16 ms·

It's obviously bad to hack into a citizen's systems without consent, but there's some kind of value that might be created here. Ring cameras are basically bein

by kick 7y ago

It's obviously bad to hack into a citizen's systems without consent, but there's some kind of value that might be created here. Ring cameras are basically being used as a gigantic police-partnered dragnet: Amazon’s Ring Planned Neighborhood “Watch Lists” Built on Facial Recognition https://theintercept.com/2019/11/26/amazon-ring-home-security-facial-recognition/ https://theintercept.com/2019/11/26/amazon-ring-home-securit... If this provides a disincentivize to an average user buying Ring cameras, their immature 'prank' may have unintentionally helped the nation.

throwawaysea 7y ago
I disagree that it is a 'dragnet'. That seems like an emotionally-colored take. It is camera owners voluntarily sharing footage with police when they request it. Citizens are allowed to lawfully film in many locations (their own homes, public spaces, etc.) and citizens are allowed to voluntarily exchange information they own with entities of their choosing.
- glenda 7y ago
  From what I’ve seen sharing these videos publicly also provides a potential thief with your location and information about the placement of your cameras, which is not a smart move if security is your main motive.
  - Johnny555 7y ago
    What information is disclosed that the thief can't discover himself by driving or walking by your house? It seems unlikely that a thief needs to see a published list of camera locations to find my house, unless for some reason he's looking specifically for houses that are protected by Ring cameras. My ring doorbell cam is readily visible from the street, so there's no secrets about placement.
    - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
      Knowing where the cameras are lets the thief know where the blind spots are. The thief wouldn't be able to see a hidden camera just by walking by (or at least it's much less likely). I don't think most Ring cameras are meant to be hidden though, since it's primarily sold as a doorbell.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  At some point quantitative changes to cost and availability make a qualitative change in the invasiveness of a technology. I don't know enough about how ring footage is being used to say whether or not it's crossed that point, but this can't be dismissed just because it's something that's always been legal and happening at a smaller scale.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  Just the sheer scale of data collection by the Ring public-private partnership is worrisome already. Some of us worry about the amount of information held by Facebook, even those that do not have a Facebook account. The same principle applies here.
  - throwawaysea 7y ago
    If it is legally filmed footage (for example on public spaces or in a private residence), then there is no legitimate expectation of privacy.
    - HarryHirsch 7y ago
      There's the tiny issue that storage became so cheap over the last 20 years that recordings can now be kept indefinitely. In the past you had a CCTV camera, and you could store maybe a month's worth of movie (on tapes, in a safe), until you had to overwrite it. Now you just keep filming and have a never forgotten record of who lives in the neighbourhood. And if Facebook runs it though its face recognition system they get names, friends and other preferences. That completely changes the nature of CCTV recordings. The law just hasn't caught up with it, also because of prolific lobbying by the usual bigdata actors.
    - homonculus1 7y ago
      Expectation of privacy was defined in an era when recording was expensive, on the assumption that there was a certain degree of anonymity in public just from the sheer impossibility of tracking everybody. There is no reason that our rights should be limited to what was found necessary to protect in the past. There must be a new category of expectation of transience, that Jeff Bezos and the FBI won't keep a permanent record of your every waking moment.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  Consider if a police force was near omniscient, and could view everything happening in a city publicly, at all times 24/7. Don't you think that changes the nature of things, even if technically legal?
