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End Amazon’s Surveillance Partnership with Police

175 points by loteck 5y ago

dshpala 5y ago
For petitions like this I wish there was a way to say "I don't support this" somewhere. Same with donations, if X asks for donations, but I don't agree with X, I wish there was a way to find an opposite of X, and donate there instead. Startup opportunity?
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  I had a £250 GPS tracker in my (pricey) electric bike, and it got stolen. No worries - I tracked it. It was on it's way up the M40 motorway. I called the local police. But it was already out of their jurisdiction. An hour later, it stopped. It had ended up in the back-garden of a house in Aston, a suburb of Birmingham. Jurisdiction: West Midlands Police (I think). So I rang them - I gave them the actual address. "I'm sorry, we can't just go ringing the doorbells of people based on that, and we certainly can't go searching their back-garden. And we have more important things to do than search for bikes; do you have any idea how many Porsches and Ferraris are stolen in the West Midlands every week?". Suppose I come to Aston, and ring the doorbell myself? Will you assign an officer to make sure the thieves don't try to kill me? "Nope." My replacement bike is a Ferrari, with no GPS tracker.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
>For those of you who down vote this post, I'm guessing you support criminals? What a disgusting sentence. Why don’t you learn to control your fawning emotions.
lettergram 5y ago
This should really be taken up with the legislators of given states. If anyone has any form letter they recommend, I can add it to a website I'm working on: https://vocalvoters.com/ https://vocalvoters.com/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- burkaman 5y ago
  The linked toolkit includes a few sample emails: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YBiynObZ5j2UfysCWb6QJ-nlW1IPFGOe https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YBiynObZ5j2UfysCWb6Q...
nkingsy 5y ago
Was shocked to hear the ceo at at my last job say he was expecting to be able to access ring camera feeds soon (2018, safety-related startup). Why would anyone pay for these things to publish a feed from your front door to anyone Amazon wants to share it with?
- asow92 5y ago
  Not to mention inside cameras. Double plus good.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  People who are worried about theft from their doorsteps, people breaking into their homes, and so on. I mean you can say "not worth it" but I think the pitch is very easy to understand really.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  Ring cameras don’t arbitrarily share feeds. Police can request access but it’s opt-in: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/ring-changed-how-police-request-door-camera-footage-what-it-means-and-doesnt-mean https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/ring-changed-how-polic... If your CEO thought they could just access Ring camera feeds at random, they were misinformed.
  - asow92 5y ago
    Maybe there's some detail omitted to us in this comment, like what if this were part of some developer extension. No idea, but just thinking.
- comeonseriously 5y ago
  On NextDoor app the other day someone posted a video of a semi trailer, that obviously had taken a wrong turn, completely tear up their front landscaping and didn't stop. Being able to record it, this is the draw for a lot of people.
rkochman 5y ago
“As we divest from policing…” They lost me right there.
- jjulius 5y ago
  I mean, the headline of this post is literally about divesting Ring access from police, so I'm not sure why that's much of a surprise.
  - rkochman 5y ago
    They’re talking about divesting generally.
    - jjulius 5y ago
      Right, and I'm suggesting that it's not much of a stretch to infer that given the nature of the headline.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      Well, if they start from a police abolitionist position obviously the rest of what they say follows.
      - xrd 5y ago
        Isn't divesting different than police abolition? Is anyone in this thread cognizant of some data that shows whether divestment has a correlation to actual crime data? I would really like to know. There have been a lot of people talking about divesting. But, I wonder how much has actually occurred. And, whether in places where it has occurred, there has been demonstrated uptick in crime, or whether there are places where crime has risen alongside a marginal reduction in police forces (due to attrition, or whatever). I would really like to see a factual discussion because it feels like the arguments are generally coming from a bias on both sides and the crime wave happening could be occurring because of number of contributing factors, not just divestment.
benatkin 5y ago
I've been avoiding Whole Foods, but I've heard Trader Joe's isn't much better. This, which I knew but hadn't thought about in a while, convinces me that Trader Joe's is much better.
908B64B197 5y ago
What's the point of having a Ring Doorbell if property crimes aren't prosecuted? If incidents like this [0] don't get any conviction, I have little faith that Ring footage of vandalism and package theft will get anything done. [0] https://youtu.be/arss9V3A1VA https://youtu.be/arss9V3A1VA
- rootsudo 5y ago
  It depends where you live. In Seattle, I agree, what's the point. In other parts of the USA and world, they are very much perused, enforced and law enforcement likes the proof.
- belval 5y ago
  I live in the suburbs and the police absolutely take porch pirates seriously, especially after a few events on the same street. But then we only have 1-2 murders per year so of course they'll gravitate towards smaller crimes.
EastOfTruth 5y ago
