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Amazon’s Ring Is Putting Suspected Petty Thieves in Its Advertisements
- 420codebro 7y agoI see no issue with this. It is a public space capturing a crime. Fuck thievery. And fuck people who clutch their pearls at make-believe issues.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoI don't see a problem. The police department posted the same video.
- dontbenebby 7y agoThe difference is this is an ad. Commercial speech is subject to more regulation than private speech in America. For example, California has a right of publicity law. It's my understanding that even photos taken "in public" can't necessarily be used for commercial purposes: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-right-publicity-law http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-right-publicity-l...
- throwawayatty 7y ago(Attorney here, but this is not legal advice.) It would be a very unusual circumstance for a person caught on camera performing a criminal act to incriminate him/herself by admitting guilt for the purpose of prevailing on a right-to-publicity action. Moreover, every case involving right to publicity/right of likeness thus far has had a "famous" person as the plaintiff, where there's a sort of "brand goodwill" in the person's likeness and that goodwill is being misappropriated specifically to recommend or endorse a product. That's not the case here, for sure.
- Xylakant 7y ago> It would be a very unusual circumstance for a person caught on camera performing a criminal act But the person wasn’t caught on camera performing a criminal act afaics. She was caught walking between two cars and pulling at a door handle, the car was locked, person continued. Is this criminal? Kids do that all the time. It’s alleged that the person did perform a criminal act elsewhere but was not caught on camera.
- rolltiide 7y agoThe point is that this person would have to sue. There is no district attorney or third party that would sue Amazon for this action. So it is a calculated risk that they won't sue, absolving Amazon of any actual negative consequence.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Xylakant 7y ago> So it is a calculated risk that they won't sue, absolving Amazon of any actual negative consequence. If that’s the standard that legal and ok gets measured on, yes, then that’s likely legal and ok.
- joezydeco 7y agoSo perhaps this is a suspect due to other factors that aren't mentioned. Maybe the location of this video is near other documented break-ins and it fits a profile.
- Xylakant 7y agoYes, possibly. That would make it fine for law enforcement to use it. That doesn’t make it fine for a for-profit company to use it in advertising.
- throwawayatty 7y agoAttempted burglary is a crime.
- dalore 7y agoAmazon should have instead paid an actor, created a fake video and then use that as an ad. Might have even gone viral like this one did.
- raverbashing 7y agoYes, the tweet is promoted. But I'm not sure if it would fit the definition of an "ad" (And what's the definition of an ad you ask? Good question, I'm not sure if the FTC has a specific definition) Think like this: what if Amazon was putting the same information into a newspaper?
- dontbenebby 7y ago> Yes, the tweet is promoted. But I'm not sure if it would fit the definition of an "ad" It's posted by a corporation to sell a product. I think it's disingenuous to claim it's not an ad, though whether the content of the ad is illegal is admittedly debatable. (As an aside, it's my understanding the "Promoted" tag is added specifically to comply with FTC guidelines that paid content be labeled.)
- balls187 7y agoIt fits the definition of marketing, but not advertising.
- will_brown 7y agoBusinesses post images and video of suspects all the time and solicit information. Hell entertainment/production companies exist just to create shows that run these kinds of stories and solicit information from the public. Think of the host of FBIs most wanted who’s own child was famously kidnapped from a sears department store...you think sears, the FBI, or even the father have no right to show videos/images, public or private, that depict the suspect and solicit information from the public? Or even offer a reward for information leading to arrest?
- pwinnski 7y agoThe police department stated that she was a suspect; Amazon identified her as a thief, breaking the presumption of innocence that is a bedrock of American society. If the video is fine, the post wording still isn't.
- shiven 7y agoHabeas corpus called & would like to be thawed from deep freeze. The presumption of innocence in American society died a long time ago, with Gitmo, CIA black sites & NSLs. What little was still left, is being killed every day with asylum seeker kids being abused in border ‘shelters’. Long live habeas corpus & the American conscience.
- geggam 7y agoThis is codified in law and society has adjusted to it. Example : Driving used to be considered a right, it has since been reduced to a privilege that gets revoked simply by accusation
- jvolkman 7y agoWhen was driving considered a right?
