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Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent

818 points by Pakdef 4y ago

helen___keller 4y ago
TLDR: > Although Ring publicizes its policy of handing over camera footage only if the owner agrees — or if judge signs a search warrant — the company says it also reserves the right to supply police with footage in “emergencies,” defined broadly as “cases involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person.” (…) > it has provided police with user footage 11 times this year alone. I would actually be okay with this if it was more public when the standard was met. For example, there’s an armed shooter at the local elementary school in front of my house? Sure, scoop up my Ring footage. But without more info I have to assume it’s whenever the police say it’s an emergency, which can be anytime they want.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  11 emergencies a year across the US sounds perfectly reasonable.
  - AlwaysRock 4y ago
    Sure. What were the emergencies though? Police knew a ring cam had evidence of a murder on it? Or police knew ring cam had some footage of where they dropped their keys last night? Who defines emergency? If its the police then anything they need it for is an emergency.
    - NegativeLatency 4y ago
      Also if it’s really an “emergency” then they should be able to use the existing warrant process
      - BurningFrog 4y ago
        Getting a warrant from a judge typically takes a few hours. It can be faster in emergencies, but in the “cases involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person” this is about, I don't know that it's practical.
        AlwaysRock 4y ago
        In what situation does previously recorded footage on a ring camera need to be accessed as evidence in sooner than a few hours? This footage isnt being used in crime prevention.
- fotta 4y ago
  In your situation, the police should be asking YOU not Amazon for the footage. I don’t have a problem with turning over footage, but not without my consent. I want to be able to decide when to give it to police.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    In an emergency, you might not be home, or you might be shot.
    - cronix 4y ago
      None of which precludes them from asking first, or attempting to.
  - gjm11 4y ago
    You might be off on holiday, or asleep, or in hospital under anaesthesia, and the police might not be able to get in touch with you quickly.
  - helen___keller 4y ago
    I’m saying that if the “emergency” standard was well described and followed consistently (and I agree with it), then I would OK granting amazon the power to manage this permission on my behalf. Similarly, as a citizen of the country, I’m OK that judges can sign a warrant and manage permission on my behalf as well.
- delecti 4y ago
  Another big distinction would be whether they told people when they sent police their camera's footage. Nothing suggest they're doing that, which makes it harder to trust their judgement.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  I would actually be okay with this if it was more public when the standard was met. For example, there’s an armed shooter at the local elementary school in front of my house? Sure, scoop up my Ring footage. As we saw recently, police/local government will often fight against the release of surveillance footage to the public in cases where it makes them look bad. The Austin Statesman had to fight in court for a month to get the footage from the school in Uvalde which showed police just loitering in a hallway for an hour, in the full knowledge that a gunman who had just massacred a bunch of young children was holed up in a room nearby. I'm not using the term 'loitering' casually. There's one bit of footage showing an officer idly checking his phone, which has 'Punisher' wallpaper.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Police will fight the release of basically any information that sheds a light on their activities. In many states, there are no publicly available statistics on things like how much SWAT teams are used, and what for. When some states tried passing laws to require PDs to capture such stats, police unions pushed back hard.
- jcranberry 4y ago
  I think there was also similar reports with Apple recently. There was some kind of emergency hotline contact or something like that where authorities could request information where it was extremely time sensitive (I think the example given was human trafficking? although my memory was hazy), and they would be provided information without a warrant.
salawat 4y ago
If the data is not on your hardware, it is not your data.
- bsedlm 4y ago
  what if my data is on my hardware as well as on the cloud hardware? whose data is it anyways?
  - cddsadsa 4y ago
    What even is "data"? If you mean "my data is the way in which I interact with a website. It is personal to me and is my property.", then surely you must also say "my mannerisms when I talk to you are personal to me, and you may not remember them without my consent".
    - phailhaus 4y ago
      > you may not remember them without my consent The Quantum Thief series takes this to its extreme, with a technology called "gevulot" which does exactly that by way of a societal exomemory. You can choose to "reveal" any aspect of your self all the way up to your appearance on a person-by-person basis. Highly recommend the book!
    - salawat 4y ago