if you are going to end THAT partnership, please end all mega-corps partnerships...
- smoldesu 5y ago
  People really have a tough time swallowing the fact that their hardware is backdoored, I'd just give up on trying to get HN to care. It's only attractive when you can Tweet it from iPhone and then go back to working on dotnet projects, so most people here will downvote you out of principle.
gibsonf1 5y ago
For sure criminals would fully be in favor of this idea, as that's who the police tend to go after. Disclaimer: My wife runs a police intelligence unit that catches actual criminals from ring info, like those people stealing the packages from your front door or breaking into your house. Disclaimer2: I fully do not trust Amazon with the info, but I do trust the police having the info to catch criminals, as thats what they do with it. Disclaimer3: The police only get ring videos that are forwarded to them from ring users, they have no generic access to ring data. The victims of crime tend to forward videos of the criminals in hopes the police can catch them. My wife actually wrote her thesis on the win win aspects of this for fighting crime [1] [1] https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/56879 https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/56879
- dublinben 5y ago
  >like those people stealing the packages from your front door What jurisdiction actually takes this kind of thing seriously? Petty theft, even by organized groups, is routinely ignored.
  - mc32 5y ago
    That probably depends a lot on jurisdiction, DA, the police and the people of said jurisdiction. SF gov kind of treats this as 'part of the fabric of life' but not all places see things the same as the example set by SF.
    - esyir 5y ago
      Thank god for that. The way Sf treats property crime with such indifference is unacceptable in most of the developed world
  - omegaham 5y ago
    Bored suburban cops. They have bait packages and everything around here. They caught the woman who stole the passports out of our mailbox, so they seem to be doing some good. Amusingly enough, my wife's response to the website in the OP was "Gee, that's some pretty good ad copy for Ring. Should we get one?"
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
To clarify, police can’t simply access Ring camera footage at will. They have to send out a request around a certain incident and Ring users are free to choose if they want to contribute their footage. The article mentions this: > In exchange, Amazon provides police departments with an easy way to request and store footage from thousands of residents at one time––allowing for massive warrantless surveillance. “Massive warrantless surveillance” doesn’t make sense because police don’t need a warrant to ask people if they’d like to volunteer footage of an incident.
- tadfisher 5y ago
  Amazon is volunteering their customers, however. If the police can identify Ring customers through the tools provided by Amazon, that's definitely outside the bounds of an ordinary business relationship, regardless of the legalese in the TOS. Even if the police can't identify customers, only request anonymous tips, that feels only a little less insidious, more along the lines of signing customers up for spam or selling purchase history.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwawaysea 5y ago
I don't own any kind of security system or surveillance camera, and even I find this site and its claims incredibly skewed and hyperbolic. Let's examine each major point on that page: 1. "Racial profiling is at the heart of Amazon Ring’s business model. In partnership with the police, Amazon profits from and therefore fosters a culture of racist fear mongering." Nope, what's at the heart of Ring's business model is people's rational and completely legitimate desire to a) be safe, b) not fall victim to crimes, c) be made whole by bringing criminals to justice, and d) deter criminals by those consequences. This requires the cooperation of the police, city prosecution, and local governments of course - but having surveillance footage is a big benefit and peace of mind to residents, and a major aid to those involved in preventing and investigating crime. 2. "Amazon Sells Police Partners Racist Technology" No, facial surveillance technology is not racist. First off, facial recognition algorithms do not take race as an input factor to make any kind of determination. Disparate outcomes, either in terms of arrests, commission of crimes, or false positives/negatives, does not make this (or any other) system racist as long as explicit discrimination is not being performed based on race. This is the same debate that's had between equity (equality of outcomes) and equality (equality of opportunity) in other situations. For example, college admissions are not racist just because some races have low representation relative to their population size. However, affirmative action is a systemically racist policy because it explicitly discriminates based on race. A similar line of thinking applies here. Secondly, false positives are fixed easily by having a human in the loop to verify matches, which all implementations of facial recognition in America use. Therefore, the false positive rate is no worse than humans and we still get the benefit of locating suspects from a large search space quickly and efficiently, so they can be brought to justice by police departments that have limited staff and resources. 