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Police in Mississippi to Pilot a Program to Live-Stream Amazon Ring Cameras

178 points by inetknght 6y ago

phendrenad2 6y ago
This article sounds like it's calling for Ring to stop streaming video to the police without the owner's knowledge. But if you keep reading, you realize that it's calling for Ring to block the owners from streaming to law enforcement with their own PC. From the end of the article: > "[Amazon and Ring] are not involved in any way with any of the companies or the city in connection with the pilot program. The companies, the police and the city that were discussed in the article do not have access to Ring’s systems or the Neighbors App. Ring customers have control and ownership of their devices and videos, and can choose to allow access as they wish." Seems like a weird take to me. Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? And is it legal for you to live-stream it? Those are rights you'll need to trample on to do something about this Ring/police thing.
- alphabettsy 6y ago
  I think the point is that Ring is facilitating this program and they don’t have to. I think there’s a pretty big distinction between a single home or even many choosing to livestream and a company providing the means for police departments to setup centralized mass-surveillance.
  - throwaway69123 6y ago
    People buy ring cameras for "law and order" related to their own properties, if anything this is the natural progression of this type of product. What is your argument to say someone who wants to opt-in to this kind of thing and why they shouldnt?
    - 14 6y ago
      Think of the children. Hackers may hack these cameras and start following children home. Edit: I was being sarcastic and bringing up what everyone does when they don’t have a valid reason to oppose something put out the old think of the children bit.
    - bb88 6y ago
      So when I read the article, I know there are a lot of people who trust the police in their community. They are fine with "mass surveillance" (though they would never see it like that) to help keep crime down. Much of that may be racist in nature to keep minorities out of neighborhoods, but much of it is also people trying to keep their amazon deliveries from being stolen. It's not hard to see that far into the future where police departments offer an app that will tell you who is at the front door before you open it -- and something like that will probably triple the sales of home security cameras.
    - alphabettsy 6y ago
      Do they? I think cameras are like police, they are only for after something happens. Their presence can be a deterrent. This does not have to be a natural progression. That’s only true if we collectively decide we’re better off having centralized government surveillance. Following any incident the police could do their jobs and respect the constitution by actually talking to people and requesting they assist rather than implementing mass-surveillance to avoid doing work.
      - throwaway69123 6y ago
        Did you read the article? > Lumumba said the city would only be able to access the devices when crimes occur in those areas.
        alphabettsy 6y ago
        No issue then since the government and police especially have a good track record of following policies and rules that’s aren’t the law. /s Only be able to access it when a crime occurs how? They’ll get a warrant or an officer says a crime occurred and asks for access?
        sangnoir 6y ago
        You shouldn't be surprised to discover that the definition of "when" and "area" can be very flexible to maximize data collection. Car break in happened 6 months ago - good enough justify a crime having occurred. The break-in was 20 miles away? Well, that's driving distance, so it qualifies as the same "area". Look at your local PD's crime map and you will discover that this is a recipe for perpetual mass surveillance. Good luck keeping this footage from the NSA and FBI. I'm counting down the days to the first person who'll be busted and their Ring will be the first hostile "witness"
    - AlexandrB 6y ago
      But Ring cameras aren't usually pointed at their own properties. They're mostly pointed at public property (the street) and their neighbors across the street. Your right to feel safe stops at my right to have privacy from you.
      - cbozeman 6y ago
        You have no expectation of privacy in a public space. Its the reason I can record you all day if I want. People don't understand this (clearly). Most of us just choose not to record others because we don't give a shit about you, or have any sort of vested interest in you.
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    How would you propose Ring stops it? Change the T&Cs to disallow sharing your video with the police while still allowing sharing with your friends? What if a private company says it's your friend and collects it on behalf of the police? What if a group of vigilant neighbors want to pool all their videos together so their own volunteers or staff can monitor them? It's kind of hard to allow something for normal people while disallowing it for the police.
    - alphabettsy 6y ago
      Ring afaik doesn’t allow anyone live-stream access other than the owners and those directly added to the app. Now we’re talking about the ability to give the police department a livestream, something neighbors can’t currently do. They don’t have to build it.
      - lopmotr 6y ago
        > and those directly added to the app The article says this is just owners allowing access to the company that manages it for the police. How can Ring stop that?
        alphabettsy 6y ago
        I don’t know how else to explain to you that this is different functionality. When someone is added to the app they have complete control over your Ring, this is not the same thing.
        lopmotr 6y ago
        Can you quote where it says this is a different functionality? The statement from Amazon says it's none of their business.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > Now, our worst fears have been confirmed. Police in Jackson, Mississippi, have started a pilot program that would allow security camera owners, including Ring owners, to patch the camera streams from their front doors directly to a police Real Time Crime Center. Sounds like Mozilla is for user freedom with their purchased hardware only when users behave as Mozilla wants them to.
  - chris_wot 6y ago
    It feels to me that Mozilla are getting more and more into areas that are not related to their core.
    - dralley 6y ago
      Mozilla Foundation. The non-profit, not the coproration that develops Firefox. The Foundation is and always has been focused on the greater mission of privacy and freedom on the web.
      - chris_wot 6y ago
        Wasn’t aware that the Ring cameras were on the web.