- geggam 7y agoGiven the fact the constitution limits the govt and not the people. Given the fact the constitution says the govt cannot limit the freedom of movement. The govt cannot make laws limiting freedom of movement regardless of the method as they were not given that right by the constitution. Therefore driving as a form of movement cannot be regulated. There are also precedents discussing it Thompson v.Smith, 154 SE 579, 11 American Jurisprudence, Constitutional Law, section 329, page 1135 “The right of the Citizen to travel upon the public highways and to transport his property thereon, in the ordinary course of life and business, is a common right which he has under the right to enjoy life and liberty, to acquire and possess property, and to pursue happiness and safety. It includes the right, in so doing, to use the ordinary and usual conveyances of the day, and under the existing modes of travel, includes the right to drive a horse drawn carriage or wagon thereon or to operate an automobile thereon, for the usual and ordinary purpose of life and business.” –
- bongobongo 7y agoYou don't understand the difference between a police department and a private corporation? No wonder you don't see a problem.
- mimixco 7y agoI smell a lawsuit coming. How can Amazon think it's ok to use people's faces in an advertisement when those people haven't been convicted of a crime? The case of Ring is particularly disturbing. When its inventor appeared on Shark Tank, he said he wanted to create a way to hear his doorbell from the garage. Since Amazon bought the company for $1B, it's pivoted to a surveillance tool that's being offered to police as a way to freely record and review neighborhood camera views. It's sad to see that unicorn companies today believe that surveillance capitalism is the way forward. Personally, I long for a return to old-fashioned values in business, namely making a product or service that people care about and want to pay for rather than pandering to fear and courting easy money from our soon-to-be robot overlords.
- quacked 7y agoAdditionally: why would it be ok to use people's faces in an advertisement even if those people HAD been convicted of a crime? (I agree with your main point.)
- relaunched 7y agoRing's mission is all about safety. Jamie has talked extensively about how they actively rejected ideas to just build connected things for the home, to focus on & foster a sense of safe homes and safe communities. The floodlight is a great example of a pre-acquisition product that piggybacks on that mission.
- mimixco 7y agoThat "mission" came from Amazon. It wasn't any part of the pitch Jamie gave on Shark Tank. This is just another example of surveillance capitalism and it's pretty sickening.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- throwawayatty 7y agoAs an attorney (this is not legal advice), I would like to know what law might be violated by publishing these videos. They're owned by the person who recorded the video; and presumably they gave Ring a license to use them for such purposes. The subject of the video, as far as I can tell, has no rights that might be recognized in law. There's no privacy right, as there's no reasonable expectation of privacy under such circumstances. There's no right of publicity being violated AFAICT, as there's no "brand goodwill" in the person's likeness to misappropriate. So what, then?
- jmsflknr 7y agoPosted this yesterday with same source, same headline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20117905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20117905
- bdcravens 7y agoLooks like there's more discussion here.
- dang 7y agoReposts are fine on HN if a story hasn't had significant attention yet. There's a lot of randomness in what gets traction, and allowing reposts is a way to mitigate that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- jmsflknr 7y agoOh I see. Did not know that. All good.
- goobynight 7y agoCool.
- bdcravens 7y agoOn the Ring Neighbors app, you see all sorts of videos where the posters are making criminal accusations all the time. (usually it's a guy selling electricity door to door, but his skin tone is wrong, so they assume he's there to rob the house)
- mc32 7y agoWhat is “selling electricity doir-to-door?” Is that offering solar on roof services? Cuz I can’t imagine actually selling electricity door to door.
- darkpuma 7y agoYeah, if somebody came to my front door to "sell me electricity" I'd be on high alert, regardless of his race. Where I come from it's a known scheme where one guy gets you distracted at the front door with some semi-plausible sales pitch like re-sealing your driveway while his accomplice goes behind the house and robs you blind. Of course, even when the apparent salesman is a genuine salesman, that doesn't mean he's a nice person. Door to door salesmen praying on politeness to get unsuspecting victims into high pressure sales situations in their own living room is common enough that my blanket response to all salesmen knocking on my door is telling them to fuck off. In a certain sense, calling a salesman a thief might actually be giving him the benefit of the doubt.
- ceejayoz 7y ago> Where I come from it's a known scheme where one guy gets you distracted at the front door with some semi-plausible sales pitch like re-sealing your driveway while his accomplice goes behind the house and robs you blind. This sounds like precisely the sort of pearl-clutching urban legend the parent comment is describing. The wealthy neighborhood I grew up in had all sorts of stories along these lines - "be on the lookout for gypsies" etc., despite a vanishingly small crime rate.
- arkades 7y agoReselling agencies promising to sell you electricity cheaper than the local utility. Of course, they’re buying the electricity from the local utility, so the contract generally looks something like a monthly price of U - x for a couple months (U being the price set by the utility, x the promised discount), followed by a number of months of U+z, z>>x. They don’t mention the U+z; that’s left to the fine print.
