Gross. You can do the search on amazon (“bathroom spy camera”) and there are tons of results. One is even a shower nozzle !
Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised
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Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised
#122So can I sell a camera with the following description? SpyCam Disclaimer: should not be used for spying
There is historical precedent. My favorite were winemaking kits sold during Prohibition that told you what you needed to avoid doing, because doing that would make wine. https://grapecollective.com/articles/prohibitions-grape-bric...
That's really funny, thanks for sharing.
It's worth to point out that the article tells it was legal to make wine in your own home during the prohibition because of a loophole.
Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised
#123Good. Amazon has been happy to rake in commissions for years from dodgy products sold by third party sellers (uncertified electrical equipment, scam flash drives/SSDs, spycams, etc) and then turn around and blame the marketplace sellers when the inevitable happens. Unlike eBay, Amazon goes to great lengths to sow confusion about what it sells versus its marketplace participants. The average user thinks that when they…
I don't think the people buying spycams off Amazon are too surprised when a spycam arrives. If Amazon had put a big banner at the top of the page saying "this is a third party product, it seems skethy af" I doubt any of the purchasers would change their behavior. Certainly no one at Amazon duped someone into accidentally setting up a bathroom cam.
Spycams are legal to sell in the US, and it is the responsibility of owners of cameras to use them legally. I wouldn't expect a brick and mortar store to certify that the products they sell are impossible to be 'used to “infringe privacy,” “surreptitiously record others for sexual purposes,” or “create and store child sex abuse material”' and be held liable when one of their products is used as such. Perhaps the sale of such cameras should be more regulated, but it shouldn't be Amazon's place to decide that the law is insufficient and fix it.
Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised
#124Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean it's a spy camera that only makes sense in a bathroom. There's even a showerhead one sold on Amazon. I'm not even sure it's humanly possible to look at one of these and not realise the primary use case is criminal. The only conclusion I'm left to draw from this is either that no actual review takes place, or that the review is merely there to ascertain "is this product literally illegal right now?"
You can create convoluted excuses for the showercam too. For example, cases where you wanted to keep an eye on a babysitter while they bathed your child or a nurse or caretaker bathing an adult/elderly family member who was disabled.
Ph-lease! You don’t need to be that damn close to “keep an eye on”, and actually I don’t think you’d really want to be that close.
Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK, "towel hook" = "coat hook" and is often placed in entryways.
It's up to the legal system to decide whether this was advertised as a hidden bathroom camera. I imagine that the advertising pictures of the camera holding a towel made this a rather easy decision.
> a product that should be illegal to sell
Is the suggestion that should be "marketing that should be illegal"?
Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
That link doesn't mention anything about it being a "bathroom spy camera". It was sold as a nanny cam which is really a legitimate, if slightly distasteful, function. There is an image of it shown with towels on the hook, but it isn't stated or implied that it should be used to spy on people as they use the bathroom. I'm a big fan of holding tech companies to the same standards as other industries, but not a big fan…
Nanny cam is obviously a crappy attempt at covering the seller's ass and no judge should believe it.
Are nanny cams not a legitimate product?
If they are a legitimate product, how do we tell the legitimate product from this (in your words) "crappy attempt at covering the seller's ass?"
If they are a legitimate product and we can't reasonably tell the difference, why should Amazon have banned this product?
Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
> You cannot possibly review this in one minute. I didn't mean to imply that you can. It's more that at Amazon's scale, they are surely constrained by how many new items are put up for sale every second. If even just 1/100 needs to be reviewed, then that's a considerable amount of work. Once the pipeline is setup their workforce probably got progressively better so they increase the review/day targets to match. That…
They choose to be constrained. Do you know just how big of a % of their budgets Tencent and the likes spend on employing people who maintain censorship on their Chinese platforms? Amazon, Meta et. al could spend the same amount to keep their platforms clean and an actual boon to society instead of scam-infested, negative externality fests.
But they don't. They could though.
Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Semantics. Besides, spying isn't illegal. It could be used for porn. They get rid of the word spy on the camera, amazon gets a fine and this will now this happen hidden under the surface. It's semantics. What's the real solution to hidden cameras that spy on victims undressing?
If you were making legit, consensual porn, why would you use tiny hideable cameras?
I was thinking of voyeurs. It's the legit side of this. Spying also isn't illegal.
Re: Judge: Amazon "cannot claim shock" that bathroom spycams were used as advertised
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
In the copyright-adjacent space, there's the concept of something having no substantial non-infringement-supporting use. It's a judgment call, of course, and certainly it's abused... but that seems like what people are angling for: making it illegal to sell things which have no legal use.
I can come up with a few legal uses for this, though. Not many, and I doubt the primary use of this thing is legal. But it means any law would have to involve some kind of balancing test.
I remember people trying to make various open source software illegal under this kind of argument. Debuggers, tool suites, and so on. Because obviously only evil hackers used them, and open source development was a negligible fringe activity.