3. "After the murder of George Floyd millions of protesters took to the streets to oppose police violence and systematic racism. Cops used heavily invasive surveillance tools to identify, track, and even arrest activists exercising their First Amendment rights." There isn't any expectation of privacy in a public place. I can film you, you can film me, we both can film cops, cops can film us, and so on. That seems reasonable. It is also laughable to claim that those being arrested in these "protests" were merely exercising their first amendment rights. In my city, and numerous others across the country, we had mass rioting and people purposely antagonizing the police and looking for violent confrontation. We saw property damage, vandalism, arson, blockades of basic infrastructure, physical violence, many deaths, and even an attempt to seize public land and declare it a separate sovereign nation (CHAZ/CHOP). Just perform a web search for what happened in DC, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, and other cities in the days following the George Floyd incident and the rest of the year. A violent riot is not a protest, and participants in those crimes should have been arrested and prosecuted more quickly, if anything. 4. "While activists call for the defunding of police forces, Amazon is doing everything they can to solidify themselves as an extension of law enforcement." White leftist activists may be calling for defunding of police forces, but minorities don't want that. An overwhelming majority of Black Americans want to retain local police presence (https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...). The push for defunding is entirely a luxury belief, likely held by those who are shielded from the realities of crime. 5. "Amazon creates dangerous technology marketed to make policing faster, cheaper, and more efficient in social control. This automated surveillance technology enables mass scale policing that can monitor everyone everywhere...Amazon’s surveillance empire will only solidify the police state." Facial recognition shouldn't be banned. As a tax paying law following resident, I definitely want my local police department to bring criminals to justice and deter crime. I'd like them to do so as effectively and efficiently as possible, which means giving them access to the best technology available. I am OK with some controls that limit use of facial recognition to only situations with either a warrant or some other condition like reasonable suspicion or probable cause. But an outright ban on this technology is ultimately no different than banning the use of electricity at police stations.
edderly 5y ago
One Ring / Police program I am aware of provides cameras to victims of domestic violence when they find a new home. A common issue is that the abusive former partners try to find out where they live and often succeed. So answering the front door is in of itself a terrifying experience. So are they against 'that'?
DevKoala 5y ago
I live in a city near Oakland and Ring is an incredibly helpful tool. The alerts around porch pirates and burglar breaking into houses make the aggravated crime situation of the past two years almost tolerable. I often see videos in the Neighborhood app in which potential burglars detect the camera and turn around. Other times, they cover the camera as soon as they notice it, but hopefully they have been recognized by then. From my experience, these devices truly help when it comes to crime prevention and keeping the neighbor safe.
- livueta 5y ago
  How much of that benefit do you think is attributable to the networked aspects of Ring, vs., say, a similar level of coverage of non-centralized cameras? I guess this could come off as a loaded question, but I'm genuinely interested in the perspectives of actual users.
  - mc32 5y ago
    I'm not familiar with Ring but I would say the ease of clipping and exporting/forwarding the evidentiary footage is the the part that makes it easy to use. A platform like FB or ND where the police have a presence make it easy for inhabitants to send the footage with little friction to the PD units.
  - debacle 5y ago
    Many people see it as a novelty. I know a bunch of people with "dog cams" in their house, even wired up with speakers so they can talk to the dog during the day. With the ring, people who have it tend to be fans of it. As a luxury item, that kind of makes sense to me. Privacy is an afterthought.
aborsy 5y ago
The article provides a good example of misinformation. Other posters have clarified.
handmodel 5y ago
>In exchange, Amazon provides police departments with an easy way to request and store footage from thousands of residents at one time––allowing for massive warrantless surveillance. I am confused by this, though I'm pretty sure it is the author who is intentionally combining verbage though? The link this post connects to is about how people submit their own photos/videos of porch thieves + suspicious people to the police. You could argue this is bad on its own but certainly not what "massive warrantless surveillance" invokes. Everyone reading that line without scrutiny will assume it means police departments are somehow watching your own Ring without permission.
mchusma 5y ago
I love being able to collaborate with the police with video footage. Package theft is a huge drain on society and needs to be faught.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Animats 5y ago
With widespread surveillance, more petty crime is detected and more petty criminals identified. Repeat offenders tend to be detected enough times to reach the felony threshold and sent to prison. The argument has been made in The Atlantic that Black people have a right to be more successful at petty crime.[1] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/stealing-amazon-packages-age-nextdoor/598156/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/steal...
- xibalba 5y ago
  Wow, what a strange article. A profile which attempts to paint an unrepentant serial thief and drug addict as the woeful victim. Also, I can’t imagine anything more noxiously racist than perpetuating the view that certain groups of people can’t be held to the same standards and laws as everyone else.

