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>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-pa

>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?
      - jacobsenscott 7y ago
        Certainly not a ring doorbell camera. Mine is so slow to respond to motion it won't capture a pic unless you walk up to it and stand in one spot for a few seconds. 99% of my motion events are just an empty street. You can fast walk up to a ring doorbell camera and knock it off the wall, or just cover it with a piece of tape, before it has a chance to capture a picture. I would bet this is true of most consumer level "security" cameras.
        Baeocystin 7y ago
        Oddly enough, they used to be faster. I have a Gen-1 ring, and for the first two years I had it, it would dutifully record folks walking up the path to my front door. Nowadays, unless it's the UPS guy waiting for a signature, it's 30 seconds of empty street, just like you said. It's enough of a change to genuinely decrease the utility of the camera.
        cwalv 7y ago
        This is funny because it's true. The wired "pro" version works a lot better (it does reliably capture video from just before the motion was detected until the end of the event), but you can still just knock the camera off the wall since it takes a couple minutes to upload the footage to the mothership (even with a solid wifi connection and 1 gig symmetric fiber connection beyond that)
    - jsight 7y ago
      These were vehicle related incidents. The important thing would be to get better descriptions of the vehicle to (hopefully) help with a later financial claim. Prevention is really a secondary goal.
  - matthewmacleod 7y ago
    I think the general issue though is that devices like this exist in kind of a grey area of ownership. Yeah, it's "your" camera or "my" camera, but in reality they're wholly dependent on services provided by Amazon or Google or whatever other large data collator. And while there are pretty obvious reasons for that to be the case, it also opens up a rather large dragnet-style video surveillance system that looks juicy as heck to certain groups, and we have to rely on "large company not known for amazing defence of privacy" to prevent this. I mean, I have a couple of Nest cameras at home. They're useful, but even relatively recently Google forced an update that disabled some features. And despite the hardware being totally capable of it, there's no way for me to connect to it and get a video stream. I have to rely on a shitfest of an app and fork over money for any usable history. At that point… is it really "your" camera?
    - jsight 7y ago
      I still think it is my camera, even if I chose a camera that is dependent upon third party services. I've had similar frustrations with them, though. The Ring doorbell is so slow to respond that it borders on uselessness for certain tasks. I really wish that I could just monitor an RTSP feed from it. I'm thinking that it will be replaced with one that is able to do that eventually.
  - heavyset_go 7y ago
    Ring lets law enforcement know that potential video evidence exists, and with that knowledge, they can go to a judge and get a warrant for it. Law enforcement can do this without ever letting the user who recorded the video know. For that reason, it's essentially a police camera. The police can ask nicely for the video footage, and if you don't cooperate, they can easily get a warrant to obtain the potential evidence from Ring.
    - throwaway_tech 7y ago
      >The police can ask nicely for the video footage, and if you don't cooperate, they can easily get a warrant to obtain the potential evidence from Ring. Or they could get the warrant to obtain the video directly from you....they just have 1 more option when a 3rd party vendor is involved that has a copy. It doesn't matter if it is Ring or CCTV, so I'm not sure the practical difference that you would classify 1 as a police camera and the other not, no matter what if your camera captures a crime the police will likely be able to get a warrant for it whether you have to turn it over or Ring does. I think most people would rather a vendor like ring have to deal with warrants on their behalf.
      - heavyset_go 7y ago
        > Or they could get the warrant to obtain the video directly from you.... They'd need knowledge that your cameras even exist. Ring provides an easy to use map of their surveillance network.
      - throwaway393955 7y ago
        They don't need a warrant necessarily, just a subpoena. And with Ring, you never would get a chance to challenge it, because you're not the recipient.
- throwaway_tech 7y ago
  Neither cameras watching gas stations nor cameras watching your front door are "police cameras". They are privately owned cameras, but feel free to expand on what makes these cameras different in your opinion.
