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Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

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Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a fairly impractical thing to map unless you're getting volunteers to walk up to and inspect people's front doors. I know there is an app for a sort of gamified version of this where people take tasks to verify street signs or even how many stories a building has, I used that app for a while, but doorbell mapping seems a lot leas casual.

apparently Ring LLC has their own OUI [0]. I wonder if you could wardrive around and identify cameras by their MAC address [0] https://maclookup.app/vendors/ring-llc

That's fun. If you have an account you can use https://wigle.net/mapsearch to search for bluetooth devices with that prefix from other people's wardrives. There are definitely some results coming up. A wildcard search for bluetooth devices named "Ring %" also seems to work

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The police have a very safe job, generally. They've done studies and construction workers have a much higher rate of injury and death than the police in the US. People have this idea that being a police officer is really unsafe and that they're throwing themselves in the line of danger just by doing their jobs, but most people are law-abiding and civil. There are people who are not, but that's not a good reason for t…

> They've done studies and construction workers have a much higher rate of injury and death than the police in the US. Sure, but both construction worker and police officer are significantly more dangerous jobs than most of us here have sitting behind a desk. Obviously it’s not a job where people are dying routinely, but suggesting death or serious injury are the only two risks of interacting with the public and resp…

No I completely agree that the police need things like health care and mental health and training on dealing with crises and all of this stuff we expect. But the idea that they need better weapons to do their job or that everyone they encounter should be treated like Afghani insurgents using the cameras they've installed in their own homes is beyond dystopian. Getting shot or stabbed, in my understanding is way less likely than just getting yelled at and traumatized by someone. And so I think the things that actually would add value would be things that either help you avoid those situations in the first place or things that help you process and lay down the trauma after the fact.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#153

When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house, you realize that the recent demo of Anduril's helmet that gives an information display that the soldier/cop wearing it can use to "see who is in the house" or "see around corners" etc. is not sci-fi but instead, something they can do today.

Pros: potentially greater safety for police and EMS when dealing with touchy people, obvious benefits for fire rescue (assuming it works in a fire). Cons: use your imagination.

A country like the US has around 0.47 deaths in the line of duty per million per year whereas a country like Germany where people can't buy gun just like that is at 0.37 and a country like the UK where normal cops do not have guns is at 0.05

Which is easier, Wifi 7 in all homes or gun restrictions ?

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#154
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a man murdered a woman in front of my house last year, our Ring camera's photos of his car led to his arrest within 24 hours, so not entirely useless?

I’m ok with that as long as I, the camera owner, am choosing to hand over the footage. At best I can see some sort of watermarking to ensure that it’s legitimate.

There are legitimate reasons to want a camera either at your front door or surveilling your property. These can range from an increased sense of security to having documentation to support insurance claims, or even for watching wildlife. We installed our Ring camera after an ongoing string of nighttime car break-ins hit us and we had no direct proof of what happened for insurance. It was meant to be both a deterrent to that type of event and also for documentation if it happened again. There's also a pack of coyotes that lives in the woods near our house and occasionally eats our chickens. While that usage was more out of curiosity (if you have chickens, you're going to lose one from time to time), we were able to develop a sense of when that threat was higher.

I live on a bucolic cul-de-sac in a house that I've lived in since the mid 1970s. Most of the neighbors are the same. I never in my life expected a random person to drive down the street, drag a lady out of his trunk, chase her around the cul-de-sac, and stab her to death in front of my house. I never expected to find the body in the woods 40' from my side door. This is when I also learned that nobody comes to clean up after a crime like that and that if I didn't want pools of blood in front of my house and a 50' streak of it crossing the circle or the splatters all over the mailboxes that I was going to have to go out there and clean it up myself. I was in PTSD therapy for a while after that. I'm glad the Ring camera caught some of the activity.

After an event like that, it's easy to lose a sense of security in your home. How are you supposed to sleep the night after that happens, when the perpetrator remains at large? You can't lock your doors hard enough or do anything at all to feel secure. That lack of sense of security does not go away in a day or a week or a month. It goes away when you can find "normal" again. It helped us to find normal by installing other cameras around the house.

I don't want Ring or Arlo or anybody to be automatically sharing my camera footage with anybody. Even with the murder event, it was my choice to go through the footage and share it with the authorities. I don't support authoritarian "law enforcement" activities, I don't want anybody tapping into my camera feed to find lost pets or for any other reason. They shouldn't be allowed to do it. Like many other services we all use, we're more of the product than the customer, as our data is harvested and used for other purposes.

Personal security is different than targeted advertising. Most people won't know they need or want a camera until after they have experienced something that makes them feel less secure in their home. I just hope they have the wits to read the Terms and understand what they're opting into before automatically accepting all of the opt-in-by-default data sharing.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#155
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>elected government Elected in part by the useful idiots on HN and many other places. They were so ignorant of how government actually works they were happy to give it this power. They foresaw the jackboot being used to stomp petty criminals and fellow middle class types who don't "pay their fair share". But they had never cracked open a history book because if they had they would know that sort of stuff is never a t…

Maybe people are just responding to things like labelling them all as "useful idiots" and "Nazis" and "fascists"

We are all useful idiots, comrade.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#156
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Ring. I got the email notifying me and was about to go disable it, but it doesn’t share anything. It says it will notify you that your camera detected the dog and then YOU choose to share the video or not. So I left it enabled, as it becomes a later choice. Effectively I’m not opted into sharing was my take.

But you’re opted into the automatic detection , regardless. Ring is still processing your video still to see if there’s a match to any Search Party unless you turn the feature off. At what point will the police request a warrant to run their own Search Party without consent?

See, I have no problem with searches that involve warrants and probably cause. They could already violate the shit out of your privacy with a warrant. That's kind of the point of a warrant.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the government that wants unchecked power, no matter what. This is why people support the 2A, and why it was the 2nd most important thing to those who founded the country.

[flagged]

i know someone who is a single issue voter for guns.

he owes $33k after having a kid with crappy insurance. I asked him how guns would help and started on a rant about slippery slopes bla bla bla

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#158
So, rather than Big Brother being government-imposed monitoring paid for by all taxpayers, the concerned citizenry is flipping the bill for the devices, network connectivity and electricity. Fascinating.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The police have a very safe job, generally. They've done studies and construction workers have a much higher rate of injury and death than the police in the US. People have this idea that being a police officer is really unsafe and that they're throwing themselves in the line of danger just by doing their jobs, but most people are law-abiding and civil. There are people who are not, but that's not a good reason for t…

> They've done studies and construction workers have a much higher rate of injury and death than the police in the US. Sure, but both construction worker and police officer are significantly more dangerous jobs than most of us here have sitting behind a desk. Obviously it’s not a job where people are dying routinely, but suggesting death or serious injury are the only two risks of interacting with the public and resp…

And nurses have even a more dangerous job.

I'm not convinced that being a cop is such a tough job. Most of it is sitting in your car waiting for speeders, or to warn traffic about road construction, or driving around looking for something unusual happening.

US courts have determined they don't even have a duty to risk their own lives to save civilians. Kinda the entire purpose of their job's existence, removed.

There's a lot of aggrandizement by and for cops; it's completely parallel to the worship of the military.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#160
post #4

Big tech is nothing different from the German industrialists one hundred years ago

I am both amazed and not surprised by the amount of people that will work at a company that is directly opposed to their own points of view. I am willing to bet many of the employees of Google, Meta, and Amazon are morally opposed to the very things they are supporting.
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