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Mozilla letter to Amazon Ring: stop sharing information with police

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Re: Mozilla letter to Amazon Ring: stop sharing information with police

#21

Post by morsch »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #15
ponker wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not feel that "Cops are natural aggressors" needs further litigation but agree on the rest. However, how do you find Ring cameras protect your packages from theft? Do package thieves notice the camera and avoid your house, or do you send the video to the police who find the person based on their appearance or vehicle? If the former, why does the camera need to even be functional? And if the latter, why is the "c…

I'm a bit confused by the question. Why should people buying home security products see a close relationship with law enforcement as a negative?

You have just repeated their question in the negative without answering it. Apparently everybody has an answer they find self-evident despite it being opposite. Also, there were other questions. (I'm aware you are not the OP.)

Re: Mozilla letter to Amazon Ring: stop sharing information with police

#22

Post by wccrawford »

There's no way that Ring is going to stop people from sharing videos.

But making it easy to push a button to submit video to police does enable casual racism.

"Oh, there's a suspicious person, I'll submit this video to the police. Click" That person has made a judgement based on looks alone. If it were harder to submit the video (download, attach to email, look up police email address, etc) then there'd be a lot less of that.

And for people who are serious about sharing video with the police, those extra steps aren't really an impediment.

In short, I think their hearts were in the right places, but the ramifications weren't fully thought out here.

Re: Mozilla letter to Amazon Ring: stop sharing information with police

#23

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

sneak wrote: post #5

I support this piecemeal protest, but ultimately we really just need to defund and abolish the police in the US as they are known today and replace them with a new and different organization dedicated to public safety, that is actually legally required to help people (the police are not), and that has huge consequences for integrity failures such as lying.

The "not legally required to help" thing sounds silly in the abstract, but most people interested in police reform are going to want to keep it. A police force that's required to help people is, by definition, a police force that can be sued for not policing aggressively enough.

Re: Mozilla letter to Amazon Ring: stop sharing information with police

#24

Post by AdamJacobMuller »

contravariant wrote: post #19
mitchellst wrote: post #6

A really odd post. I am open to the argument but don’t think Mozilla makes it here. The only piece of evidence they cite for harm— hyperlinked to the phrase “facilitate racial profiling”— leads to a think piece by someone a little creeped out by posts on Nextdoor, which doesn’t mention Ring at all. I get that people don’t love surveillance. But the evidence is not here that a homeowner or renter’s decision to install…

Hurting someone's privacy is in and of itself harm. Allowing law enforcement unrestricted access exacerbates this problem, however even without that I've already seen quite a few videos (made by ring cameras, or similar) posted, usually without any attempts at anonymization.

The access is hardly unrestricted.

Once a verified LEO organization partners with Ring, they can send a geographically and time limited request to Ring for footage.

"please send me all video footage from 123 possum street to 350 possum street from midnight to 3am yesterday"

Ring then identifies who has cameras that may be of interest and sends the owners a request to share footage, which the owners can ignore (deny), explicitly deny or choose to share video.

Re: Mozilla letter to Amazon Ring: stop sharing information with police

#25

Post by sneak »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #23
sneak wrote: post #5

I support this piecemeal protest, but ultimately we really just need to defund and abolish the police in the US as they are known today and replace them with a new and different organization dedicated to public safety, that is actually legally required to help people (the police are not), and that has huge consequences for integrity failures such as lying.

The "not legally required to help" thing sounds silly in the abstract, but most people interested in police reform are going to want to keep it. A police force that's required to help people is, by definition, a police force that can be sued for not policing aggressively enough.

Most of the issues with police today are not that they are enforcing the law too aggressively, it is that they are closing out call tickets too aggressively.

They are entirely different things: https://sneak.berlin/20200628/the-problem-with-police-in-ame...

Re: Mozilla letter to Amazon Ring: stop sharing information with police

#26

Post by schwartzworld »

citations needed did an incredible episode on the porch pirate narrative. Listen to Episode 97: Porch Pirate Panic and the Paranoid Racism of Snitch Apps by Citations Needed Podcast on #SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-97-porch-pira...
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