal-approval-factor. The one exception I've found so far is that the UNVR-4 system software in ol…

For what it's worth you can use RSTP streams from the cameras in most open source NVRs but you can only enabled it from the UniFi NVR thus requiring UniFi NVR hardware to begin with.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#528

Post by zrail »

KevinGlass wrote: post #527
zrail wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I have a UniFi Protect setup and almost all of the equipment is top notch. I don't appreciate the lock-in inherent in the system (Protect NVR only works with Protect cameras, cameras only work with their NVR, and you can't self-host the NVR on your own hardware), but I'll gladly take it in trade for excellent spousal-approval-factor. The one exception I've found so far is that the UNVR-4 system software in ol…

For what it's worth you can use RSTP streams from the cameras in most open source NVRs but you can only enabled it from the UniFi NVR thus requiring UniFi NVR hardware to begin with.

The streams don't come from the cameras in that scenario either, they get proxied by the NVR.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#529

Post by Handytinge »

CursedUrn wrote: post #39
ubermonkey wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no, not exactly. The ring is an always-on camera. My phone is not that. My phone may leak some information about me, and its basic job (cell phone) provides a record of location data, but that's not the same thing as forcibly making a home security device into part of a police state panopticon.

Are you sure your phone microphone isn't always on? At the very least your voice assistant is listening all the time to detect the trigger word (does this send the voice to the cloud for AI assisted detection?). Also if you search for articles about Ultrasonic Beacons, they imply adware tech is listening all the time too.

It's wild to me you think someone using the phrase "police state panopticon" would have an always on voice assistant enabled.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#530

Post by Handytinge »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #344
ensignavenger wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My smart phone is not recording video all the time and uploading it to somebody else's computer. It does send location pings to the cell tower when turned on... However, I can easily turn my smart phone off, or leave it home or somewhere else. Security cameras and thermostats and refrigerators aren't so easy to just turn off.

It's listening and recording audio at all time.

There are billions of smart phones out there, and hundreds of thousands of technical minds both working at the companies who make them, and owning and checking them for these things.

Please provide a singular credible source for your statement.

Post reply on HN