      The legal system of the U.S. recognizes Third Party Doctrine. I am not an espouser of that legal philosophy. I draw a hard line. Business with me is no one one else's business but me and the customer in question. I believe there is an expectation of privacy in business affairs. I call it Professional Discretion. Yes, before you ask, this makes my life comparatively miserable in today's world. No, I'm not amenable to changing my view on it, because I've seen enough of how the rest of the world treats it to realize just how pathological things become when no one respects anyone else's privacy anymore. You can ask. But it's up to me to say yes. Everyone else has trouble even grokking the concept of asking anymore.
  - dspillett 4y ago
    It is shared data. You can use it for whatever you like, so can who-ever controls the other location it is stored at (unless encrypted and only you hold the keys).
nomilk 4y ago
It's often overlooked that users get happiness from privacy, and the mere risk of a breach (however small) makes risk-averse people unhappy, even if a breach never eventuates. Law enforcement might catch some more bad guys with 11 extra ring videos, but now every ring user has to worry about local police sharing/laughing/perving at their home videos - is it worth it? It might have been well intentioned, but Amazon's decision seems dubious.
- fundad 4y ago
  Privacy makes you happy but policing is a social program and its constituency are happy with more police invasion into the lives of others.
  - nomilk 4y ago
    Maybe it could be opt-in, or even opt-out, like organ donation, at least then the user has a say and it's not totally left to Amazon's discretion.
- phailhaus 4y ago
  > It's often overlooked that users get happiness from privacy That's not true though, at all. Users prefer convenience over privacy by far, just look at how much people still use Facebook, Google, TikTok, etc despite having terrible privacy practices. Those videos are too addicting. Being able to monitor your home is too convenient.
  - nomilk 4y ago
    If forced to, users may forego privacy for convenience. But in the case of ring there's no reason users shouldn't be able to expect both.
    - phailhaus 4y ago
      But they don't. They see the product, it's useful to them, they buy it. Practically nobody is doing research into privacy practices of the things they buy. It's only a problem if it becomes a news story.
karaterobot 4y ago
> “If there is the infrastructure, if there is the channel by which police can request footage without a warrant or consent of the user, under what circumstances they get it is out of our control. I worry that because it’s decided by the police and by somebody at Ring, there will be temptation to use that for increasingly less urgent situations.” Many people (I would argue anybody with common sense) predicted Ring would get used as a surveillance tool. This quote correctly states the nearly-inevitable next step, which will also be ignored.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  So moved into a newly built house, by default everyone gets a smart doorbell in this house. They looked at me like I was crazy when I said I didn't want it or any of the other the "smart" devices. This was the exact reason.
  - AlwaysRock 4y ago
    To be fair... If you carry around a smart phone or have a smart watch or a laptop you're at just as much risk. The ring is just one more device.
    - ubermonkey 4y ago
      Well, no, not exactly. The ring is an always-on camera. My phone is not that. My phone may leak some information about me, and its basic job (cell phone) provides a record of location data, but that's not the same thing as forcibly making a home security device into part of a police state panopticon.
      - CursedUrn 4y ago
        Are you sure your phone microphone isn't always on? At the very least your voice assistant is listening all the time to detect the trigger word (does this send the voice to the cloud for AI assisted detection?). Also if you search for articles about Ultrasonic Beacons, they imply adware tech is listening all the time too.
bob1029 4y ago
I fear for the day when someone comes knocking on my door because my government-approved surveillance doorbell has been offline for too long. The very first thing I did when I moved into my new house was completely disconnect/disable all networked security & "smart" home systems. I have a Ring doorbell, but it is not receiving any power. I figure the simple sight of it may still serve as a deterrent. Most of the "smart" home things I permit today utilize bimetallic strips for their decision making.
- remflight 4y ago
  Burglars are not deterred by cameras or alarm systems, especially in the age of face masks. They know they will only be in the house for 5 mins or less and face masks make it harder to identify them.
  - kcb 4y ago
    Many ring devices have sirens that I would think would be quite deterent when set off. The Ring Alarm can even act as a proper monitored alarm system.
    - remflight 4y ago
      Burglars target to be in a house for roughly 5 mins. They don’t care what noise they make, they will be out before the cops can come.
      - mywittyname 4y ago
        Also, everyone pretty much ignores alarms. There's a 3 second window where they wonder if the alarm is there's, but they promptly ignore it afterwards.
  - jkubicek 4y ago
    This makes me wonder, what is a burglar in 2022 stealing? We have no jewelry or cash in our house. We have a nice TV, but in the age of $250 4k TVs I can't imagine most burglars would chance breaking into a house to get a valuable TV. The kid's iPads are ancient and mostly worthless, we've got no game systems, no fancy cameras, no stereo. The small handful of valuables we have are either stored in an obscure enough place that the thief would have to devote longer than 5 minutes to finding it, or so esoteric that I doubt a random burglar would recognize its value.