  - hannasanarion 7y ago
    Police can get footage from Nest cameras, indoor and outdoor, without owner permission by applying directly to Amazon, and users can't opt out of Amazon's "Rekognition" tool that is always on and alerts police when a face on their wanted list is recognized on a camera.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      That tool had better not have a false positive rate that can be measured or Jeff Bezos will have some blood on his hands. The response to a 'wanted' criminal being spotted can easily cause that wanted person to end up dead and if it turns out to be the wrong person afterwards that would be more than just a little bit problematic.
    - throwaway_tech 7y ago
      >Police can get footage from Nest cameras, indoor and outdoor, without owner permission by applying directly to Amazon So that brings us full circle to police are able to get footage from your CCTVs without your permission too by applying for a warrant directly to the court.
      - hannasanarion 7y ago
        You have your own CCTV tapes, and you know when they are being seized because the warrant is delivered to you, not the manufacturer of your camera.
      - velp 7y ago
        Applying for a warrant through a legal process is absolutely not the same as requesting data from a tech company (especially because Amazon has incentive to cooperate with police in order to continue to sell these cameras)
- ActorNightly 7y ago
  They are not the same, and the latter does not happen with Ring cameras. Read all the articles more carefully. The issue is with the app and cloud stored footage, both of which are optional.
  - hannasanarion 7y ago
    "Optional" features that literally everybody is going to get because what is the point of a security camera if you can't record or view remotely.
    - ActorNightly 7y ago
      I don't know about the indoor cameras, but the ring doorbell can send a notification live to your phone with live video, without saving it on the server. I would imagine this is the same case for indoor cameras.
- evantahler 7y ago
  This is a tech community, and I like tech metaphors - it’s like old CCTVs were inside the firewall and these new services our outside the firewall. In the old model, sharing your data (videos) was opt in each time. You could be sure that only you had access to the data unless you chose to share it. In the new model, you are always sharing, and these hacks show you don’t really even know who you are sharing with.
take_a_breath 7y ago
==seeing as our entire criminal system is primarily driven by eye witnesses of crimes?== Do you have a source for this? In my yearlong experience on a Federal Grand Jury, the vast majority of evidence we deliberated on was "hard". By that I mean video evidence, financial transactions, text messages, emails, cell phones tower pings for location, etc. Eye witness testimony helps solidify a case, but you typically need some form of "hard" evidence to even indict someone. Even in your example, the video is what identified the suspect and lead to arrest not eye witnesses.
- throwaway_tech 7y ago
  >By that I mean video evidence, financial transactions, text messages, emails, cell phones tower pings for location Yes, you are right, the majority of criminal convictions at trial are based on physical evidence (of course 9 out of 10 cased do not go to trial). But none of that evidence comes in without a witness that can introduce it. So perhaps not an eyewitness to the crime itself, but a mandatory witness to introduce the "hard evidence". So for example take any DUI, before any video of the suspect or breathalyzer evidence can be introduced the officer needs to testify to the facts of the initial stop, then a witness needs to introduce the breathalyzer (make, model, has is been calibrated regularly, is/was the officer properly trained, did the test results get handled through the proper chain of custody, etc...). >Even in your example, the video is what identified the suspect and lead to arrest not eye witnesses. A video can't be introduced without a witness (now they don't need an eyewitness to the events depicted on camera, the store manager/records custodian will generally get the video in, but a good defense attorney might get it thrown out, so the eyewitness to the abduction becomes the key evidence in the case itself). This is why "red-light cameras" failed constitutionality tests in many cases, because many jurisdictions tried to introduce the video without a witness...which violates the defendant's right to cross examine. Or take the OJ case...all the physical evidence in the world from bodied, to murder weapon, to bloody glove...and no conviction.
  - take_a_breath 7y ago
    For almost all of the evidence introduced in the Federal Grand Jury cases I heard, the witness was a law enforcement officer. They were typically the case lead from a federal agency (Postal Inspectors, FBI, DEA, Secret Service, DHS, IRS, ATF, HUD, FDA, etc). They explain the documents that were collected through warrants and provide expert analysis.