        brewdad 6y ago
        https://account.ring.com/account/dashboard https://account.ring.com/account/dashboard You need access to an account but that's exactly what we are discussing here.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    Constraining other peoples freedom, or otherwise possible ways to harm other people in any form is not included into the freedom people push for. Your argument is kinda like saying if you prevent someone from hitting someone else your are against fredome because that person should be free to hit anyone they want to hit. Just that's a more subtle topic then hitting someone.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- shakna 6y ago
  > But if you keep reading, you realize that it's calling for Ring to block the owners from streaming to law enforcement with their own PC. There is a difference in incentives and scale between those two circumstances, however. I know that the normal Ring user doesn't have the ability to store all the video being streamed, and isn't incentivised to care about random people walking by their house. Most people are selfish, they care about recording interactions with their property, not every innocuous event. The same is not true for a government body. They have incentives and capability to store everything, for an unreasonable timeframe. They have reason to not just care who might approach the house, but to track every single passerby. This sort of mass collection of information generally requires a warrant, for good reason. This kind of project is designed to skirt the law without violating it, to further increase the power differential between the police, and those they claim to be protecting by these measures. > Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? And is it legal for you to live-stream it? Those are rights you'll need to trample on to do something about this Ring/police thing. It's already been establish that it's legal for the normal civilian to do that. Public square stuff. However, the police are on the receiving end, in this case. They've found a little loophole that may or may not be quite legal, and are intent on exploiting it. Ring are assisting them in this. You don't need to trample on public square laws to end this. You just need to require police to get a warrant, even for publicly available information, because it should be acknowledged that _what_ they can do with that information is vastly different than what you or I could.
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    Exactly. There is a difference in kind that results from the difference in degree. One person recording their front door isn't an issue. Each person recording their own front door isn't an issue. The conglomeration of all those front door recordings into a single frictionless searchable product is a massive, massive privay issue.
- darig 6y ago
  You have the right to shoot a gun, but if you murder someone while shooting it, you're criminally liable. You might accidentally capture someone on run from an abusive ex who works for the police department with access to the video feeds. They already have facial and license plate recognition, why wouldn't the police be using it on the ring feeds as well? Don't sue the cops, sue the people shooting the video and indiscriminately distributing it. For a little background, I built a system to share video exactly like this around 1995 in a very popular restaurant I worked at. I also interned at a local ISP, so I had unlimited dial-up and FTP/WWW space for free, so I set up the accounting laptop in the back office with a Snappy video capture device that would take a crappy still image every 10 minutes from the security cams, dial into the ISP on one of the 3 telephone lines, and FTP the image so it would show on the restaurant homepage to let people know how busy it was. It was very common to get shoulder to shoulder crowded, so I figured people would like to know in advance and wait 20 minutes to make everyone's lives easier. This was like 320x200 resolution on crappy multiplexed security cameras. You couldn't make out faces. I contacted the local media to let them know that the website was going to launch soon. There were other features for other local businesses to create their own pages, sort of like geocities or myspace. They called me back and said they never do website announcements, but the live video stream was very interesting to them. We did an interview, and they sent me the article they were going to run after I launched, it painted the still image service as "1984 is here", and you would give up your privacy if you went to the restaurant. They must have told other people, because by the end of the week I had lawyers contacting me and threatening me with lawsuits if I launched. The website launched without the live image. No one cares anymore. All of the people the media were trying to scare are the same people uploading their entire lives to for-profit corporations like facebook and instagram, and they're doing it in full HD with their names attached. So, I completely see how cool this technology is, and some good that can be done with it, but anyone involved is setting themselves up for trouble.
  - rkagerer 6y ago
    Yeah the cultural shift in that regard boggles my mind. Most people don't understand the significance of what they're forking over. I wish someone would do a documentary where some creep follows you around all day writing down where you go, who you look at, what you buy, what you say, read, etc. and connect the dots for people about how today's major web properties are doing exactly that. It's like how nobody really cares if some guy they can't see in a back room at the airport can see through your clothes but if they were instructed to strip naked it would never fly. Once upon a time it was bad manners to even take a picture of someone without asking. I hate it when people indiscriminately point their damn cameraphones at me. /end old fogey rant here.
- l3s2d 6y ago
  It probably is within their individual rights to send their data to the police, but the implications of a system like this are unsettling. Is the physical world going post-privacy? There's a future where every public space is live-streamed, 24/7 on the internet.
  - taneq 6y ago
    Is it better or worse to have an open panopticon like this (live streamed post privacy), or a closed one where the government & friends get access but normal people do not? At least this this accessible to all.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      This project seems to let everyone contribute their camera to the closed system, but I don't see how you can call it "accessible to all."
  - sershe 6y ago
