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Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

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Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#431

Post by Spooky23 »

array_key_first wrote: post #313
westmeal wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walk up to door with stack of papers with a stock photo of a puppy on it that says lost puppy. Check if there's a camera. If the owner comes outside, ask them if they have seen this puppy.

And then remember you live in America and you get shot for walking on someone's property. Joking, a little, but seriously: the culture in the US has rotted to such an insane degree. Not only are we not friends with our neighbors, I'm actually scared to talk to them!

I participate in Nextdoor.com because of a community group I work with.

The fear in people’s hearts is insane. One memorable one was a Little boy who decided to sell candy bars. I knew the kid from my son’s school. Some psycho followed him for a few hours, tracked down to his home and called the sales tax authorities and the city clerk as he didn’t have a peddler permit. She documented her “investigation”, complete with photos.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#432

Post by encrypted_bird »

deelowe wrote: post #411
dmix wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only real solution is strong privacy laws around gov usage and strong courts willing to enforce it. Expecting consumer choice or regulations to prevent that data from ever existing is mostly a fools errand IMO, there's just too much of it and it's everywhere.

> The only real solution is strong privacy laws around gov usage and strong courts willing to enforce it. I don't think this is a solution, personally.

Care to elaborate? You can't just say "I disagree" without explaining why you disagree.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#433

Post by x______________ »

namibj wrote: post #70
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then at door 125,000 you finally reach the home of the puppy that’s in the stock photo you printed. And they say “Why yes, we have seen this puppy. How did you know??”

So use one that you know to now be dead.

We live in the age of generative AI.. can't you just use one of those instead?

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#434

Post by encrypted_bird »

bdangubic wrote: post #417
dmix wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only real solution is strong privacy laws around gov usage and strong courts willing to enforce it. Expecting consumer choice or regulations to prevent that data from ever existing is mostly a fools errand IMO, there's just too much of it and it's everywhere.

any solution that has “law” in it is 100% not a solution

They did say "and strong courts willing to enforce it." What good is a law without enforcement, after all?

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#435

Post by Spooky23 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #430

It'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.

As VC backed startups run out of ideas that meet their return requirements, they pivot to government.

The whole flock thing is brilliant as the FBI is the sales force through their grant programs.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#436

Post by Spooky23 »

nik282000 wrote: post #412
Liftyee wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think something like Tailscale's technology could resolve this and many other self hosting access cases. Already, I don't open any ports - just use Tailscale to connect to my PC at home. If this was integrated into the "camera app", it could be seamless - only authentication required. Since the traffic goes directly point to point, the cost of hosting this service isn't too large either.

Tailscale solves the access/NAT issue and keeps your services off of your WAN, but it relies on a 3rd party to let you use your own equipment. I understand why it is useful and a necessary service but I'll never touch it.

There’s a bunch of ways to achieve a similar goal. Especially if the scenario is you and your family to home or a server.

I use it with a few friends and we do stuff like host backups for each other. It makes it easy to securely allow that one server to be available to my hosts.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#437

Post by lazystar »

captainkrtek wrote: post #71
kotaKat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad news: Ring just enabled opt-in-by-default "search parties" for people to leverage your outdoor cameras to find their "lost animals". https://ring.com/search-party

The feature in the app is also worded cleverly: “Search party lets you use your outdoor Ring cameras to help neighbors in your area” Note: doesn’t mention pets yet. Then: “Starting with lost pets, Search party will…” What comes after lost pets? Very open ended

> What comes after lost pets? Very open ended

endangered animal conservation groups looking for rare birds

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#438

Post by somenameforme »

charcircuit wrote: post #425
somenameforme wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One of the biggest 'culture shocks' I had when first moving to Asia, that eventually I'd see in numerous places, is visiting a food court during business hours. There's people shoulder to shoulder, so everybody goes to claim a table before getting their food. They do this by leaving various things, including their purses, on tables while they went to go queue up to get some food. There wasn't a camera anywhere. That is a high trust society, and it's amazing. What you're describing here is the opposite of a high trust society - when you have a camera on every person for fear they might do something bad, it's a 0, if not negative, trust society.

Your perceptions of other peoples' views are also off. Even with the current scope of government surveillance, 66% of Americans say that the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits. [1] And laws would not be what limit freedoms. Government and authority is not some abstract holistic entity. It's made up of people, like you and I. Would you feel comfortable with me being able to surveil every moment of your life? The difference between me and the person who would end up doing so is not this great gulf you might imagine.

For instance Snowden revealed that NSA officers would regularly collect and trade sexually explicit media obtained from surveillance. [2] They'd also use their position to spy on their love interests to the point it gained it's own little sardonic moniker 'LOVEINT'. The people that would be looking through those cameras are just people. And the government leadership overseeing these groups would include those prone to go off to an island to screw minors, or more upstanding fellows like Eric Swalwell, cheating on his wife with a Chinese spy while serving on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that oversees the entire US intelligence apparatus, and would oversee this sort of surveillance.

We're all just people, warts and all.

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/11/15/key-takea...

[2] - https://time.com/3010649/nsa-sexually-explicit-photographs-s...

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#439

Post by jdyer9 »

nerdsniper wrote: post #316
JeremyHerrman wrote: post #284

Unifi G4 Doorbell Pro [0] is a great self-hosted option. I've been very happy with mine over the last year, but I was already bought into the unifi ecosystem with a UDM Pro SE and U6 mesh APs. 0: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cameras-doorbells/collec...

Alternatively, the Reolink Doorbell cameras for anyone who doesn't want to be on the Unifi/Ubiquiti platform. Also I believe all these cameras provide a generic RTSP feed which can be consumed by any computer running Frigate[0], an open-source NVR/AI platform. 0: https://frigate.video (Reolink, Unifi/Ubiquiti, and Frigate are all good solutions for anyone who is not interested in supporting the proliferation of a pol…

If it matters to you, Reolink is a Chinese owned company. Not passing judgement one way or another, but if avoiding Unifi over the remote incident matters, I could see this factoring in as well.

Re: Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

#440

Post by Spivak »

tptacek wrote: post #363
puppycodes wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you seen this? https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-dfr much much more dystopian...

What's your point? Obviously we wouldn't allow something like this to be deployed in our community. But what does that have to do with Flock providing an interface to police departments for collecting Ring camera footage? I don't think that's a good thing --- I think PDs should continue to manually canvass for footage and specifically ask residents for footage when they need it, I think that's actually the right publ…

Also the thing not being mentioned anywhere in this thread that is in other reporting is that the Flock partnership is an interface for police to ask the Ring owner to share their footage with police. A thing that police can already do under the current system. It seems to just be a "single pane of glass" for both systems.
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