175 points by loteck 5y ago

For petitions like this I wish there was a way to say "I don't support this" somewhere. Same with donations, if X asks for donations, but I don't agree with X, I wish there was a way to find an opposite of X, and donate there instead. Startup opportunity?

denton-scratch 5y ago
I had a £250 GPS tracker in my (pricey) electric bike, and it got stolen. No worries - I tracked it. It was on it's way up the M40 motorway. I called the local police. But it was already out of their jurisdiction. An hour later, it stopped. It had ended up in the back-garden of a house in Aston, a suburb of Birmingham. Jurisdiction: West Midlands Police (I think). So I rang them - I gave them the actual address. "I'm sorry, we can't just go ringing the doorbells of people based on that, and we certainly can't go searching their back-garden. And we have more important things to do than search for bikes; do you have any idea how many Porsches and Ferraris are stolen in the West Midlands every week?". Suppose I come to Aston, and ring the doorbell myself? Will you assign an officer to make sure the thieves don't try to kill me? "Nope." My replacement bike is a Ferrari, with no GPS tracker.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

>For those of you who down vote this post, I'm guessing you support criminals? What a disgusting sentence. Why don’t you learn to control your fawning emotions.

lettergram 5y ago

This should really be taken up with the legislators of given states. If anyone has any form letter they recommend, I can add it to a website I'm working on: https://vocalvoters.com/ https://vocalvoters.com/

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
burkaman 5y ago
The linked toolkit includes a few sample emails: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YBiynObZ5j2UfysCWb6QJ-nlW1IPFGOe https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YBiynObZ5j2UfysCWb6Q...

nkingsy 5y ago

Was shocked to hear the ceo at at my last job say he was expecting to be able to access ring camera feeds soon (2018, safety-related startup). Why would anyone pay for these things to publish a feed from your front door to anyone Amazon wants to share it with?

asow92 5y ago
Not to mention inside cameras. Double plus good.
emodendroket 5y ago
People who are worried about theft from their doorsteps, people breaking into their homes, and so on. I mean you can say "not worth it" but I think the pitch is very easy to understand really.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Ring cameras don’t arbitrarily share feeds. Police can request access but it’s opt-in: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/ring-changed-how-police-request-door-camera-footage-what-it-means-and-doesnt-mean https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/ring-changed-how-polic... If your CEO thought they could just access Ring camera feeds at random, they were misinformed.
- asow92 5y ago
  Maybe there's some detail omitted to us in this comment, like what if this were part of some developer extension. No idea, but just thinking.
comeonseriously 5y ago
On NextDoor app the other day someone posted a video of a semi trailer, that obviously had taken a wrong turn, completely tear up their front landscaping and didn't stop. Being able to record it, this is the draw for a lot of people.

rkochman 5y ago

“As we divest from policing…” They lost me right there.

jjulius 5y ago
I mean, the headline of this post is literally about divesting Ring access from police, so I'm not sure why that's much of a surprise.
- rkochman 5y ago
  They’re talking about divesting generally.
  - jjulius 5y ago
    Right, and I'm suggesting that it's not much of a stretch to infer that given the nature of the headline.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Well, if they start from a police abolitionist position obviously the rest of what they say follows.
    - xrd 5y ago
      Isn't divesting different than police abolition? Is anyone in this thread cognizant of some data that shows whether divestment has a correlation to actual crime data? I would really like to know. There have been a lot of people talking about divesting. But, I wonder how much has actually occurred. And, whether in places where it has occurred, there has been demonstrated uptick in crime, or whether there are places where crime has risen alongside a marginal reduction in police forces (due to attrition, or whatever). I would really like to see a factual discussion because it feels like the arguments are generally coming from a bias on both sides and the crime wave happening could be occurring because of number of contributing factors, not just divestment.

benatkin 5y ago

I've been avoiding Whole Foods, but I've heard Trader Joe's isn't much better. This, which I knew but hadn't thought about in a while, convinces me that Trader Joe's is much better.

908B64B197 5y ago

What's the point of having a Ring Doorbell if property crimes aren't prosecuted? If incidents like this [0] don't get any conviction, I have little faith that Ring footage of vandalism and package theft will get anything done. [0] https://youtu.be/arss9V3A1VA https://youtu.be/arss9V3A1VA

rootsudo 5y ago
It depends where you live. In Seattle, I agree, what's the point. In other parts of the USA and world, they are very much perused, enforced and law enforcement likes the proof.
belval 5y ago
I live in the suburbs and the police absolutely take porch pirates seriously, especially after a few events on the same street. But then we only have 1-2 murders per year so of course they'll gravitate towards smaller crimes.