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    Omniscient police would be a qualitatively new development, for sure. But as surveillance increases, so does stealth. You’d have to include that in your model.
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  > It is camera owners voluntarily sharing footage with police when they request it. Police can request that you share the footage you have, or police can get a warrant and obtain the footage directly from Ring. The difference between a camera whose footage you control and Ring is that Ring provides a nice interface to let police know that potential video evidence that you captured exists. A camera system that you rolled out yourself doesn't send a message to law enforcement agencies each time your cameras potentially capture evidence. The knowledge that video evidence exists makes it infinitely easier to get a warrant for it from a judge.
  - throwaway393955 7y ago
    They don't need a warrant. They only need to make a friendly administrative subpoena to Amazon, which will happily fork over the data without challenging the order, even if the owner has refused. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/police-can-get-your-ring-doorbell-footage-without-a-warrant-report-says/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/police-can-get-y...
    - heavyset_go 7y ago
      This is a good point, as well. Part of Ring's business model is integration with law enforcement. The incentives in place certainly don't align with user privacy. Thanks for the link.
    - throwawaysea 7y ago
      This is a false story that relies on an incorrect statement from someone in the Fresno police department. Your own article contains this update: > UPDATE 5:55pm ET: After we published our story, a representative from Ring responded to our request for comment to deny all allegations in the Government Technology report. > "The reports that police can obtain any video from a Ring doorbell within 60 days is false," a spokesperson said. "Ring will not release customer information in response to government demands without a valid and binding legal demand properly served on us. Ring objects to overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course. We are working with the Fresno County Sheriff's Office to ensure this is understood."
throwaway_tech 7y ago
>Ring cameras are basically being used as a gigantic police-partnered dragnet: Isn't that sort of like saying humans are basically used as a gigantic police-partnered dragnet...seeing as our entire criminal system is primarily driven by eye witnesses of crimes? Only what we know is eye-witnesses often have conflicting testimony, some will refuse to assist police officers (out of concern for their own safety or they just don't give a shit), and others outright lie. For example, a UFC fighter's step-daughter was recently kidnapped and murdered (abducted right from a gas station)...video would later assist identify the suspect and lead to arrest, but also identify eye witnesses to the abduction (who never came forward because they "didn't want to get involved") but after the video identified the witnesses, their testimony ended up being important.
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  A police camera watching a gas station is not the same as a police camera watching your front door.
  - jsight 7y ago
    No, but my camera watching what happens outside of my house is also not the same as a police camera. I didn't have such a camera at my old house, but if I did, there were several happenings that would have been reported to police.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      there were several happenings that would have been reported to police. Reported. Not prevented. The companies that make money off of law enforcement have conditioned people to believe cameras=prevention and camera=safety, which is false.
      - Tempest1981 7y ago
        True, but camera=deterrent?
ActorNightly 7y ago
This is a very hyperbolic take. Police do not have access to the cameras, only the server stored footage, which is both optional to share and optional to even participate in.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Until all video starts streaming to the server in a software update. For the safety of your children.
  - ActorNightly 7y ago
    At which point the company gets massive federal lawsuit violating multiple laws, and gets shut down quick.