unfocused 4y ago
My next door neighbor (we share a wall) had their bicycles stolen twice, so they installed Ring (floodlight) cameras in both the backyard and the front porch. After a year, the cameras have yielded no added security, or caught any "bad guys" as far as I can tell and from what they told me. What I realized, is they use it to keep track of their kids, funny cat videos that trigger the recording, and most importantly, as a 2 way radio to talk or listen to the kids. That last point, well, I found out they can also listen to my conversations an my kids. I asked them to point their front porch camera so that it doesn't record my front driveway, just theirs. and they lost their shit. They confirmed they record audio and video. They asked if there was a problem. I said no problem with them. I'm not comfortable with the audio/video recording me or my friends conversations if company comes over to talk to me on my porch or driveway. I really didn't need to tell them anything, it's self evident why someone wants a camera point away. Needless to say, after I asked them in the winter, one of them refuses to speak to me and crosses the street and avoids me. These people use surveillance to supervise their kids, and don't care about the fact that their neighbors (me) could be recorded, and they could be hacked or footage access by random people, because Amazon isn't exactly the king of privacy. I believe these cameras haven't decreased crime. They also don't really add more security. It's a shame though they are everywhere, with disregard for privacy right on people's property. So yes, I'm biased. I have no love for Ring.
- krnlpnc 4y ago
  If feasible a physical barrier on the porch along your property line might be the simplest option. Simply block the line of sight, and optionally install white noise generators on your side to mask noise.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  If your houses are close together I don't think it's reasonable to have an expectation of privacy on the driveway or front porch. After all sound at normal speaking volume can easily travel 100 feet on a quiet day, if there's nothing in-between.
  - doublerabbit 4y ago
MengerSponge 4y ago
I'll change my tune when news like this breaks about Apple, but I paid extra for a HomeKit video camera because Amazon's data policies give me heebie-jeebies. I get a notification and a live video on my TV when someone shows up on my doorstep, but not when someone walks by on the sidewalk. It's easy.
- CubsFan1060 4y ago
  Do you use HomeKit cameras or HomeKit Secure Video cameras?
  - MengerSponge 4y ago
    HomeKit Secure Video on a Logitech Circle View. It is decidedly aight. It's expensive, but it works well enough. The video was high enough quality that the local police could ID the guy who stole letters from my mailbox a few months ago. But it's easy and reliable and notifies us when somebody drops a package on our doorstep.
    - CubsFan1060 4y ago
      My biggest gripe is the searching. Other systems let you say "search for videos with an animal". HKSV is basically just a long list of videos that are hard to search through. Sure hope they fix that.
- Pakdef 4y ago
  Why wait? host your own...
  - MengerSponge 4y ago
    If I host my own, I know how to get openCV to only get notifications when a particular feature is detected, but can I get a live preview as a picture-in-picture on my TV while I'm watching NBA basketball? Or while my girlfriend is watching college basketball? I don't think there's a reasonable solution for that. Buying a HomeKit hosted camera, and AppleTV, and the prerequisite WiFi network upgrade costs about two hours of my time. Could a standalone camera, ethernet/wifi connection, server, and software be stood up for fewer dollars or less time? I really doubt it.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
They don't need your consent to give police their footage.
- orthecreedence 4y ago
  Right, this is the issue. Don't install surveillance devices on behalf of a megacorporation and get butthurt when they use the footage for something you don't approve of. How the fuck did people go this insane?
johndhi 4y ago
I mean, duh. The law obliged companies to turn over internet related data to law enforcement and not tell the data subject about it if law enforcement asks in the right way. This can be said of all data Amazon or any other tech company collects.
- mabbo 4y ago
  The full title of the article includes "WITHOUT A WARRANT". The law doesn't oblige anyone to provide police with information without a warrant. Amazon is choosing to do this.
jazzyjackson 4y ago
IMO the primary utility of Ring is for Amazon to surveil their delivery contractors, without a doorbell cam it’s trivial for a delivery person to set the package on the porch, photograph it as “proof of delivery”, and then walk away with said package. So the deterrent effect is good for the consumer in that it prevents theft, and good for Amazon because they can contract out to just about anyone to deliver packages, no trust required (or, “trust but verify”)
- techdragon 4y ago
  For bonus points they can then point the finger at the local thieves that happily try to identify and then shadow Amazon delivery contractors and steal valuable looking parcels based on whatever gut instinct they have for value based on size/shape/weight of the packages. Amazon proves the delivery and now it’s the local Polive Department’s problem. They are literally selling customers an excuse they can use later against the very customer that buys it.
  - jonnycomputer 4y ago
    That really does sound like one of their incentives for having these... never thought about that.