    I certainly hope so. Really the only problem I see with this is how the video is shared with the police only (and I trust the police, for now)... What I'd really like to see is ubiquitous cameras everywhere, live streaming online with free (or nominal fee) access for everyone.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Ms. Streisand made it clear that this is legal in the US. Public spaces (and airspace) are not private.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    If you're talking about the Streisand Effect, that isn't concerned with legality or morality. It just says that the attempt to suppress information can publicize that information farther than it would have been without the attempt. That could apply just as easily to nude pictures of your children as anything else.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      She was trying to suppress aerial photography of her backyard and lost.
- phkahler 6y ago
  >> Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? And is it legal for you to live-stream it? What if it offers a view of the house across the street? Or into their window? Also, it's one thing to have a camera record 24/7 so footage can be reviewed later. It's very different to add motion detection and face recognition to ubiquitous live streams that include views of other peoples property.
  - austincheney 6y ago
    > Or into their window? Edit. I stand corrected. This cannot be used by police at all. A police officer would have to be present at the time of the video and not reliant upon that video for observation of the criminal act. If the officer requires use of the video then that video would require a warrant prior to its viewing by law enforcement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_view_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_view_doctrine
    - vaccinator 6y ago
      It doesnt require a warrant if you willingly give it to them....
      - boomboomsubban 6y ago
        It does require a warrant to use the video as grounds to enter their neighbor's home, if the previous Supreme Court ruling holds up. More likely, they'd figure out some kind of parallel construction.
        vaccinator 6y ago
        parallel construction should be relabeled as perjury or something similar
- INTPenis 6y ago
  >Seems like a weird take to me. Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? In some countries, yes. It is illegal to point a camera at a public place without alerting people that there is a camera there. Here in Sweden our version of the FCC (I gues, PTS) have actually written permission to apartment owners that they're allowed to have peep hole cameras in their doors. For example a lot of senior citizens have this so they don't have to get up to see who's at the door. So that was an exception they had to make because otherwise you're not allowed to point a camera at a public place willy nilly.
- pc86 6y ago
  > Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? In the US, anyway[0], yes it is. You do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy when you're on a street, sidewalk, or yard (whether it's your yard or not). [0] Every state is different; this is to say there is no national law prohibiting it (I'm not sure the federal government has jurisdiction for this kind of thing), and to my knowledge no state has a law explicitly prohibiting having a personally owned camera facing a public area like this.
mjevans 6y ago
Why can't we _also_ do this with police body cameras, and have independent auditors create authenticated copies of the footage?
- VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
  > police body cameras The body cameras worn by police officers record a lot more than would be legally allowed to share to the public.
  - pugworthy 6y ago
    Same goes for home cameras doesn't it? There is no way for individuals caught on camera to protect their privacy, there are no signs across the street saying you are under camera supervision, no protection from invasion of privacy? True, police cameras go places that are private, but then we expect (though probably don't have rights to) privacy driving our car down the street, or even stepping onto someone's private property for legal reasons.
    - Reelin 6y ago
      > no protection from invasion of privacy ... then we expect (though probably don't have rights to) privacy driving our car down the street That's the key difference. In the US, public places aren't generally afforded any privacy protections and thus video can be recorded and shared. Police go many places that aren't public, so a significant portion of body cam footage is likely illegal to share. Of course in this particular case (Ring live streaming) there's a question about whether it's legal or acceptable for police to engage in such practices on a wide scale. An end user doing something once simply isn't the same as a large government agency doing it many times over.
- rasz 6y ago
  Didnt you know? Police body cameras are to clear Police from any wrongdoing, not the other way around.
- Mashimo 6y ago
mensetmanusman 6y ago
The U.S. criticizes China for implementing a police state. But humans are humans, and the urge to control other humans trumps all culture.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  One can only imagine how this thread would be going if it were China joining with industry to carry out something similar.
- kccqzy 6y ago
  I agree. After I moved to a new place (in South Bay), I found that many of my neighbors had some kind of video doorbell installed, usually Nest but sometimes also Ring. Initially I was quite horrified by the fact that when I'm taking a stroll around the neighborhood I would be captured by all these cameras. And if I'm having a conversation while walking it's quite easy for the neighbors to overhear. This all changed when I decided to install Nest Hello myself. You get this inexplicable satisfaction from having a camera that watches passers-by and knowing they aren't messing with your property (even though statistically you probably know they won't). It really taps into that part of human nature.
  - throwaway69123 6y ago
    Most people dont worry about this when they visit a shopping center, its been like this for many decades.
    - pugworthy 6y ago
      But not when walking out of our front doors or taking the dog for a walk.
    - anigbrowl 6y ago
      False equivalences seems to be your specialty.
- ssss11 6y ago
AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
> it allows police departments to avoid the cost of buying surveillance equipment and to put that burden onto consumers As-if we're not paying for it anyway through our taxes? > ensure active resident participation in the process Seems like this requires participation of the residents? The existing Amazon/Ring partnership sure does, and, I don't see how (with Amazon/Ring not being directly involved) this could work without the resident agreeing to share the footage? > This is not a drill. Red alert: Ugh, this kind of hyperbole doesn't help anything.