EastOfTruth 5y ago

if you are going to end THAT partnership, please end all mega-corps partnerships...

smoldesu 5y ago
People really have a tough time swallowing the fact that their hardware is backdoored, I'd just give up on trying to get HN to care. It's only attractive when you can Tweet it from iPhone and then go back to working on dotnet projects, so most people here will downvote you out of principle.

gibsonf1 5y ago

For sure criminals would fully be in favor of this idea, as that's who the police tend to go after. Disclaimer: My wife runs a police intelligence unit that catches actual criminals from ring info, like those people stealing the packages from your front door or breaking into your house. Disclaimer2: I fully do not trust Amazon with the info, but I do trust the police having the info to catch criminals, as thats what they do with it. Disclaimer3: The police only get ring videos that are forwarded to them from ring users, they have no generic access to ring data. The victims of crime tend to forward videos of the criminals in hopes the police can catch them. My wife actually wrote her thesis on the win win aspects of this for fighting crime [1] [1] https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/56879 https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/56879

dublinben 5y ago
>like those people stealing the packages from your front door What jurisdiction actually takes this kind of thing seriously? Petty theft, even by organized groups, is routinely ignored.
- mc32 5y ago
  That probably depends a lot on jurisdiction, DA, the police and the people of said jurisdiction. SF gov kind of treats this as 'part of the fabric of life' but not all places see things the same as the example set by SF.
  - esyir 5y ago
    Thank god for that. The way Sf treats property crime with such indifference is unacceptable in most of the developed world
- omegaham 5y ago
  Bored suburban cops. They have bait packages and everything around here. They caught the woman who stole the passports out of our mailbox, so they seem to be doing some good. Amusingly enough, my wife's response to the website in the OP was "Gee, that's some pretty good ad copy for Ring. Should we get one?"

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

To clarify, police can’t simply access Ring camera footage at will. They have to send out a request around a certain incident and Ring users are free to choose if they want to contribute their footage. The article mentions this: > In exchange, Amazon provides police departments with an easy way to request and store footage from thousands of residents at one time––allowing for massive warrantless surveillance. “Massive warrantless surveillance” doesn’t make sense because police don’t need a warrant to ask people if they’d like to volunteer footage of an incident.

tadfisher 5y ago
Amazon is volunteering their customers, however. If the police can identify Ring customers through the tools provided by Amazon, that's definitely outside the bounds of an ordinary business relationship, regardless of the legalese in the TOS. Even if the police can't identify customers, only request anonymous tips, that feels only a little less insidious, more along the lines of signing customers up for spam or selling purchase history.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

throwawaysea 5y ago

I don't own any kind of security system or surveillance camera, and even I find this site and its claims incredibly skewed and hyperbolic. Let's examine each major point on that page: 1. "Racial profiling is at the heart of Amazon Ring’s business model. In partnership with the police, Amazon profits from and therefore fosters a culture of racist fear mongering." Nope, what's at the heart of Ring's business model is people's rational and completely legitimate desire to a) be safe, b) not fall victim to crimes, c) be made whole by bringing criminals to justice, and d) deter criminals by those consequences. This requires the cooperation of the police, city prosecution, and local governments of course - but having surveillance footage is a big benefit and peace of mind to residents, and a major aid to those involved in preventing and investigating crime. 2. "Amazon Sells Police Partners Racist Technology" No, facial surveillance technology is not racist. First off, facial recognition algorithms do not take race as an input factor to make any kind of determination. Disparate outcomes, either in terms of arrests, commission of crimes, or false positives/negatives, does not make this (or any other) system racist as long as explicit discrimination is not being performed based on race. This is the same debate that's had between equity (equality of outcomes) and equality (equality of opportunity) in other situations. For example, college admissions are not racist just because some races have low representation relative to their population size. However, affirmative action is a systemically racist policy because it explicitly discriminates based on race. A similar line of thinking applies here. Secondly, false positives are fixed easily by having a human in the loop to verify matches, which all implementations of facial recognition in America use. Therefore, the false positive rate is no worse than humans and we still get the benefit of locating suspects from a large search space quickly and efficiently, so they can be brought to justice by police departments that have limited staff and resources. 3. "After the murder of George Floyd millions of protesters took to the streets to oppose police violence and systematic racism. Cops used heavily invasive surveillance tools to identify, track, and even arrest activists exercising their First Amendment rights." There isn't any expectation of privacy in a public place. I can film you, you can film me, we both can film cops, cops can film us, and so on. That seems reasonable. It is also laughable to claim that those being arrested in these "protests" were merely exercising their first amendment rights. In my city, and numerous others across the country, we had mass rioting and people purposely antagonizing the police and looking for violent confrontation. We saw property damage, vandalism, arson, blockades of basic infrastructure, physical violence, many deaths, and even an attempt to seize public land and declare it a separate sovereign nation (CHAZ/CHOP). Just perform a web search for what happened in DC, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, and other cities in the days following the George Floyd incident and the rest of the year. A violent riot is not a protest, and participants in those crimes should have been arrested and prosecuted more quickly, if anything. 4. "While activists call for the defunding of police forces, Amazon is doing everything they can to solidify themselves as an extension of law enforcement." White leftist activists may be calling for defunding of police forces, but minorities don't want that. An overwhelming majority of Black Americans want to retain local police presence (https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...). The push for defunding is entirely a luxury belief, likely held by those who are shielded from the realities of crime. 5. "Amazon creates dangerous technology marketed to make policing faster, cheaper, and more efficient in social control. This automated surveillance technology enables mass scale policing that can monitor everyone everywhere...Amazon’s surveillance empire will only solidify the police state." Facial recognition shouldn't be banned. As a tax paying law following resident, I definitely want my local police department to bring criminals to justice and deter crime. I'd like them to do so as effectively and efficiently as possible, which means giving them access to the best technology available. I am OK with some controls that limit use of facial recognition to only situations with either a warrant or some other condition like reasonable suspicion or probable cause. But an outright ban on this technology is ultimately no different than banning the use of electricity at police stations.