  - jrh206 4y ago
    In your example the thieves have nothing to do with Amazon or their drivers. I don’t understand how this could be construed as Amazon selling an excuse for something they’re not responsible for.
    - jjoonathan 4y ago
      Amazon used to get stuck holding the bag. Now they can make the customer hold the bag.
      - berberous 4y ago
        I mean, the customer should hold the bag in that scenario. Amazon completed the delivery.
crikeyjoe 4y ago
troyvit 4y ago
Often when a story like this comes up I go off on a search for clothing and accessories that help disrupt the AIs these cameras use. The attempts at this fall into 3 categories: works of art, college projects, and organizations that are no longer selling. One exception might be https://adversarialfashion.com/ https://adversarialfashion.com/, though it seems focused on license plate readers.
- Pakdef 4y ago
  I think that they might be more likely to look at the pictures with a bunch of license plates on them
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    Or you'd get miscategorized as a car which is probably the best case scenario.
    - Pakdef 4y ago
      not very often a car moves around with multiple tags visible from one direction...
eth0up 4y ago
I tend to drop a link to Motion when such subjects arise. It's been a stalwart companion for years and is usually in Linux repositories. https://motion-project.github.io/ https://motion-project.github.io/
- Pakdef 4y ago
  My favorite one. I run a script on_event_end to make a backup on my VPS and also, on_event_start, I record audio: on_event_start ffmpeg -nostdin -f alsa -i pulse -c:a libmp3lame -ar 44100 -b:a 128k -ac 1 -f mp3 /home/user/motion/%Y%m%d%H%M%S.mp3 & I just wish they would have chosen a different name, it can be hard to find in a web search.
  - eth0up 4y ago
    > I just wish they would have chosen a different name, it can be hard to find in a web search. It's an apt and good name, but definitely not search friendly.
lacker 4y ago
What I would like to see is for the police to actually track down crime when people give them video evidence. Here's a video of someone stealing a car, stealing a bicycle, breaking into a house. Go arrest them! Instead, the police just ignore reports like this. I think it would be fair to do something like, if you are convicted of a crime, the police keep your face and other biometric data on file for the next five years. Then if you get caught on video committing another crime, they can just use face detection to know it's you. The way it works now, the power dynamics are all wrong. It shouldn't be Amazon listening to the police who ignore the people, it should be the police listening to the people, and Amazon just sells people a data service.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  If you get convicted of a crime, the police will keep your biometric data forever. What leads you to imagine they don't?
  - lacker 4y ago
    I am not an expert, but right now it seems like the police generally keep around your biometric data, but they don't keep it in a very useful way. I can't walk into the police station, show them a video clip on my phone of someone breaking into my car last night, they scan the video and it says "we found them, this is John Q. Smith". The data is on a piece of paper somewhere, or it's in a database that is rarely used for whatever reason. So in practice it's like they aren't storing it at all. If the police did keep biometric data in a useful way, I think our society would have to be more explicit about what biometric data we want the police to keep. I don't know what the right answer is, but something like, if you are convicted by a crime then your biometric data is at least kept for a few years, that seems reasonable to me.
    - n8ta 4y ago
      Seems more likely they are storing it in a useful form but just don't care about your problem. Or perhaps a larger agency than your local pd is making use of it.
- 4y ago
kornhole 4y ago
I worry less about the police than I do about Amazon having this surveillance in the first place. The former head of the NSA sits on the board of directors and they have multi billion dollar contracts for services to the intelligence agencies. Please if you want to surveil your property and people nearby, choose devices that capture it locally or to your private cloud. You can then choose to hand it over to police when warranted.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  >I worry less about the police than I do about Amazon having this surveillance in the first place. The former head of the NSA sits on the board of directors and they have multi billion dollar contracts for services to the intelligence agencies. That's just being worried about the police with extra steps. An F15 doesn't stand on a street corner and a surveillance dragnet doesn't kick in your door.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Those extra steps are important because they create legal deniability. For example, local jurisdictions (or judicial outcomes) tell police they can't do X, Y, or Z because it's government overreach. So police just look for corporations that engage in those activities and purchase the data from them, with your tax money. So instead of the Stasi you end up with Corpsec.com, but it's OK because there's a middleman making a dollar, good old capitalism.
    - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
      When the local police kick in your door it doesn't matter whether BigPerkyTips.com "made a technical mistake" told them you were a dealer or the glowies shoveled parallel constructed crap at them. In neither case will anyone be held accountable. Until we hold the people closest to the bad outcomes accountable for the bad outcomes nothing will change.
