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Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

arstechnica.com

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Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#31

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

kshacker wrote: post #7

So can I sell a camera with the following description? SpyCam Disclaimer: should not be used for spying

It's a common trope in grey markets.

Not sure to what extent this is still the case, but when I was messing around with greyzone drugs about a decade ago, they tended to be sold on technically legal, UK, Swedish, Polish etc web stores. They'd have names similar to illegal drugs they were analogues of and like descriptions of the effects. But have the disclaimer "not for human consumption. Research purposes only".

Of course even the purportedly pure chemical products were unsuitable for actual research or standards use due to lack of attestation to purity(at least with most vendors) and so on.

It didn't affect the legality, probably just a weak attempt to avoid potential liability.

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#32

Post by chankstein38 »

bdw5204 wrote: post #9

A spy camera that looks like a towel hook seems like a product that should be illegal to sell. For what legitimate purpose would somebody want a towel hook camera? Don't most people put towel hooks in bathrooms? It seems perfectly reasonable to hold Amazon legally responsible for selling this product even if it was a 3rd party seller (not clear from the article). A product whose intended use is to secretly record vid…

Yeah I thought the quote in the article claiming there were "legitimate and legal uses" was odd. They said "like in-home surveillance" but... why do you need to surveil your bathroom? What legal purpose does that serve? Maybe a way to film burglars while they don't know they're being filmed? But isn't part of the reason security surveillance works is visible cameras making people do the "right thing" or whatever. The quote was so weird. I don't see any legitimate use that doesn't have a pretty easy contradiction.

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#33

Post by thfuran »

xmprt wrote: post #8
graphe wrote: post #2

[flagged]

If Facebook showed illegal images on its platform and didn't do anything to counter that the I think most people would argue that it was Facebook's fault. Why is it so hard to imagine holding corporations to higher standards? And for all the examples you gave: Facebook marketplace has safety features to try to prevent robberies. Gun shops do background checks to avoid selling to murderers.

They also don't usually advertise that their guns are the ideal pick for a school shooting.

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#35

Post by mamurphy »

space_fountain wrote: post #17
metadat wrote: post #4

Is there an archive snapshot of the Towel bar Cam product page as displayed by Amazon? Kinda wondering what the product actually looks like, and how Amazon allowed it to be presented. Edit: whoa, @navels how'd you do that?! Thank you, amazing: https://web.archive.org/web/20230527030738/https://www.amazo... The product reviews are creepy. -- Rest of my comment for posterity: There's an image in TFA, though it's only a…

I mean I also have a morbid curiosity, but is there anything that could have been there that would have made it ok? This isn't lock picks were a lot of people buy them to mess around with and to get back into their own property

Another commenter posted the archive page. No comment on whether this "made it ok," but some of the other photos show the hooks being used in a different context, more like a nanny cam.

This one (https://web.archive.org/web/20231204210803/https://m.media-a...) shows hooks in what looks like a mudroom catching an image of a person in black clothing in a ski-mask, indicating a use case of the hook would be to surreptitiously record a thief.

On the archive, it is advertised as a "Hidden Clothes Hook Camera, Mini Spy Camera HD 1080P, Nanny Cam with Motion Detection, Wireless Security Camera for Home/Office/Pet Monitor, Video Recorder No WiFi Needed, No Audio" with no mention of it being a "bathroom spycam."

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#36

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

notatoad wrote: post #18
bdw5204 wrote: post #9

A spy camera that looks like a towel hook seems like a product that should be illegal to sell. For what legitimate purpose would somebody want a towel hook camera? Don't most people put towel hooks in bathrooms? It seems perfectly reasonable to hold Amazon legally responsible for selling this product even if it was a 3rd party seller (not clear from the article). A product whose intended use is to secretly record vid…

"you can't sell a spy cam that looks like a towel hook" is sort of too broad and too specific to be a good law. what does "looks like a towel hook" actually mean? a law like this would end up having some unintended consequences, where bad actors use it for something like claiming all their competitors products look like towel hooks. i think what's happening here is really the ideal solution: you can sell a camera tha…

I'm not sure I can agree with either of you.

I definitely don't agree with "thing I don't like should be illegal".

And I can't really agree with "People who sold something I don't like should be liable for it's use".

I think the "blame" for objects should lie in the people that misuse them. Now, obviously, it's a little hard to come up with legitimate reasons to have a towel hook camera. However... All you're asking for is smaller cameras.

To which we restart this whole thing with "These super small cameras should be illegal".

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#37

Post by asveikau »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #24
bdw5204 wrote: post #9

A spy camera that looks like a towel hook seems like a product that should be illegal to sell. For what legitimate purpose would somebody want a towel hook camera? Don't most people put towel hooks in bathrooms? It seems perfectly reasonable to hold Amazon legally responsible for selling this product even if it was a 3rd party seller (not clear from the article). A product whose intended use is to secretly record vid…

The standard answer is to prevent the crime that happens in bathrooms: drug use, rapes, bullying, et cetera. But that's a BS answer IMO. If you actually want to prevent the crime, the criminals have to know the surveillance is there. Make the cameras visible, or take the doors off the bathroom stalls[1]. People will be outraged at that; but hidden surveillance is even worse. 1: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchene…

Looking at the photo of the product, it'd be substantially less sketchy to put it somewhere other than a bathroom for home security purposes. But I know a lot of people are sketched out by putting security cameras indoors, even in a living room or hallway. I've got lots of cameras on my perimeter but none inside the house.

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#38

Post by bluGill »

belval wrote: post #15
jacquesm wrote: post #3

You wonder why they even have a review team if this passed.

That part is confusing to me because it specifically calls out items that are for violating privacy. Any defense from "we are not responsible for how a product is used as long as it's legal" or "our safety team inspects products that could hurt people" (AC appliance without a properly grounded case) would have sounded much more reasonable to me. The reality of it is probably that reviewers can only spend ~1 minute pe…

You cannot possibly review this in one minute. You need a team of different experts and they need time to think. If you saw this for one minute before looking at this article you probably wouldn't think about this use case - even though it is obvious once someone points it out. So Amazon needs to show they gave the review team enough time to think about this type of thing.

Amazon might be able to get out of this if they can show the court a long enough checklist of things they did look for that this does pass. If that list is long enough (a term I specifically did not define!) they can argue they did due diligence, this is just different from everything they thought of and so it slipped threw the cracks. Of course the checklist better have a clear procedure for "something else not on this list" and a it needs to be clear anytime something not on the list is thought of that the process gets that new thing on the list. This is NOT easy or cheap.

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#39

Post by duskwuff »

xmprt wrote: post #8
graphe wrote: post #2

[flagged]

If Facebook showed illegal images on its platform and didn't do anything to counter that the I think most people would argue that it was Facebook's fault. Why is it so hard to imagine holding corporations to higher standards? And for all the examples you gave: Facebook marketplace has safety features to try to prevent robberies. Gun shops do background checks to avoid selling to murderers.

> And for all the examples you gave:

And, while we're at it: eBay has listing policies which prohibit certain classes of items from being sold (including hidden cameras!), and will take down listings which violate them.

https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite...

Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised

#40

Post by neilv »

I'd expect Amazon product safety people to know what these are. Spycams have been widely advertised for decades, often overtly targeted specifically for use of spying on women.

For example, pretty early in Web history (before WiFi and then IoT were popular), "X10" cameras were advertised heavily: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kuan/x10.html

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