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I had a situation recently where I needed to talk to some people to get their footage when a crime was committed against a neighbor nearby. Of the 8 I talked to

I had a situation recently where I needed to talk to some people to get their footage when a crime was committed against a neighbor nearby. Of the 8 I talked to around the neighborhood and explained the situation and said "between X and Y time", only 1 showed any hesitancy at all. I suspect most saw it as a way to help their neighbor and since I was specific, it was easy for them to check quickly and share the video if they found what I described.

kelnos 6y ago
I think this is really the distinction that matters to me. If access to footage was available only to trustworthy parties; that is, people the person with the camera personally knows and trusts, then I'm more or less ok with this sort of thing. The person who owns the camera should own the footage and should have to -- on a case by case basis -- decide who gets access to it. But I'm really not comfortable with corporate entities mining their consumer devices for data to voluntarily give to the police. Incentivizing customers to give blanket permission to share all this data is unconscionable. It's especially telling that the normal path would require the police to get a judge to sign off on a warrant to get at this data. It's funny... in another post thread people are talking about a petition to have Microsoft withdraw their membership from the RIAA (in the wake of the youtube-dl takedown fiasco). Why aren't people banding together to demand that Amazon terminate their Ring camera relationship with police?