dikaio 4y ago
To be fair, consent is given by these corporations constantly over any allegation so whether with or without consent you can safely assume these corporations are not on your side. For me, I try not to get caught up in the day to day arguments of it all and just donate to organizations like the EFF.
silisili 4y ago
After years of avoiding 'smart home' bs, I finally caved on a doorbell camera and a few other goodies. After doing a lot of research, this is the reason I avoided Ring. I ended up landing on Eufy as it stores data locally. You're free to back it up, and cloud services are completely optional(I don't use them). No complaints, feel free to ask if anyone has questions.
asojfdowgh 4y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/18/amazon-ring-largest-civilian-surveillance-network-us https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/18/amazon... https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/31/22258856/amazon-ring-partners-police-fire-security-privacy-cameras https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/31/22258856/amazon-ring-part... Its not an accident, its the entire reason why they make the doorbells
gffrd 4y ago
It blows my mind how quickly people put up home cameras with zero thought to * (1) what gets captured * (2) who gets what gets captured Walk down the street of any middle-class neighborhood in a major suburb: a healthy chunk have cameras. Let's say 60%. So, you and your family are being passively surveilled on a massive scale … for the benefit of someone who's not you preventing another someone from stealing their bike. Is this a reasonable tradeoff? Is it fair to others?
- Pakdef 4y ago
  In addition to that, they pay a lot for the service... someone I know just had 3 cameras installed and pays $80 a month for cloud storage... Buying your own and hosting it yourself would pay for itself in just a couple months with something like Reolink RLC-510A and a cheap VPS https://www.lowendstock.com/ https://www.lowendstock.com/.
- helen___keller 4y ago
  > Is this a reasonable tradeoff? Is it fair to others? Devils advocate: You word this in a way that implies it is negative, but the fact so many people do it suggests many or most people don’t agree with you. Maybe having cameras around makes the average person feel safe? It sucks for you as a privacy minded individual, but ultimately who are you to tell your neighbors they can’t have cameras on their property? The street itself is public, there’s no implied right to privacy for what can be seen from the public road. Truthfully many American suburbs have only ever had privacy by chance, many places in more urban locales there’s always eyes from the public street. It’s just happened that because cars are efficient and convenient, nobody walks by or spends time on the sidewalk in the modern American suburb. That doesn’t mean they have no right to do so.
  - gffrd 4y ago
    > Maybe having cameras around makes the average person feel safe? Interesting point! Attempted interpretation: "I'm a person walking by a house that has a camera, and it makes me feel better knowing there's a recording of what's happening to me … in the event that I'm robbed/harassed/assaulted/etc." Also: no need for an alibi, when there's record of you being pretty much everywhere. I wonder if anyone has studied whether cameras being present in communities increase the net level of trust with which people operate? I would assume the net benefit would be "everyone's less worried/suspicious, so operates with greater baseline trust." This feels like similar territory as social media, where we (humans) tend to think the system operates with the same set of rules/principles as normal socialization, but vastly underestimate the scale in which we're now operating.
UberFly 4y ago
All the more reason to keep the video footage within your own network. A Unifi system or similar.
shadowgovt 4y ago
This is exactly the sort of thing that David Brin discussed in Transparent Society. In this case, people should be aware that Ring owns that footage, not them, so final decisions on how its used will rest with that company
robg 4y ago
Who would have thought that consumers would accept a surveillance state by absorbing the upfront costs?
at_a_remove 4y ago
Looking at most Ring videos, they don't seem very useful for tracking anyone down, more of a "yes, a porch pirate stole your stuff." Their position is such that the license plate -- assuming they even come in via a vehicle -- is visible. Plate readers need to be in a different place, with a different aim. Plus, Rings are wireless, and too many thieves are just using a wireless jammer.
- darknavi 4y ago
  > too many thieves are just using a wireless jammer. Is this actually that wide spread? I hardwire all of my cameras but I've never heard of wide-spread wireless jamming in house-hold crime.
  - Pakdef 4y ago
    They should cut off the power instead... it would take care of both.
    - at_a_remove 4y ago
      It's a grab, not a heist.
      - Pakdef 4y ago
        In a heist, they probably would have battery backups anyways...
  - at_a_remove 4y ago
    Around here, I have seen a few clips of it.
thewebcount 4y ago