bigiain 6y ago
I wonder how hard it'd be to geolocate these cameras by comparing their stream to Google StreetView imagery, then program a drone with a spray paint can to go visit? (For bonus points, the drone could paint blood on the top and sides of doorframes of every house without a live-streaming ring camera, so the destroyer will not enter those houses...)
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  Hold on you are going to fight surveillance with ... surveillance .
  - bigiain 6y ago
    Something something irony something something Alanis Morissette...
    - bigiain 6y ago
      Also, it's not the householder choosing to surveil their entrances that bugs me, it's the householders who choose to feed all that surveillance into the gaping maw of overreaching police and their unaccountable databases. Like I said, if you're _not_ live-streaming your Ring footage, I'll blood your door so the destroyer passes over you. Even if you have a Ring camera.
- stronglikedan 6y ago
  Ah, yes, vigilantism, trespass, and vandalism...always a good decision!
VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
This is the extreme end of the spectrum of "all police body camera footage should be made public no matter what". Police officers record a lot of people in a lot of very bad situations. Those people have a right to their privacy. They didn't give it up just by virtue of them encountering a police officer that was recording them with their body camera. Especially not just because a police officer entered their home and was wearing a body cam recording everything they saw. The courts decide what bodycam footage gets made public.
throwaway69123 6y ago
Mozilla has no problem taking googles blood money for mass surveillance of peoples online behaviors.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I would support them taking money from Satan as long as it keeps them afloat and working for the common good and privacy in general
stevecalifornia 6y ago
In all of the EFF's writing they make it sound like the police are tapping into Ring cameras and snooping without owner being aware. In ALL scenarios they have written about, it's been users pushing their content to the police. The owner of the Ring camera is either specifying to share a specific bit of footage around an event to their local police OR in this case the owner is specifying they want to stream their Ring / Security footage to some service which the police can use. They always mention this as an aside like it's not important. I am so frustrated with the continued alarmist reporting from the EFF around Ring cameras. Can't we get information without all the fear mongering? Look at the title of this article and look at the comments. People don't read the content-- they just read the title.
- titzer 6y ago
  I, for one, do not want people plugging their security cameras directly into the police department, especially when they capture public and semi-public spaces.
  - Gabrielfair 6y ago
    To add to the discussion, I haven't seen anyone mention that this will effectively give the police departments the ability to do surveillance without a warrant
  - swebs 6y ago
    Congrats, you probably don't live in a high crime area. The people opting in to these services definitely want them, and usually because they were victimized in the past.
    - titzer 6y ago
      It's unfortunate that constitutional rights are in constant tension with surveillance, isn't it? Technology and people's irrational fears have been pushing that balance in pretty much one direction only.
underseacables 6y ago
This could be the most watched live series ever.
- pii 6y ago
  > Yeah, just sitting here watching Joe on Ring TV, you? > Same, watching my neighbor on Ring TV. > What's Joe doing today? > Watching someone watch Ring TV on Ring TV > Lol same
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    I have no idea why this is downvoted, because its actually hilarious and true.
dstaley 6y ago
I'd love to hear more about how this third-party company is somehow tapping into live feeds from Ring cameras without the involvement of Ring.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  "Ring customers have control and ownership of their devices and videos, and can choose to allow access as they wish."
charliebrownau 6y ago
Meanile in majority black cities Violent Crime Soars in Minneapolis as Police Quit! SHOCKING TRUTH! https://www.bitchute.com/video/v1VIPm1P3TI/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/v1VIPm1P3TI/
2Gkashmiri 6y ago
Where i live businesses who have cameras refuse to point any towards the streets. Reason? The police comes to hassle, you are labelled a snitch and general discomfort. Granted i live in a low/near zero crime area but still, the police isnt nice always and more often its the police at fault and cameras record so yeah.
jobigoud 6y ago
I think the next logical step in this is a future where the government is paying citizens a small fee (or a few points of karma/social credit) to access their video feeds. All feeds, from their door bell, from their self driving car, possibly their smart speakers, and any other place where machine vision provides a service to an individual. The reward will confuse people on what's good and bad for the whole community.
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
I've experienced enough neighborhood crime and unreported incidents that I can see great value in a neighborhood surveillance network. However, I don't know whether this surveillance network is worth the costs that are to be associated with it. The cure costs more than the problem. Ring is an Amazon product. Ring videos stream to AWS s3 servers. Video is processed through AI and used in an unlimited number of ways for Amazon's purposes and not just policing. We're going to wind up paying Amazon through taxes for an unnecessary neighborhood surveillance platform that it gets to monetize in countless ways. Politicians, whose greatest contributor to re-election campaigns will be an anonymous source affiliated with a lobbying outfit contracted by Amazon, will insist that the program is valuable but never substantiate the claims with much else than anecdotal evidence. Society functions well enough today without these services and it costs us far less than it will tomorrow. Don't forget that. Mozilla Foundation is ringing the alarm bells about public surveillance when it should be alarming us about paying more taxes. We'll be paying taxes for unnecessary technology services. The programs will involve long-term contracts, too, so forget about voting in a new mayor to change things.
jkestner 6y ago
“Are you surveilled by the state like poor people or do you surveil yourself like the middle class?” - Tressie McMillan Cottom