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?
    - jacobsenscott 7y ago
      Certainly not a ring doorbell camera. Mine is so slow to respond to motion it won't capture a pic unless you walk up to it and stand in one spot for a few seconds. 99% of my motion events are just an empty street. You can fast walk up to a ring doorbell camera and knock it off the wall, or just cover it with a piece of tape, before it has a chance to capture a picture. I would bet this is true of most consumer level "security" cameras.
      - Baeocystin 7y ago
        Oddly enough, they used to be faster. I have a Gen-1 ring, and for the first two years I had it, it would dutifully record folks walking up the path to my front door. Nowadays, unless it's the UPS guy waiting for a signature, it's 30 seconds of empty street, just like you said. It's enough of a change to genuinely decrease the utility of the camera.
      - cwalv 7y ago
        This is funny because it's true. The wired "pro" version works a lot better (it does reliably capture video from just before the motion was detected until the end of the event), but you can still just knock the camera off the wall since it takes a couple minutes to upload the footage to the mothership (even with a solid wifi connection and 1 gig symmetric fiber connection beyond that)
  - jsight 7y ago
    These were vehicle related incidents. The important thing would be to get better descriptions of the vehicle to (hopefully) help with a later financial claim. Prevention is really a secondary goal.
- matthewmacleod 7y ago
  I think the general issue though is that devices like this exist in kind of a grey area of ownership. Yeah, it's "your" camera or "my" camera, but in reality they're wholly dependent on services provided by Amazon or Google or whatever other large data collator. And while there are pretty obvious reasons for that to be the case, it also opens up a rather large dragnet-style video surveillance system that looks juicy as heck to certain groups, and we have to rely on "large company not known for amazing defence of privacy" to prevent this. I mean, I have a couple of Nest cameras at home. They're useful, but even relatively recently Google forced an update that disabled some features. And despite the hardware being totally capable of it, there's no way for me to connect to it and get a video stream. I have to rely on a shitfest of an app and fork over money for any usable history. At that point… is it really "your" camera?
  - jsight 7y ago
    I still think it is my camera, even if I chose a camera that is dependent upon third party services. I've had similar frustrations with them, though. The Ring doorbell is so slow to respond that it borders on uselessness for certain tasks. I really wish that I could just monitor an RTSP feed from it. I'm thinking that it will be replaced with one that is able to do that eventually.
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  Ring lets law enforcement know that potential video evidence exists, and with that knowledge, they can go to a judge and get a warrant for it. Law enforcement can do this without ever letting the user who recorded the video know. For that reason, it's essentially a police camera. The police can ask nicely for the video footage, and if you don't cooperate, they can easily get a warrant to obtain the potential evidence from Ring.
  - throwaway_tech 7y ago
    >The police can ask nicely for the video footage, and if you don't cooperate, they can easily get a warrant to obtain the potential evidence from Ring. Or they could get the warrant to obtain the video directly from you....they just have 1 more option when a 3rd party vendor is involved that has a copy. It doesn't matter if it is Ring or CCTV, so I'm not sure the practical difference that you would classify 1 as a police camera and the other not, no matter what if your camera captures a crime the police will likely be able to get a warrant for it whether you have to turn it over or Ring does. I think most people would rather a vendor like ring have to deal with warrants on their behalf.
    - heavyset_go 7y ago
      > Or they could get the warrant to obtain the video directly from you.... They'd need knowledge that your cameras even exist. Ring provides an easy to use map of their surveillance network.
    - throwaway393955 7y ago
      They don't need a warrant necessarily, just a subpoena. And with Ring, you never would get a chance to challenge it, because you're not the recipient.
throwaway_tech 7y ago
Neither cameras watching gas stations nor cameras watching your front door are "police cameras". They are privately owned cameras, but feel free to expand on what makes these cameras different in your opinion.