I just saw this article[0] about how the constant scams we're subjected to on a daily basis are a big problem for more than just monetary reasons. If companies weren't allowed to collect so much data, and weren't allowed to just share with whomever they wanted to, this would be much less of a problem. Many of these scams are possible because of the huge trove of personal information collected by companies like Amazon, Google, etc. Whether they lose control of their data to hackers or sell it to untrustworthy "partners" doesn't really matter. If they didn't have it, they couldn't sell it or lose it. [0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/13/scam-fraud-fatigue/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/13/scam-fr...
RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
Does any one know of a privacy focused security camera? I live in a rough neighborhood and am concerned about theft, but I have 0 faith or trust in companies like amazon. If I want a security camera that I can check remotely, but I want to own my data and have complete privacy (no snooping by the company, no ability for them to give my data to some one else). Do I have any options for this other than completely rolling my own?
- tekeous 4y ago
  If you believe what they say, Apple HomeKit Secure Video. If you don’t, Ubiquiti makes a good remote system with on premise DVR.
- MikeFez 4y ago
  Rolling your own is probably your best bet as being able to check remotely typically means your camera streams are running through a company's servers. Personally, I moved from BlueIris and I've been incredibly happy with Frigate which is configured to pull from my local IP cameras - none of which have direct access to the internet: https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate You can check in via browser assuming you have some method of accessing your local network. Paired with a google coral device (or a beefy CPU) alongside local storage, it also has the ability to detect objects in real-time which often is a feature that requires video processing on a company's server.
- wilg 4y ago
  I have a HomeKit doorbell camera which uses HomeKit Secure Video and is end-to-end encrypted.
abeppu 4y ago
I get that privacy vs law and order issues get people worked up because they probe at a difference in values. And perhaps in many contexts reasonable people can take different abstract positions. But with Ring etc, I think society gets a really poor law and order benefit in exchange for the privacy cost. We should at least be demanding that if our privacy is invaded we get something out of it. I live in a dense city where minor property crimes are notoriously common. Last year, after multiple package thefts, one neighbor bought a blink camera for the building entrance. It recorded every time me or my neighbors entered or exited, and it recorded when later my neighbor had yet more packages stolen (thieves easily got through a locked gate and front door). But what do you do then? The cops aren't going to do anything with a video of a guy in a hoodie stealing $200 worth of goods. That stuff is never going to be recovered. Nextdoor in our area has tons of these videos. My neighbor still had to learn to be proactive and defensive. A cost in privacy was paid, but no reduction in crime was enjoyed. Here are some proposals for potentially more equitable arrangements: - if the police can have at-will access to our cameras, we should get at-will access to their bodycams. No more of this "10 days after a shooting, family members of the deceased were able to watch key clips of footage selected by the PD" - if the police claim that having access to our cameras makes them more efficient in solving crimes, then let them put numbers on that efficiency so we can reduce police budgets accordingly - if the police claim that having access to our cameras makes lets them solve more crimes, then anyone coming forward with footage of a crime should be able to demand that the police make a credible effort to investigate. Oh, not enough resources? My city is in the top 10 in per-capita police spending in the US, and I see _so many_ cops doing absolutely nothing all the time. If I'm going to live in a creepy surveillance state we could at least have an industrious and effective police force.
bedast 4y ago
Bear in mind that Amazon not only owns Ring, but also Blink.
ascendantlogic 4y ago
I'm shocked I tell you. Shocked that they would collaborate with the growing police state and just enable dragnet surveillance.
arwhatever 4y ago
Do you wonder if the SWAT team ever needs to bulldoze your wall in (rightly or wrongly), whether they might get a warrant to disable your cloud-based security camera(s) just beforehand?
- Pakdef 4y ago
  Apparently they don't need a warrant for that... Amazon just demonstrated that.
base3 4y ago
I interviewed at ring before they were absorbed by Amazon. The hiring manager tried to close the deal with an inspiring story about using ring cameras to scare "gang bangers" who got too close to his girlfriend. I walked out. I'm white, but I remember Emmett Till.
robbywashere_ 4y ago
Is this sort of thing a boiled frog type slide to surveillance powered totalitarianism or will everyone eventually catch on and demand ubiquitous privacy everywhere?
- mike_hock 4y ago
  The frog's been slowly boiling for decades now, so the former.
suddenexample 4y ago
I'm probably just being naive here, but can someone enlighten me to whether Google's Nest cameras have had similar issues? Ring seems to have had a long trail of issues with being hacked, collaborating with police, etc. Not looking for hypotheticals here; I know most oppose the general principle of cloud-backed surveillance devices, but I personally (for better or for worse) have a better impression of Google's attempts to ensure user privacy and security.
- Pakdef 4y ago
  We know that Google has a pipe going to the Government from Snowden's leaks... Apple too. We are due for a new leak though.
berry_sortoro 4y ago
jennyjenny5309 4y ago
jennyjenny5309 4y ago

