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Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

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Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So while that is true (and not to go too far off into the weeds on an analogy), in an emergency, people are trying to follow procedure under pressure and the odds of error in operation of an interface increase. You want the interface that is used in an emergency situation to either be well practiced or absolutely as intuitive as possible. To destructure the analogy and give a concrete example, if I'm dying of allergi…

Your concrete example would never happen the real world. If you were in anaphylactic shock, no doctor is going to go off looking for your medical records first, even if they were sitting on the table next to him. He's just going to stick you with epinephrine and then MAYBE look at your medical records later. All that said, I get your point, but I'm not sure how it applies to this discussion anyway.

My point is there's a tradeoff between prevention and penalty. Sometimes, the best option isn't a locked door; it's a clear sign saying "trespassers will be prosecuted" and a security camera (i.e. auditable access, not preventative access denial). That way, people can get in if they need to to do something critical, and one can resolve the question of trespass later.

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#93
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I trust Amazon/Ring more than I trust some random Chinese company. Really? Why?

Because I worked at Amazon and I know how seriously they take data security.

And yet, literally, this article shows that you cannot.

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#94

At least the homeowner has a choice to upload their video to ring. Street-facing doorbell cameras on public sidewalks are in my opinion the worse problem. Pedestrians didn't opt-in. Operators of these cameras (both the buyer and the vendor) should be subject to the same legal obligations as other data collectors.

My neighbor, across the street, has a Ring camera aimed directly at my house, since that is where their front door faces. What is my recourse for preventing my private property from being recorded?

Personally, i'd use one of these https://www.wickedlasers.com/arctic to resolve the issue

aim well

:)

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#95
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encryption with customer managed keys solves that pretty easily. It also solves any ethical questions with regards to furnishing data to comply with warrants. This creates a new problem of managing keys, of course, but that's been solved many times now in other parts of the industry.

There are numerous logistic issues with this approach. How would you implement a feature where users could log in to view the footage while away from home? They would need the decryption key, and if the server doesn't have it how would they get it? The only secure option is from the device itself, which is a pretty big UX challenge. However, worse, features that use AI to detect movement/people/etc can't be implement…

> They would need the decryption key, and if the server doesn't have it how would they get it?

Either carry it with them or enter a passphrase (for use with a key derivation function; I guess/hope that Ring requires some passphrase to view video via their website anyway). That's a rather common problem.

As for "AI", depending on what you mean by that, it can be implemented in the device itself (unless it's something particularly fancy, requiring more resources than viable to dedicate there).

It's indeed easier and slightly more convenient to not care about security, but that's also a general/common case.

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#96
post #15

Whenever end-to-end encryption is not used, scenarios like these are bound to happen eventually. As far as I know, the only home surveillance products that use E2EE are ones that support HomeKit Secure Video [1]. 1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210538

These kind of scenarios can happen with workers in government offices, archives and medical institutions as well. And yet the paper documents are not E2E encrypted. Maybe... just maybe... technology is not really what should be the core issue here? But we should perhaps look at our policies and legislation? Adding proper liability there will make technology come by itself. The magic of free market doesn't seem to be…

Any problem is easy if you oversimplify it.

The cultural conceit of 'disruptors' is that society has made everything complicated and therefore society is 'ripe for disruption' which if you read between the lines means 'stupid'. Lack of respect means lack of care. Lack of care leads to injury (theirs, and/or ours).

You are right. It's not the tech. It's the arrogance.

From my knothole, legislation comes for things that aren't policing themselves adequately. I think what we are discovering is that there are a lot of domains where the old guard were self-policing to a degree, and the newcomers have absolutely no reverence for anything.

I expect it won't be long before you'll see industries taking a hard look at their internal culture, and then engaging in regulatory capture to keep out the disruptors.

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#97

How is this even possible? I know that at Google, there was no way to access customer data directly. So this couldn't happen. That seems like a saner design

Where you there in 2010?

https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/google-engineer-spying-fir...

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#98

I was always skeptical of cloud-based camera solutions due to privacy & bandwidth concerns, but now that those concerns are being proven true and reported in mainstream outlets I can’t imagine any reason to purchase them now. Long-term prospects for Ring can’t be looking good.

It has a lot of advantages. Now when a criminal steals my package I alert the police immediately with 100% return rate so far. Before Ring, I would go home and search for a package for thirty minutes before realizing it was stolen. I'll gladly pay $3 a month for this service, it pays for itself. As far as privacy, I don;t have the privilege of a gated community to keep thieves out so this is the next best thing

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#99
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These kind of scenarios can happen with workers in government offices, archives and medical institutions as well. And yet the paper documents are not E2E encrypted. Maybe... just maybe... technology is not really what should be the core issue here? But we should perhaps look at our policies and legislation? Adding proper liability there will make technology come by itself. The magic of free market doesn't seem to be…

The easiest way to keep someone out is to lock the door. You can create penalties, punishments, hire security guards to watch the door. But the most efficient and effective way is just a lock.

Follow-ups to your comment have responded to your analogy with discussions of lock-picks, firefighter exceptions, and safes vs doors.

The point I think you were trying to make is that it's mathematically possible to create a cryptographic lock that's inviolable. This is a different way of thinking.

I agree strongly - it's one thing to have a process or rule on what to do, and another to build a system that forces the processes and rules to be followed.

(I say inviolable, but I'm aware you can typically defeat a cryptographic lock by taking a crowbar to the physical locks watched by your Ring doorbell and subsequently using the crowbar on the person whose mind holds the key to said lock...but that's not the lock's fault.)

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#100

How is this even possible? I know that at Google, there was no way to access customer data directly. So this couldn't happen. That seems like a saner design

Where you there in 2010? https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/google-engineer-spying-fir...

nope, joined in 2012
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