178 points by inetknght 6y ago

This article sounds like it's calling for Ring to stop streaming video to the police without the owner's knowledge. But if you keep reading, you realize that it's calling for Ring to block the owners from streaming to law enforcement with their own PC. From the end of the article: > "[Amazon and Ring] are not involved in any way with any of the companies or the city in connection with the pilot program. The companies, the police and the city that were discussed in the article do not have access to Ring’s systems or the Neighbors App. Ring customers have control and ownership of their devices and videos, and can choose to allow access as they wish." Seems like a weird take to me. Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? And is it legal for you to live-stream it? Those are rights you'll need to trample on to do something about this Ring/police thing.

alphabettsy 6y ago
I think the point is that Ring is facilitating this program and they don’t have to. I think there’s a pretty big distinction between a single home or even many choosing to livestream and a company providing the means for police departments to setup centralized mass-surveillance.
- throwaway69123 6y ago
  People buy ring cameras for "law and order" related to their own properties, if anything this is the natural progression of this type of product. What is your argument to say someone who wants to opt-in to this kind of thing and why they shouldnt?
  - 14 6y ago
    Think of the children. Hackers may hack these cameras and start following children home. Edit: I was being sarcastic and bringing up what everyone does when they don’t have a valid reason to oppose something put out the old think of the children bit.
  - bb88 6y ago
    So when I read the article, I know there are a lot of people who trust the police in their community. They are fine with "mass surveillance" (though they would never see it like that) to help keep crime down. Much of that may be racist in nature to keep minorities out of neighborhoods, but much of it is also people trying to keep their amazon deliveries from being stolen. It's not hard to see that far into the future where police departments offer an app that will tell you who is at the front door before you open it -- and something like that will probably triple the sales of home security cameras.
  - alphabettsy 6y ago
    Do they? I think cameras are like police, they are only for after something happens. Their presence can be a deterrent. This does not have to be a natural progression. That’s only true if we collectively decide we’re better off having centralized government surveillance. Following any incident the police could do their jobs and respect the constitution by actually talking to people and requesting they assist rather than implementing mass-surveillance to avoid doing work.
    - throwaway69123 6y ago
      Did you read the article? > Lumumba said the city would only be able to access the devices when crimes occur in those areas.
      - alphabettsy 6y ago
        No issue then since the government and police especially have a good track record of following policies and rules that’s aren’t the law. /s Only be able to access it when a crime occurs how? They’ll get a warrant or an officer says a crime occurred and asks for access?
      - sangnoir 6y ago
        You shouldn't be surprised to discover that the definition of "when" and "area" can be very flexible to maximize data collection. Car break in happened 6 months ago - good enough justify a crime having occurred. The break-in was 20 miles away? Well, that's driving distance, so it qualifies as the same "area". Look at your local PD's crime map and you will discover that this is a recipe for perpetual mass surveillance. Good luck keeping this footage from the NSA and FBI. I'm counting down the days to the first person who'll be busted and their Ring will be the first hostile "witness"
  - AlexandrB 6y ago
    But Ring cameras aren't usually pointed at their own properties. They're mostly pointed at public property (the street) and their neighbors across the street. Your right to feel safe stops at my right to have privacy from you.
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      You have no expectation of privacy in a public space. Its the reason I can record you all day if I want. People don't understand this (clearly). Most of us just choose not to record others because we don't give a shit about you, or have any sort of vested interest in you.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  How would you propose Ring stops it? Change the T&Cs to disallow sharing your video with the police while still allowing sharing with your friends? What if a private company says it's your friend and collects it on behalf of the police? What if a group of vigilant neighbors want to pool all their videos together so their own volunteers or staff can monitor them? It's kind of hard to allow something for normal people while disallowing it for the police.
  - alphabettsy 6y ago
    Ring afaik doesn’t allow anyone live-stream access other than the owners and those directly added to the app. Now we’re talking about the ability to give the police department a livestream, something neighbors can’t currently do. They don’t have to build it.
    - lopmotr 6y ago
      > and those directly added to the app The article says this is just owners allowing access to the company that manages it for the police. How can Ring stop that?
      - alphabettsy 6y ago
        I don’t know how else to explain to you that this is different functionality. When someone is added to the app they have complete control over your Ring, this is not the same thing.
        lopmotr 6y ago
        Can you quote where it says this is a different functionality? The statement from Amazon says it's none of their business.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> Now, our worst fears have been confirmed. Police in Jackson, Mississippi, have started a pilot program that would allow security camera owners, including Ring owners, to patch the camera streams from their front doors directly to a police Real Time Crime Center. Sounds like Mozilla is for user freedom with their purchased hardware only when users behave as Mozilla wants them to.
- chris_wot 6y ago
  It feels to me that Mozilla are getting more and more into areas that are not related to their core.
  - dralley 6y ago
    Mozilla Foundation. The non-profit, not the coproration that develops Firefox. The Foundation is and always has been focused on the greater mission of privacy and freedom on the web.
    - chris_wot 6y ago
      Wasn’t aware that the Ring cameras were on the web.
      - brewdad 6y ago
        https://account.ring.com/account/dashboard https://account.ring.com/account/dashboard You need access to an account but that's exactly what we are discussing here.
- dathinab 6y ago
  Constraining other peoples freedom, or otherwise possible ways to harm other people in any form is not included into the freedom people push for. Your argument is kinda like saying if you prevent someone from hitting someone else your are against fredome because that person should be free to hit anyone they want to hit. Just that's a more subtle topic then hitting someone.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
shakna 6y ago