818 points by Pakdef 4y ago

TLDR: > Although Ring publicizes its policy of handing over camera footage only if the owner agrees — or if judge signs a search warrant — the company says it also reserves the right to supply police with footage in “emergencies,” defined broadly as “cases involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person.” (…) > it has provided police with user footage 11 times this year alone. I would actually be okay with this if it was more public when the standard was met. For example, there’s an armed shooter at the local elementary school in front of my house? Sure, scoop up my Ring footage. But without more info I have to assume it’s whenever the police say it’s an emergency, which can be anytime they want.

BurningFrog 4y ago
11 emergencies a year across the US sounds perfectly reasonable.
- AlwaysRock 4y ago
  Sure. What were the emergencies though? Police knew a ring cam had evidence of a murder on it? Or police knew ring cam had some footage of where they dropped their keys last night? Who defines emergency? If its the police then anything they need it for is an emergency.
  - NegativeLatency 4y ago
    Also if it’s really an “emergency” then they should be able to use the existing warrant process
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      Getting a warrant from a judge typically takes a few hours. It can be faster in emergencies, but in the “cases involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person” this is about, I don't know that it's practical.
      - AlwaysRock 4y ago
        In what situation does previously recorded footage on a ring camera need to be accessed as evidence in sooner than a few hours? This footage isnt being used in crime prevention.
fotta 4y ago
In your situation, the police should be asking YOU not Amazon for the footage. I don’t have a problem with turning over footage, but not without my consent. I want to be able to decide when to give it to police.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  In an emergency, you might not be home, or you might be shot.
  - cronix 4y ago
    None of which precludes them from asking first, or attempting to.
- gjm11 4y ago
  You might be off on holiday, or asleep, or in hospital under anaesthesia, and the police might not be able to get in touch with you quickly.
- helen___keller 4y ago
  I’m saying that if the “emergency” standard was well described and followed consistently (and I agree with it), then I would OK granting amazon the power to manage this permission on my behalf. Similarly, as a citizen of the country, I’m OK that judges can sign a warrant and manage permission on my behalf as well.
delecti 4y ago
Another big distinction would be whether they told people when they sent police their camera's footage. Nothing suggest they're doing that, which makes it harder to trust their judgement.
anigbrowl 4y ago
I would actually be okay with this if it was more public when the standard was met. For example, there’s an armed shooter at the local elementary school in front of my house? Sure, scoop up my Ring footage. As we saw recently, police/local government will often fight against the release of surveillance footage to the public in cases where it makes them look bad. The Austin Statesman had to fight in court for a month to get the footage from the school in Uvalde which showed police just loitering in a hallway for an hour, in the full knowledge that a gunman who had just massacred a bunch of young children was holed up in a room nearby. I'm not using the term 'loitering' casually. There's one bit of footage showing an officer idly checking his phone, which has 'Punisher' wallpaper.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Police will fight the release of basically any information that sheds a light on their activities. In many states, there are no publicly available statistics on things like how much SWAT teams are used, and what for. When some states tried passing laws to require PDs to capture such stats, police unions pushed back hard.
jcranberry 4y ago
I think there was also similar reports with Apple recently. There was some kind of emergency hotline contact or something like that where authorities could request information where it was extremely time sensitive (I think the example given was human trafficking? although my memory was hazy), and they would be provided information without a warrant.

salawat 4y ago

If the data is not on your hardware, it is not your data.

bsedlm 4y ago
what if my data is on my hardware as well as on the cloud hardware? whose data is it anyways?
- cddsadsa 4y ago
  What even is "data"? If you mean "my data is the way in which I interact with a website. It is personal to me and is my property.", then surely you must also say "my mannerisms when I talk to you are personal to me, and you may not remember them without my consent".
  - phailhaus 4y ago
    > you may not remember them without my consent The Quantum Thief series takes this to its extreme, with a technology called "gevulot" which does exactly that by way of a societal exomemory. You can choose to "reveal" any aspect of your self all the way up to your appearance on a person-by-person basis. Highly recommend the book!
  - salawat 4y ago
    The legal system of the U.S. recognizes Third Party Doctrine. I am not an espouser of that legal philosophy. I draw a hard line. Business with me is no one one else's business but me and the customer in question. I believe there is an expectation of privacy in business affairs. I call it Professional Discretion. Yes, before you ask, this makes my life comparatively miserable in today's world. No, I'm not amenable to changing my view on it, because I've seen enough of how the rest of the world treats it to realize just how pathological things become when no one respects anyone else's privacy anymore. You can ask. But it's up to me to say yes. Everyone else has trouble even grokking the concept of asking anymore.
- dspillett 4y ago
  It is shared data. You can use it for whatever you like, so can who-ever controls the other location it is stored at (unless encrypted and only you hold the keys).