    - bradknowles 7y ago
      No, a democracy dies to thunderous applause.
- __jal 7y ago
  This is a red-herring. Nobody cares about physical access to essentially disposable cameras. The stored footage is the whole game.
  - ActorNightly 7y ago
    Yes, and stored footage is completely optional with Ring cameras.
    - __jal 7y ago
      Can you point to a page where Ring says this? I cannot find any indication that these work with anything other than their cloud service.
    - throwaway393955 7y ago
dzhiurgis 7y ago
How is helping petty thieves and junkies is helping the nation?
- PascLeRasc 7y ago
  Do you look like any "petty thieves and junkies"? Are you sure? It's your word against Amazon's.
fpgaminer 7y ago
As someone who tends to fall on the side of privacy more often than not, I'm actually not sure how I feel about facial recog+home security cameras. I'm completely against any fully automated system where the police can have access to the camera's data. But on the other hand, what if the system was implemented completely locally, and all with the owner's control and permission? So your Ring app pops up and says "Hey, your local police department is looking for a suspect and your camera spotted them. Would you like to share the footage?". So many petty crimes (e.g. home burglaries, car breakins, etc) go unsolved because the police just don't have the tools and resources to go after all those crimes. I have neighbors who've had their homes and cars broken into. It's a violating experience, and I think it's justified to want the perpetrators of those crimes caught and sentenced appropriately; at the very least to dissuade others. Within the context of a well built, local, permissioned system, I'm not sure I'm against it. Of course A) The likes of Amazon would never build such a system responsibly; they'd rather gobble up and abuse the data themselves. B) There are serious security concerns, as evidenced by TFA. C) Civil disobedience and similar acts are an important part of democratic society, and mass surveillance, responsible or not, threatens that. And finally, D) something which I think everyone misses when it comes to facial recognition systems ... they're still not very good. SOTA published recog systems make a mistake on 1 in 1000 faces (http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html), and that's on LFW which is fairly high quality. I'm sure FAANG does better, and SOTA will continue to improve quickly, but is that good enough for this kind of application? So I'm torn.
- trevyn 7y ago
  How do you know the request is connected to violation of a law you agree with?
  - mikepurvis 7y ago
    If nothing else, you could review the footage yourself before deciding to share. If they person the system thinks it recognized looks like they're minding their own business, bury it.
  - fpgaminer 7y ago
bobongo 7y ago
I wonder whether Nest cams are being used in a similar fashion.
- mv4 7y ago
  Yes they are. FTA:"The NulledCast is a podcast livestreamed to Discord. It's a show in which hackers take over people's Ring and Nest smarthome cameras and use their speakers to talk to and harass their unsuspecting owners."
  - NulledMember 7y ago
    The discord was made to talk about the last situation that happend on the website. The Cast was not made for any of this Ring thing. Some Kid named Chance done this shit while they were in the podcast.
remotecool 7y ago
I have no problem with this. I have ring cameras all around my property and so do most of my neighbors and it's already caught multiple people attempting breaking and stealing packages. They get hacked because of poor password choices. You are fighting against a changing tide and the benefits of the cameras vastly outweigh the privacy concerns.
- themagician 7y ago
  It’s not even a changing tide. Security has always been more important than privacy to the average person. In the 90s monitored home security was a HUGE business. Thousands for an install and thousands more per year to have someone sit around and watch for unusual activity and report it to the police. ADT and Brinks are all that’s really left, but I remember dozens of companies competing in this space growing up. Now you can get the same essential service, better in many ways, for $99 and a small monthly fee.
  - remotecool 7y ago
    It sounds like we agree.

