Unpopular Opinion: good? I mean I like wish all the people who steal packages and break into cars in my neighborhood would get arrested.
Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock
421–430 of 531 posts
Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock
#422So, 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.
Tax payers and citizenry are largely the same. It's not really flipping the bill.
Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider not sending your doorbell footage to accompany that has no respect for user privacy, and is now actively partnering with a police surveillance company.
Yeah there are plenty of self-hosted solutions that work just as well.
And it's cheap! If you want JUST cameras it's pennies a day, I'm running a 2010 gaming PC with a dozen services (which would cost >200 bucks from the usual suspects) and it's still only 20 bucks a month.
Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock
#424One of the many reasons to host your own stuff. It costs about 0.75CAD per day to run my server and PoE switch. For my 20 bucks a month I get cameras, a media server, password manager, push notifications, file sharing, and a dozen other services, all without handing my data over to business or governments. Is it as secure as a cloud service? Depends on what you consider secure. I closely monitor access logs and use s…
>they also have thousands of employees that can access your data at any time for any reason.
They have 0 employees who can do that.
Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock
#425Earlier 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 think a good thought experiment to consider, in terms of defining what your own views are, is to consider that if every single person had a mandatory 24/7 uplinked camera on them with redundancies, then the number of unsolved crimes would rapidly approach zero. It would be essentially impossible to get away with crime, so the only crimes that would happen would be those of passion, ignorance, or the political elite…
>And I think that's true for most people.
I think it's the opposite. I think people would prefer the peace of mind of living in a high trust society. People like predictability and being able to trust people. I also think people would enjoy that laws that people pass are actually applied and we can efficiently apply the will of the people to the country.
>with any freedom there is always a cost
Laws ultimately would be what restrict your freedom, not the enforcement of them. I don't think freedom should rely on poor enforcement of laws.
Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock
#426All this hand-wringing about surveillance powers is not keeping up with how quickly our ability to surveil people is expanding. The fourth amendment seems kind of like a wet fart in a timeline where private companies can surveil the public and then simply choose to share their data with law enforcement. I had to buy a surveillance camera recently, but I made sure mine doesn’t connect to the internet in any way.
I mean the feed has to be written to a storage and this storage I immediately backup off-site in the case someone is clever enough to immediately go for such (e.g. burglary).
I think one of the traps we fall into is imagining that an attacker is somehow intelligent (someone who can immediately attack video storage) but simultaneously uncreative (doesn’t think of some way to make the surveillance footage irrelevant).
I’ve decided that I’m not a high-profile target for covert operatives, but I am a target of opportunity for people who have access to my data once that data is outside of my control. The decisions I make based on that are decisions like, “No surveillance feed goes into cloud services operated by companies I don’t trust,” but “I don’t need to encrypt my NAS”.
Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock
#427Wild how if a government does this directly most folks agree its dystopian and flip out, but let companies do it and, even if it ends up in the governments hands, people install it themselves...
Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
No doubt. The question is, is that the explicit goal, and if so, why? And if not, don't they consider the effects of their actions, if they aren't, why?
Gotta bring home that stable paycheck (not justifying it)
You actually don’t. Technologists have more leverage than most workers. There’s no shortage of jobs that don’t require building surveillance states or engagement addiction engines.
Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Next time a jihadist invites you to their wedding... politely decline.
At one point I volunteered to join an anti-jihadist Syrian militia (YPG) that was backed by the US government. When I returned to the US, they flagged my passport (and interrogated me everytime I crossed a border for about a decade).... thinking I was a jihadist. So yeah consider that the government is so dumb that one half of the government thinks the secular anti-jihadist militias supported by the other half of gov…
They don't care about that. They care about the fact that you now have irregular warfare experience. Their morals are wholly situational, so they assume the same is true of everyone else.
It's not a terrible assumption; if you study extremist circles for long enough you come across examples of people who completely flip sides because they were only ever in it for the extralegal opportunities. Of course, you can find similar chameleons in politics.
Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock
#430It's not that long ago that people used to talk about East Germany as a dystopian hellhole of state surveillance, and yet the US is now far more surveilled than the DDR ever was. It's amazing to me how easily this country was propagandized and its inhabitants persuaded to establish an authoritarian state of their own.