- givinguflac 7y agoInnocent until proven guilty.* *or until public ads by Amazon sway the jury with video editing and accusations.
- rolltiide 7y agofrom linked tweet: > is it legal for ring/amazon to use faces of people, suspected BY THEIR CUSTOMERS to have done crimes, in an advertisement? especially given they haven't consented or been convicted or anything. seems uhhh not right This really comes down to the consequences. "A calculated risk betting that the people shown allegedly committing crimes won't risk identifying themselves to sue" or a paid actor. generally a win for everyone
- ltc5505 7y agoAren't we at the stage where we can generate faces? Like the This Person Does Not Exist website?
- awinder 7y agoIn the video, the woman’s face is clearly visible and there is no obvious criminal activity taking place. The Facebook post shows her passing between two cars. She pulls the door handle of one of the cars, but it is locked. Yeah that's pretty clearly attempting to steal vehicles / contents of vehicles, that's 100% what that looks like.
- smacktoward 7y agoIn a surveillance state, all behavior is by definition suspicious behavior.
- booleandilemma 7y agoIt wouldn’t have been suspicious if she had just walked between the 2 cars, but she tried to break into one of them, and at about 8 seconds in you can clearly see her scanning the parking lot to see if anyone is watching her.
- DoctorOetker 7y agoI've had embarassing situations where an outsider might misinterpret my behaviour such that I would scan around for a good moment, good in the sense of not being bothered needlessly: 1. one time I lost the key to my bicycle lock, so I had to cut it free, ... obviously I looked around for a calmer moment, even though it simply was my bike. 2. another time I (or a friend, I can't remember) threw my frisbee on the roof of a small entrance building with elevator to the underground parking lot under a public square. Although the height could be scaled by climbing some structure besides it, we didn't because it was too busy... then I told my brother about what happened without asking him to get it... the next day I decide to get it, but there was a police car doing a patrol and passing every 7 minutes, ... so I doubt for a while, then stop the police car on its next tour, ask the cops if I can go fetch my frisbee from the roof,... very hesitant to give any explicit permission they subtextually indicate they don't care, as long as I do it quickly while they are there... so climb the structure, then the roof, ... no frisbee! later I would learn my brother had already retrieved it...
- man2525 7y agoThe app itself is entertaining, but a lot of false alarms. My favorite so far was a county worker who tripped my camera with his...i want to say water collection tool...from off camera before hanging a doorknob sign warning of mosquitoes. I took a screen capture while at work and zoomed in on his shirt to see the familiar county symbol. Most of the crimes are petty...the older generation doesn't always lock their cars..., although one guy shot up a barbershop a mile or two away, killing several barbers. Good to know. Also, I know why that police chopper is circling or what caused that fire in the distance. My neighbors are pretty good at being on the DL, but this is a lot faster. Not as good as a scanner, but my local PD refuses to be on the internet scanner apps anyway. Not to say that even the police reports get it right. Shoplifting and armed robbery aren't the same.
- trhway 7y ago>Amazon purchased Ring in 2018. The company sells surveillance camera systems, and recently filed two patent applications for facial recognition technology in its cameras that would automatically alert law enforcement to "suspicious" people. next version will feature a drone quietly deployed to follow the "suspicious" person and to tazer the person upon the "suspiciousness" crossing the pre-determined threshold (established by the neighborhood).
- schaefer 7y agoWhat's Amazon Ring selling? Fear? No thanks, I'll pass.
- m463 7y agoThat's what pretty much all security products sell. Except of course, the Magnavolt Car Security System from Robocop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRNVxHPJ0hM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRNVxHPJ0hM
- kyleblarson 7y agoIf only there were a way for her to not be put in this situation in the first place.
- lostmyoldone 7y agoWhich woman? The one on the picture might have, but what about anyone who to overzealous neighbours looks like the person on a rather crappy picture? What should they do to avoid being accosted on the street, or worse?
- hn23 7y agoSomehow this reminds me of the "Running Man" movie. There was a comercial playing that said something like: "Citizen, denounce your neighbor, and get some extra dollars"... There should have been more positive visions of the future. These idiot companies took the shit from the 80s as script it seems.
- codezero 7y agoCan we talk about the fact that in the US you are granted no right to privacy in public spaces? I don’t think this is universally good. Companies have used this fact to build databases of license plate locations and much more. Our anger shouldn’t primarily be directed at Amazon, but rather at the acceptance of public surveillance. Hopefully, events like this help bring more light to this kind of blanket acceptance.
- lacraig2 7y agoI honestly can't see a problem with this so long as police posted a BOLO before ring.