> But if you keep reading, you realize that it's calling for Ring to block the owners from streaming to law enforcement with their own PC. There is a difference in incentives and scale between those two circumstances, however. I know that the normal Ring user doesn't have the ability to store all the video being streamed, and isn't incentivised to care about random people walking by their house. Most people are selfish, they care about recording interactions with their property, not every innocuous event. The same is not true for a government body. They have incentives and capability to store everything, for an unreasonable timeframe. They have reason to not just care who might approach the house, but to track every single passerby. This sort of mass collection of information generally requires a warrant, for good reason. This kind of project is designed to skirt the law without violating it, to further increase the power differential between the police, and those they claim to be protecting by these measures. > Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? And is it legal for you to live-stream it? Those are rights you'll need to trample on to do something about this Ring/police thing. It's already been establish that it's legal for the normal civilian to do that. Public square stuff. However, the police are on the receiving end, in this case. They've found a little loophole that may or may not be quite legal, and are intent on exploiting it. Ring are assisting them in this. You don't need to trample on public square laws to end this. You just need to require police to get a warrant, even for publicly available information, because it should be acknowledged that _what_ they can do with that information is vastly different than what you or I could.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  Exactly. There is a difference in kind that results from the difference in degree. One person recording their front door isn't an issue. Each person recording their own front door isn't an issue. The conglomeration of all those front door recordings into a single frictionless searchable product is a massive, massive privay issue.
darig 6y ago
You have the right to shoot a gun, but if you murder someone while shooting it, you're criminally liable. You might accidentally capture someone on run from an abusive ex who works for the police department with access to the video feeds. They already have facial and license plate recognition, why wouldn't the police be using it on the ring feeds as well? Don't sue the cops, sue the people shooting the video and indiscriminately distributing it. For a little background, I built a system to share video exactly like this around 1995 in a very popular restaurant I worked at. I also interned at a local ISP, so I had unlimited dial-up and FTP/WWW space for free, so I set up the accounting laptop in the back office with a Snappy video capture device that would take a crappy still image every 10 minutes from the security cams, dial into the ISP on one of the 3 telephone lines, and FTP the image so it would show on the restaurant homepage to let people know how busy it was. It was very common to get shoulder to shoulder crowded, so I figured people would like to know in advance and wait 20 minutes to make everyone's lives easier. This was like 320x200 resolution on crappy multiplexed security cameras. You couldn't make out faces. I contacted the local media to let them know that the website was going to launch soon. There were other features for other local businesses to create their own pages, sort of like geocities or myspace. They called me back and said they never do website announcements, but the live video stream was very interesting to them. We did an interview, and they sent me the article they were going to run after I launched, it painted the still image service as "1984 is here", and you would give up your privacy if you went to the restaurant. They must have told other people, because by the end of the week I had lawyers contacting me and threatening me with lawsuits if I launched. The website launched without the live image. No one cares anymore. All of the people the media were trying to scare are the same people uploading their entire lives to for-profit corporations like facebook and instagram, and they're doing it in full HD with their names attached. So, I completely see how cool this technology is, and some good that can be done with it, but anyone involved is setting themselves up for trouble.
- rkagerer 6y ago
  Yeah the cultural shift in that regard boggles my mind. Most people don't understand the significance of what they're forking over. I wish someone would do a documentary where some creep follows you around all day writing down where you go, who you look at, what you buy, what you say, read, etc. and connect the dots for people about how today's major web properties are doing exactly that. It's like how nobody really cares if some guy they can't see in a back room at the airport can see through your clothes but if they were instructed to strip naked it would never fly. Once upon a time it was bad manners to even take a picture of someone without asking. I hate it when people indiscriminately point their damn cameraphones at me. /end old fogey rant here.
l3s2d 6y ago
It probably is within their individual rights to send their data to the police, but the implications of a system like this are unsettling. Is the physical world going post-privacy? There's a future where every public space is live-streamed, 24/7 on the internet.
- taneq 6y ago
  Is it better or worse to have an open panopticon like this (live streamed post privacy), or a closed one where the government & friends get access but normal people do not? At least this this accessible to all.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    This project seems to let everyone contribute their camera to the closed system, but I don't see how you can call it "accessible to all."
- sershe 6y ago
  I certainly hope so. Really the only problem I see with this is how the video is shared with the police only (and I trust the police, for now)... What I'd really like to see is ubiquitous cameras everywhere, live streaming online with free (or nominal fee) access for everyone.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Ms. Streisand made it clear that this is legal in the US. Public spaces (and airspace) are not private.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  If you're talking about the Streisand Effect, that isn't concerned with legality or morality. It just says that the attempt to suppress information can publicize that information farther than it would have been without the attempt. That could apply just as easily to nude pictures of your children as anything else.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    She was trying to suppress aerial photography of her backyard and lost.
phkahler 6y ago
>> Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? And is it legal for you to live-stream it? What if it offers a view of the house across the street? Or into their window? Also, it's one thing to have a camera record 24/7 so footage can be reviewed later. It's very different to add motion detection and face recognition to ubiquitous live streams that include views of other peoples property.
- austincheney 6y ago
  > Or into their window? Edit. I stand corrected. This cannot be used by police at all. A police officer would have to be present at the time of the video and not reliant upon that video for observation of the criminal act. If the officer requires use of the video then that video would require a warrant prior to its viewing by law enforcement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_view_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_view_doctrine
  - vaccinator 6y ago
    It doesnt require a warrant if you willingly give it to them....
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      It does require a warrant to use the video as grounds to enter their neighbor's home, if the previous Supreme Court ruling holds up. More likely, they'd figure out some kind of parallel construction.
      - vaccinator 6y ago
        parallel construction should be relabeled as perjury or something similar
INTPenis 6y ago
>Seems like a weird take to me. Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? In some countries, yes. It is illegal to point a camera at a public place without alerting people that there is a camera there. Here in Sweden our version of the FCC (I gues, PTS) have actually written permission to apartment owners that they're allowed to have peep hole cameras in their doors. For example a lot of senior citizens have this so they don't have to get up to see who's at the door. So that was an exception they had to make because otherwise you're not allowed to point a camera at a public place willy nilly.
pc86 6y ago
> Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? In the US, anyway[0], yes it is. You do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy when you're on a street, sidewalk, or yard (whether it's your yard or not). [0] Every state is different; this is to say there is no national law prohibiting it (I'm not sure the federal government has jurisdiction for this kind of thing), and to my knowledge no state has a law explicitly prohibiting having a personally owned camera facing a public area like this.