by kick 7y ago

throwawaysea 7y ago

I disagree that it is a 'dragnet'. That seems like an emotionally-colored take. It is camera owners voluntarily sharing footage with police when they request it. Citizens are allowed to lawfully film in many locations (their own homes, public spaces, etc.) and citizens are allowed to voluntarily exchange information they own with entities of their choosing.

glenda 7y ago
From what I’ve seen sharing these videos publicly also provides a potential thief with your location and information about the placement of your cameras, which is not a smart move if security is your main motive.
- Johnny555 7y ago
  What information is disclosed that the thief can't discover himself by driving or walking by your house? It seems unlikely that a thief needs to see a published list of camera locations to find my house, unless for some reason he's looking specifically for houses that are protected by Ring cameras. My ring doorbell cam is readily visible from the street, so there's no secrets about placement.
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    Knowing where the cameras are lets the thief know where the blind spots are. The thief wouldn't be able to see a hidden camera just by walking by (or at least it's much less likely). I don't think most Ring cameras are meant to be hidden though, since it's primarily sold as a doorbell.
aidenn0 7y ago
At some point quantitative changes to cost and availability make a qualitative change in the invasiveness of a technology. I don't know enough about how ring footage is being used to say whether or not it's crossed that point, but this can't be dismissed just because it's something that's always been legal and happening at a smaller scale.
HarryHirsch 7y ago
Just the sheer scale of data collection by the Ring public-private partnership is worrisome already. Some of us worry about the amount of information held by Facebook, even those that do not have a Facebook account. The same principle applies here.
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  If it is legally filmed footage (for example on public spaces or in a private residence), then there is no legitimate expectation of privacy.
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    There's the tiny issue that storage became so cheap over the last 20 years that recordings can now be kept indefinitely. In the past you had a CCTV camera, and you could store maybe a month's worth of movie (on tapes, in a safe), until you had to overwrite it. Now you just keep filming and have a never forgotten record of who lives in the neighbourhood. And if Facebook runs it though its face recognition system they get names, friends and other preferences. That completely changes the nature of CCTV recordings. The law just hasn't caught up with it, also because of prolific lobbying by the usual bigdata actors.
  - homonculus1 7y ago
    Expectation of privacy was defined in an era when recording was expensive, on the assumption that there was a certain degree of anonymity in public just from the sheer impossibility of tracking everybody. There is no reason that our rights should be limited to what was found necessary to protect in the past. There must be a new category of expectation of transience, that Jeff Bezos and the FBI won't keep a permanent record of your every waking moment.
throwaway2048 7y ago
Consider if a police force was near omniscient, and could view everything happening in a city publicly, at all times 24/7. Don't you think that changes the nature of things, even if technically legal?
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Omniscient police would be a qualitatively new development, for sure. But as surveillance increases, so does stealth. You’d have to include that in your model.
heavyset_go 7y ago
> It is camera owners voluntarily sharing footage with police when they request it. Police can request that you share the footage you have, or police can get a warrant and obtain the footage directly from Ring. The difference between a camera whose footage you control and Ring is that Ring provides a nice interface to let police know that potential video evidence that you captured exists. A camera system that you rolled out yourself doesn't send a message to law enforcement agencies each time your cameras potentially capture evidence. The knowledge that video evidence exists makes it infinitely easier to get a warrant for it from a judge.
- throwaway393955 7y ago
  They don't need a warrant. They only need to make a friendly administrative subpoena to Amazon, which will happily fork over the data without challenging the order, even if the owner has refused. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/police-can-get-your-ring-doorbell-footage-without-a-warrant-report-says/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/police-can-get-y...
  - heavyset_go 7y ago
    This is a good point, as well. Part of Ring's business model is integration with law enforcement. The incentives in place certainly don't align with user privacy. Thanks for the link.
  - throwawaysea 7y ago
    This is a false story that relies on an incorrect statement from someone in the Fresno police department. Your own article contains this update: > UPDATE 5:55pm ET: After we published our story, a representative from Ring responded to our request for comment to deny all allegations in the Government Technology report. > "The reports that police can obtain any video from a Ring doorbell within 60 days is false," a spokesperson said. "Ring will not release customer information in response to government demands without a valid and binding legal demand properly served on us. Ring objects to overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course. We are working with the Fresno County Sheriff's Office to ensure this is understood."

throwaway_tech 7y ago

>Ring cameras are basically being used as a gigantic police-partnered dragnet: Isn't that sort of like saying humans are basically used as a gigantic police-partnered dragnet...seeing as our entire criminal system is primarily driven by eye witnesses of crimes? Only what we know is eye-witnesses often have conflicting testimony, some will refuse to assist police officers (out of concern for their own safety or they just don't give a shit), and others outright lie. For example, a UFC fighter's step-daughter was recently kidnapped and murdered (abducted right from a gas station)...video would later assist identify the suspect and lead to arrest, but also identify eye witnesses to the abduction (who never came forward because they "didn't want to get involved") but after the video identified the witnesses, their testimony ended up being important.

hannasanarion 7y ago
A police camera watching a gas station is not the same as a police camera watching your front door.
- jsight 7y ago
  No, but my camera watching what happens outside of my house is also not the same as a police camera. I didn't have such a camera at my old house, but if I did, there were several happenings that would have been reported to police.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    there were several happenings that would have been reported to police. Reported. Not prevented. The companies that make money off of law enforcement have conditioned people to believe cameras=prevention and camera=safety, which is false.
    - Tempest1981 7y ago
      True, but camera=deterrent?

