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Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

theintercept.com

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Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#491

Post by dm319 »

brokenmachine wrote: post #438
dm319 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also no fan of Ring or similar, though the reasons are slightly different. We lost our cat recently, and I went round my neighbourhood knocking/ringing on every door to ask around. It was a strange experience as around 30% had these ring doorbells. It was unpleasant to know I was being recorded and judged, and often as a result, not answered. I vowed at that point we would never consider one, if only because I d…

You should keep your cat inside and not leave it free to roam the neighborhood killing wildlife, and then going to disturb your neighbors when it does exactly what a cat does and runs away.

I wasn't asking for your opinion or your judgement.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#492

Post by salawat »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #129
salawat wrote: post #3

If the data is not on your hardware, it is not your data.

I dislike these beliefs that idealize a world with no trust or cooperation. Humans are social animals and we do our best when we work together. We don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water and private host everything on our own servers because one company is doing something shady. You can own your data on someone else's hardware with strong encryption and common sense legislation that regulates how its acc…

>I dislike these beliefs that idealize a world with no trust or cooperation. Humans are social animals and we do our best when we work together.

I agree. Remember, cooperation and trust brought you such gems as:

  The Trail of Tears
  Jim Crow
  Standard Oil
  The Holocaust
  MKULTRA
  COINTELPRO
  The War on Drugs
  WWII internment camps
  The Rwandan Genocide
  The Uiyghur genocide
  Systemic Human Rights abuses
  Plenty of other bits and bobs   of nastyness no one wants to admit to.
The problem with cooperation without strict limits, is that cooperation is the "might makes right" of our time. Network effects are a hell of a superpower, and like all superpowers, there is a responsibility to really consider whether the world truly is a better place with it. When you build these social constructs, you're putting a lot of motive power into potentially only precious few hands.

Cooperation and trust is all good when you're the one watching the local outgroup get curb stomped.

Woe be unto the ingroup that becomes the outgroup due to lack of foresight.

I like humans that aren't focusing on targeting other groups of humans.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#493

Post by salawat »

bsedlm wrote: post #4
salawat wrote: post #3

If the data is not on your hardware, it is not your data.

what if my data is on my hardware as well as on the cloud hardware? whose data is it anyways?

Then the data on your hardware is yours.

Your data in the cloud is the data of the cloud service's.

Your data is protected. Your cloud service resident data is not.

My rule is simple. If I cannot point at the drives my 0's and 1's are ultimately stored on, and the drives I point at do not belong to me, operating in in computers I own, it isn't mine. I don't have a fleet of lawyers to navigate the "technically mine" ToS/EULA minefield.

If I own the hardware, and I own the software on it, it is mine. Otherwise, short of levels of audit I find extremely unpleasant, it's an arms length arrangement I personally am intensely uncomfortable with given the track record humanity has demonstrated with prioritizing short-term self-interest against not doing questionable things in the long term.

I find this simplistic treatment of things, while making my life and software choices fewer in number, and less polished, tends to keep my friends and family out of trouble and harms way. They know the lecture is coming, and they still come see me anyway.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#494

Post by dm319 »

vorpalhex wrote: post #329
dm319 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you judge how suspicious someone is through a video feed?

If it's 90° on a hot summer day and they are wearing a big bulky jacket, that raises eyebrows. Are they wearing a uniform? If they are pretending to be part of a company and not wearing a uniform, that is suspicious. What about the time of day? ADT sales people don't knock on my door at 8pm at night. How are they acting? Are they waiting calmly? Are they checking their pockets or waistline? Are they glancing around s…

I guess it depends where you live and what experiences you've had so far. Your 'pre-test' probability I guess. I doubt there is much I would see on a video feed that would stop me finding out for myself who they are.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#495

Post by salawat »

mdp2021 wrote: post #133
bsedlm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if my data is on my hardware as well as on the cloud hardware? whose data is it anyways?

I was also confused by that expression: the poster very probably meant: "what is stored in the hardware of somebody else you cannot control".

This is correct.

The only person you can control the affairs and effects of is you.

Big data beat the trust out of me. The bigger the dataset, the more likely it is to attract abuse. I started out my computing career with what others described as a near martyr level of dedication to keeping my customers data private. I'm still that, but after working for everyone else in the industry and finding that the moment you give them a scrap of data, you just kicked off a chain of 3 or 4 bulk transfers to people you aren't even aware of...

I can't control them. I can only echo for people the importance of understanding: no one is nice until proven otherwise. Not even me. Trust only what you have made, or what you yourself have been gifted, and can modify.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#496

Post by salawat »

cddsadsa wrote: post #6
bsedlm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if my data is on my hardware as well as on the cloud hardware? whose data is it anyways?

What even is "data"? If you mean "my data is the way in which I interact with a website. It is personal to me and is my property.", then surely you must also say "my mannerisms when I talk to you are personal to me, and you may not remember them without my consent".

The legal system of the U.S. recognizes Third Party Doctrine.

I am not an espouser of that legal philosophy. I draw a hard line. Business with me is no one one else's business but me and the customer in question. I believe there is an expectation of privacy in business affairs.

I call it Professional Discretion.

Yes, before you ask, this makes my life comparatively miserable in today's world. No, I'm not amenable to changing my view on it, because I've seen enough of how the rest of the world treats it to realize just how pathological things become when no one respects anyone else's privacy anymore.

You can ask. But it's up to me to say yes. Everyone else has trouble even grokking the concept of asking anymore.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#497

Post by jerry1979 »

thegrimmest wrote: post #326
jerry1979 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd just like a clear idea of why we ban some and not others. Can you think of any reasons why we would want to ban some and not others? It reminds a bit of something that Emma Goldman might say: people have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.

I can't think of any deontological reasons, no. It seems to me that people are just more apprehensive of the more recent innovations. I can point you to writings in the past advising what to avoid writing down. This taboo has clearly shifted. Say in 1000 years from now everyone has cameras and storage media implanted in their persons, I suspect the public consciousness surrounding what is and isn't expected to be rec…

Pardon my ignorance, but I thought deontology evaluates actions by measuring them against a set of rules. I find it hard to believe that you can't imagine any rules that would prohibit filming someone else's home.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#498

Post by CalRobert »

RNAlfons wrote: post #29
ensignavenger wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are alternative cameras that don't have the same privacy concerns.

Can you recommend some?

Reolink have cameras which keep the video local, but support RTSP and can upload video to an FTP server (old school, I know) of your choice. I run my own FTP server and keep the video streams in DigitalOcean spaces with a 24 hours object expiration policy, fairly cheap NVR.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#499

Post by suddenexample »

I'm probably just being naive here, but can someone enlighten me to whether Google's Nest cameras have had similar issues? Ring seems to have had a long trail of issues with being hacked, collaborating with police, etc.

Not looking for hypotheticals here; I know most oppose the general principle of cloud-backed surveillance devices, but I personally (for better or for worse) have a better impression of Google's attempts to ensure user privacy and security.

Re: Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

#500

Post by justin66 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #481
smegger001 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ironically, if police would just do their job on property crime, they wouldn’t be so needed. if the last several years have taught us anything its that police only do there jobs when they feel like it. whether that processing rape kits, stopping gunmen, stopping property theft, doesn't matter that wont do it.

When police are incredibly understaffed, they don’t do their job because they don’t have many to do it. Granted, everyone is understaffed these days, so it’s not just a police problem, and prosecutor/judges in my county make things harder for them by auto releasing the property-crime offenders they do catch (doesn’t matter if they have 10 warrants for times they didn’t return to court after being released from previo…

> incredibly understaffed

That's adorable.

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