mjevans 6y ago

Why can't we _also_ do this with police body cameras, and have independent auditors create authenticated copies of the footage?

VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
> police body cameras The body cameras worn by police officers record a lot more than would be legally allowed to share to the public.
- pugworthy 6y ago
  Same goes for home cameras doesn't it? There is no way for individuals caught on camera to protect their privacy, there are no signs across the street saying you are under camera supervision, no protection from invasion of privacy? True, police cameras go places that are private, but then we expect (though probably don't have rights to) privacy driving our car down the street, or even stepping onto someone's private property for legal reasons.
  - Reelin 6y ago
    > no protection from invasion of privacy ... then we expect (though probably don't have rights to) privacy driving our car down the street That's the key difference. In the US, public places aren't generally afforded any privacy protections and thus video can be recorded and shared. Police go many places that aren't public, so a significant portion of body cam footage is likely illegal to share. Of course in this particular case (Ring live streaming) there's a question about whether it's legal or acceptable for police to engage in such practices on a wide scale. An end user doing something once simply isn't the same as a large government agency doing it many times over.
rasz 6y ago
Didnt you know? Police body cameras are to clear Police from any wrongdoing, not the other way around.
Mashimo 6y ago

mensetmanusman 6y ago

The U.S. criticizes China for implementing a police state. But humans are humans, and the urge to control other humans trumps all culture.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
One can only imagine how this thread would be going if it were China joining with industry to carry out something similar.
kccqzy 6y ago
I agree. After I moved to a new place (in South Bay), I found that many of my neighbors had some kind of video doorbell installed, usually Nest but sometimes also Ring. Initially I was quite horrified by the fact that when I'm taking a stroll around the neighborhood I would be captured by all these cameras. And if I'm having a conversation while walking it's quite easy for the neighbors to overhear. This all changed when I decided to install Nest Hello myself. You get this inexplicable satisfaction from having a camera that watches passers-by and knowing they aren't messing with your property (even though statistically you probably know they won't). It really taps into that part of human nature.
- throwaway69123 6y ago
  Most people dont worry about this when they visit a shopping center, its been like this for many decades.
  - pugworthy 6y ago
    But not when walking out of our front doors or taking the dog for a walk.
  - anigbrowl 6y ago
    False equivalences seems to be your specialty.
ssss11 6y ago

AdamJacobMuller 6y ago

> it allows police departments to avoid the cost of buying surveillance equipment and to put that burden onto consumers As-if we're not paying for it anyway through our taxes? > ensure active resident participation in the process Seems like this requires participation of the residents? The existing Amazon/Ring partnership sure does, and, I don't see how (with Amazon/Ring not being directly involved) this could work without the resident agreeing to share the footage? > This is not a drill. Red alert: Ugh, this kind of hyperbole doesn't help anything.

bigiain 6y ago

I wonder how hard it'd be to geolocate these cameras by comparing their stream to Google StreetView imagery, then program a drone with a spray paint can to go visit? (For bonus points, the drone could paint blood on the top and sides of doorframes of every house without a live-streaming ring camera, so the destroyer will not enter those houses...)

quickthrower2 6y ago
Hold on you are going to fight surveillance with ... surveillance .
- bigiain 6y ago
  Something something irony something something Alanis Morissette...
  - bigiain 6y ago
    Also, it's not the householder choosing to surveil their entrances that bugs me, it's the householders who choose to feed all that surveillance into the gaping maw of overreaching police and their unaccountable databases. Like I said, if you're _not_ live-streaming your Ring footage, I'll blood your door so the destroyer passes over you. Even if you have a Ring camera.
stronglikedan 6y ago
Ah, yes, vigilantism, trespass, and vandalism...always a good decision!