ActorNightly 7y ago

This is a very hyperbolic take. Police do not have access to the cameras, only the server stored footage, which is both optional to share and optional to even participate in.

reaperducer 7y ago
Until all video starts streaming to the server in a software update. For the safety of your children.
- ActorNightly 7y ago
  At which point the company gets massive federal lawsuit violating multiple laws, and gets shut down quick.
  - bradknowles 7y ago
    No, a democracy dies to thunderous applause.
__jal 7y ago
This is a red-herring. Nobody cares about physical access to essentially disposable cameras. The stored footage is the whole game.
- ActorNightly 7y ago
  Yes, and stored footage is completely optional with Ring cameras.
  - __jal 7y ago
    Can you point to a page where Ring says this? I cannot find any indication that these work with anything other than their cloud service.
  - throwaway393955 7y ago

dzhiurgis 7y ago

How is helping petty thieves and junkies is helping the nation?

PascLeRasc 7y ago
Do you look like any "petty thieves and junkies"? Are you sure? It's your word against Amazon's.

fpgaminer 7y ago

As someone who tends to fall on the side of privacy more often than not, I'm actually not sure how I feel about facial recog+home security cameras. I'm completely against any fully automated system where the police can have access to the camera's data. But on the other hand, what if the system was implemented completely locally, and all with the owner's control and permission? So your Ring app pops up and says "Hey, your local police department is looking for a suspect and your camera spotted them. Would you like to share the footage?". So many petty crimes (e.g. home burglaries, car breakins, etc) go unsolved because the police just don't have the tools and resources to go after all those crimes. I have neighbors who've had their homes and cars broken into. It's a violating experience, and I think it's justified to want the perpetrators of those crimes caught and sentenced appropriately; at the very least to dissuade others. Within the context of a well built, local, permissioned system, I'm not sure I'm against it. Of course A) The likes of Amazon would never build such a system responsibly; they'd rather gobble up and abuse the data themselves. B) There are serious security concerns, as evidenced by TFA. C) Civil disobedience and similar acts are an important part of democratic society, and mass surveillance, responsible or not, threatens that. And finally, D) something which I think everyone misses when it comes to facial recognition systems ... they're still not very good. SOTA published recog systems make a mistake on 1 in 1000 faces (http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html), and that's on LFW which is fairly high quality. I'm sure FAANG does better, and SOTA will continue to improve quickly, but is that good enough for this kind of application? So I'm torn.

trevyn 7y ago
How do you know the request is connected to violation of a law you agree with?
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  If nothing else, you could review the footage yourself before deciding to share. If they person the system thinks it recognized looks like they're minding their own business, bury it.
- fpgaminer 7y ago

bobongo 7y ago

I wonder whether Nest cams are being used in a similar fashion.

mv4 7y ago
Yes they are. FTA:"The NulledCast is a podcast livestreamed to Discord. It's a show in which hackers take over people's Ring and Nest smarthome cameras and use their speakers to talk to and harass their unsuspecting owners."
- NulledMember 7y ago
  The discord was made to talk about the last situation that happend on the website. The Cast was not made for any of this Ring thing. Some Kid named Chance done this shit while they were in the podcast.

remotecool 7y ago

I have no problem with this. I have ring cameras all around my property and so do most of my neighbors and it's already caught multiple people attempting breaking and stealing packages. They get hacked because of poor password choices. You are fighting against a changing tide and the benefits of the cameras vastly outweigh the privacy concerns.

themagician 7y ago
It’s not even a changing tide. Security has always been more important than privacy to the average person. In the 90s monitored home security was a HUGE business. Thousands for an install and thousands more per year to have someone sit around and watch for unusual activity and report it to the police. ADT and Brinks are all that’s really left, but I remember dozens of companies competing in this space growing up. Now you can get the same essential service, better in many ways, for $99 and a small monthly fee.
- remotecool 7y ago
  It sounds like we agree.