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  Police can get footage from Nest cameras, indoor and outdoor, without owner permission by applying directly to Amazon, and users can't opt out of Amazon's "Rekognition" tool that is always on and alerts police when a face on their wanted list is recognized on a camera.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    That tool had better not have a false positive rate that can be measured or Jeff Bezos will have some blood on his hands. The response to a 'wanted' criminal being spotted can easily cause that wanted person to end up dead and if it turns out to be the wrong person afterwards that would be more than just a little bit problematic.
  - throwaway_tech 7y ago
    >Police can get footage from Nest cameras, indoor and outdoor, without owner permission by applying directly to Amazon So that brings us full circle to police are able to get footage from your CCTVs without your permission too by applying for a warrant directly to the court.
    - hannasanarion 7y ago
      You have your own CCTV tapes, and you know when they are being seized because the warrant is delivered to you, not the manufacturer of your camera.
    - velp 7y ago
      Applying for a warrant through a legal process is absolutely not the same as requesting data from a tech company (especially because Amazon has incentive to cooperate with police in order to continue to sell these cameras)
ActorNightly 7y ago
They are not the same, and the latter does not happen with Ring cameras. Read all the articles more carefully. The issue is with the app and cloud stored footage, both of which are optional.
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  "Optional" features that literally everybody is going to get because what is the point of a security camera if you can't record or view remotely.
  - ActorNightly 7y ago
    I don't know about the indoor cameras, but the ring doorbell can send a notification live to your phone with live video, without saving it on the server. I would imagine this is the same case for indoor cameras.
evantahler 7y ago
This is a tech community, and I like tech metaphors - it’s like old CCTVs were inside the firewall and these new services our outside the firewall. In the old model, sharing your data (videos) was opt in each time. You could be sure that only you had access to the data unless you chose to share it. In the new model, you are always sharing, and these hacks show you don’t really even know who you are sharing with.

take_a_breath 7y ago

==seeing as our entire criminal system is primarily driven by eye witnesses of crimes?== Do you have a source for this? In my yearlong experience on a Federal Grand Jury, the vast majority of evidence we deliberated on was "hard". By that I mean video evidence, financial transactions, text messages, emails, cell phones tower pings for location, etc. Eye witness testimony helps solidify a case, but you typically need some form of "hard" evidence to even indict someone. Even in your example, the video is what identified the suspect and lead to arrest not eye witnesses.

throwaway_tech 7y ago
>By that I mean video evidence, financial transactions, text messages, emails, cell phones tower pings for location Yes, you are right, the majority of criminal convictions at trial are based on physical evidence (of course 9 out of 10 cased do not go to trial). But none of that evidence comes in without a witness that can introduce it. So perhaps not an eyewitness to the crime itself, but a mandatory witness to introduce the "hard evidence". So for example take any DUI, before any video of the suspect or breathalyzer evidence can be introduced the officer needs to testify to the facts of the initial stop, then a witness needs to introduce the breathalyzer (make, model, has is been calibrated regularly, is/was the officer properly trained, did the test results get handled through the proper chain of custody, etc...). >Even in your example, the video is what identified the suspect and lead to arrest not eye witnesses. A video can't be introduced without a witness (now they don't need an eyewitness to the events depicted on camera, the store manager/records custodian will generally get the video in, but a good defense attorney might get it thrown out, so the eyewitness to the abduction becomes the key evidence in the case itself). This is why "red-light cameras" failed constitutionality tests in many cases, because many jurisdictions tried to introduce the video without a witness...which violates the defendant's right to cross examine. Or take the OJ case...all the physical evidence in the world from bodied, to murder weapon, to bloody glove...and no conviction.
- take_a_breath 7y ago
  For almost all of the evidence introduced in the Federal Grand Jury cases I heard, the witness was a law enforcement officer. They were typically the case lead from a federal agency (Postal Inspectors, FBI, DEA, Secret Service, DHS, IRS, ATF, HUD, FDA, etc). They explain the documents that were collected through warrants and provide expert analysis.