VWWHFSfQ 6y ago

This is the extreme end of the spectrum of "all police body camera footage should be made public no matter what". Police officers record a lot of people in a lot of very bad situations. Those people have a right to their privacy. They didn't give it up just by virtue of them encountering a police officer that was recording them with their body camera. Especially not just because a police officer entered their home and was wearing a body cam recording everything they saw. The courts decide what bodycam footage gets made public.

throwaway69123 6y ago

Mozilla has no problem taking googles blood money for mass surveillance of peoples online behaviors.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
I would support them taking money from Satan as long as it keeps them afloat and working for the common good and privacy in general

stevecalifornia 6y ago

In all of the EFF's writing they make it sound like the police are tapping into Ring cameras and snooping without owner being aware. In ALL scenarios they have written about, it's been users pushing their content to the police. The owner of the Ring camera is either specifying to share a specific bit of footage around an event to their local police OR in this case the owner is specifying they want to stream their Ring / Security footage to some service which the police can use. They always mention this as an aside like it's not important. I am so frustrated with the continued alarmist reporting from the EFF around Ring cameras. Can't we get information without all the fear mongering? Look at the title of this article and look at the comments. People don't read the content-- they just read the title.

titzer 6y ago
I, for one, do not want people plugging their security cameras directly into the police department, especially when they capture public and semi-public spaces.
- Gabrielfair 6y ago
  To add to the discussion, I haven't seen anyone mention that this will effectively give the police departments the ability to do surveillance without a warrant
- swebs 6y ago
  Congrats, you probably don't live in a high crime area. The people opting in to these services definitely want them, and usually because they were victimized in the past.
  - titzer 6y ago
    It's unfortunate that constitutional rights are in constant tension with surveillance, isn't it? Technology and people's irrational fears have been pushing that balance in pretty much one direction only.

underseacables 6y ago

This could be the most watched live series ever.

pii 6y ago
> Yeah, just sitting here watching Joe on Ring TV, you? > Same, watching my neighbor on Ring TV. > What's Joe doing today? > Watching someone watch Ring TV on Ring TV > Lol same
- cbozeman 6y ago
  I have no idea why this is downvoted, because its actually hilarious and true.

dstaley 6y ago

I'd love to hear more about how this third-party company is somehow tapping into live feeds from Ring cameras without the involvement of Ring.

lopmotr 6y ago
"Ring customers have control and ownership of their devices and videos, and can choose to allow access as they wish."

charliebrownau 6y ago

Meanile in majority black cities Violent Crime Soars in Minneapolis as Police Quit! SHOCKING TRUTH! https://www.bitchute.com/video/v1VIPm1P3TI/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/v1VIPm1P3TI/

2Gkashmiri 6y ago

Where i live businesses who have cameras refuse to point any towards the streets. Reason? The police comes to hassle, you are labelled a snitch and general discomfort. Granted i live in a low/near zero crime area but still, the police isnt nice always and more often its the police at fault and cameras record so yeah.

jobigoud 6y ago

I think the next logical step in this is a future where the government is paying citizens a small fee (or a few points of karma/social credit) to access their video feeds. All feeds, from their door bell, from their self driving car, possibly their smart speakers, and any other place where machine vision provides a service to an individual. The reward will confuse people on what's good and bad for the whole community.

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

I've experienced enough neighborhood crime and unreported incidents that I can see great value in a neighborhood surveillance network. However, I don't know whether this surveillance network is worth the costs that are to be associated with it. The cure costs more than the problem. Ring is an Amazon product. Ring videos stream to AWS s3 servers. Video is processed through AI and used in an unlimited number of ways for Amazon's purposes and not just policing. We're going to wind up paying Amazon through taxes for an unnecessary neighborhood surveillance platform that it gets to monetize in countless ways. Politicians, whose greatest contributor to re-election campaigns will be an anonymous source affiliated with a lobbying outfit contracted by Amazon, will insist that the program is valuable but never substantiate the claims with much else than anecdotal evidence. Society functions well enough today without these services and it costs us far less than it will tomorrow. Don't forget that. Mozilla Foundation is ringing the alarm bells about public surveillance when it should be alarming us about paying more taxes. We'll be paying taxes for unnecessary technology services. The programs will involve long-term contracts, too, so forget about voting in a new mayor to change things.

jkestner 6y ago

“Are you surveilled by the state like poor people or do you surveil yourself like the middle class?” - Tressie McMillan Cottom