edderly 5y ago

One Ring / Police program I am aware of provides cameras to victims of domestic violence when they find a new home. A common issue is that the abusive former partners try to find out where they live and often succeed. So answering the front door is in of itself a terrifying experience. So are they against 'that'?

DevKoala 5y ago

I live in a city near Oakland and Ring is an incredibly helpful tool. The alerts around porch pirates and burglar breaking into houses make the aggravated crime situation of the past two years almost tolerable. I often see videos in the Neighborhood app in which potential burglars detect the camera and turn around. Other times, they cover the camera as soon as they notice it, but hopefully they have been recognized by then. From my experience, these devices truly help when it comes to crime prevention and keeping the neighbor safe.

livueta 5y ago
How much of that benefit do you think is attributable to the networked aspects of Ring, vs., say, a similar level of coverage of non-centralized cameras? I guess this could come off as a loaded question, but I'm genuinely interested in the perspectives of actual users.
- mc32 5y ago
  I'm not familiar with Ring but I would say the ease of clipping and exporting/forwarding the evidentiary footage is the the part that makes it easy to use. A platform like FB or ND where the police have a presence make it easy for inhabitants to send the footage with little friction to the PD units.
- debacle 5y ago
  Many people see it as a novelty. I know a bunch of people with "dog cams" in their house, even wired up with speakers so they can talk to the dog during the day. With the ring, people who have it tend to be fans of it. As a luxury item, that kind of makes sense to me. Privacy is an afterthought.

aborsy 5y ago

The article provides a good example of misinformation. Other posters have clarified.

handmodel 5y ago

>In exchange, Amazon provides police departments with an easy way to request and store footage from thousands of residents at one time––allowing for massive warrantless surveillance. I am confused by this, though I'm pretty sure it is the author who is intentionally combining verbage though? The link this post connects to is about how people submit their own photos/videos of porch thieves + suspicious people to the police. You could argue this is bad on its own but certainly not what "massive warrantless surveillance" invokes. Everyone reading that line without scrutiny will assume it means police departments are somehow watching your own Ring without permission.

mchusma 5y ago

I love being able to collaborate with the police with video footage. Package theft is a huge drain on society and needs to be faught.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Animats 5y ago

With widespread surveillance, more petty crime is detected and more petty criminals identified. Repeat offenders tend to be detected enough times to reach the felony threshold and sent to prison. The argument has been made in The Atlantic that Black people have a right to be more successful at petty crime.[1] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/stealing-amazon-packages-age-nextdoor/598156/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/steal...

xibalba 5y ago
Wow, what a strange article. A profile which attempts to paint an unrepentant serial thief and drug addict as the woeful victim. Also, I can’t imagine anything more noxiously racist than perpetuating the view that certain groups of people can’t be held to the same standards and laws as everyone else.