nomilk 4y ago

It's often overlooked that users get happiness from privacy, and the mere risk of a breach (however small) makes risk-averse people unhappy, even if a breach never eventuates. Law enforcement might catch some more bad guys with 11 extra ring videos, but now every ring user has to worry about local police sharing/laughing/perving at their home videos - is it worth it? It might have been well intentioned, but Amazon's decision seems dubious.

fundad 4y ago
Privacy makes you happy but policing is a social program and its constituency are happy with more police invasion into the lives of others.
- nomilk 4y ago
  Maybe it could be opt-in, or even opt-out, like organ donation, at least then the user has a say and it's not totally left to Amazon's discretion.
phailhaus 4y ago
> It's often overlooked that users get happiness from privacy That's not true though, at all. Users prefer convenience over privacy by far, just look at how much people still use Facebook, Google, TikTok, etc despite having terrible privacy practices. Those videos are too addicting. Being able to monitor your home is too convenient.
- nomilk 4y ago
  If forced to, users may forego privacy for convenience. But in the case of ring there's no reason users shouldn't be able to expect both.
  - phailhaus 4y ago
    But they don't. They see the product, it's useful to them, they buy it. Practically nobody is doing research into privacy practices of the things they buy. It's only a problem if it becomes a news story.

karaterobot 4y ago

> “If there is the infrastructure, if there is the channel by which police can request footage without a warrant or consent of the user, under what circumstances they get it is out of our control. I worry that because it’s decided by the police and by somebody at Ring, there will be temptation to use that for increasingly less urgent situations.” Many people (I would argue anybody with common sense) predicted Ring would get used as a surveillance tool. This quote correctly states the nearly-inevitable next step, which will also be ignored.

buscoquadnary 4y ago
So moved into a newly built house, by default everyone gets a smart doorbell in this house. They looked at me like I was crazy when I said I didn't want it or any of the other the "smart" devices. This was the exact reason.
- AlwaysRock 4y ago
  To be fair... If you carry around a smart phone or have a smart watch or a laptop you're at just as much risk. The ring is just one more device.
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    Well, no, not exactly. The ring is an always-on camera. My phone is not that. My phone may leak some information about me, and its basic job (cell phone) provides a record of location data, but that's not the same thing as forcibly making a home security device into part of a police state panopticon.
    - CursedUrn 4y ago
      Are you sure your phone microphone isn't always on? At the very least your voice assistant is listening all the time to detect the trigger word (does this send the voice to the cloud for AI assisted detection?). Also if you search for articles about Ultrasonic Beacons, they imply adware tech is listening all the time too.

bob1029 4y ago

I fear for the day when someone comes knocking on my door because my government-approved surveillance doorbell has been offline for too long. The very first thing I did when I moved into my new house was completely disconnect/disable all networked security & "smart" home systems. I have a Ring doorbell, but it is not receiving any power. I figure the simple sight of it may still serve as a deterrent. Most of the "smart" home things I permit today utilize bimetallic strips for their decision making.

remflight 4y ago
Burglars are not deterred by cameras or alarm systems, especially in the age of face masks. They know they will only be in the house for 5 mins or less and face masks make it harder to identify them.
- kcb 4y ago
  Many ring devices have sirens that I would think would be quite deterent when set off. The Ring Alarm can even act as a proper monitored alarm system.
  - remflight 4y ago
    Burglars target to be in a house for roughly 5 mins. They don’t care what noise they make, they will be out before the cops can come.
    - mywittyname 4y ago
      Also, everyone pretty much ignores alarms. There's a 3 second window where they wonder if the alarm is there's, but they promptly ignore it afterwards.
- jkubicek 4y ago
  This makes me wonder, what is a burglar in 2022 stealing? We have no jewelry or cash in our house. We have a nice TV, but in the age of $250 4k TVs I can't imagine most burglars would chance breaking into a house to get a valuable TV. The kid's iPads are ancient and mostly worthless, we've got no game systems, no fancy cameras, no stereo. The small handful of valuables we have are either stored in an obscure enough place that the thief would have to devote longer than 5 minutes to finding it, or so esoteric that I doubt a random burglar would recognize its value.

unfocused 4y ago

My next door neighbor (we share a wall) had their bicycles stolen twice, so they installed Ring (floodlight) cameras in both the backyard and the front porch. After a year, the cameras have yielded no added security, or caught any "bad guys" as far as I can tell and from what they told me. What I realized, is they use it to keep track of their kids, funny cat videos that trigger the recording, and most importantly, as a 2 way radio to talk or listen to the kids. That last point, well, I found out they can also listen to my conversations an my kids. I asked them to point their front porch camera so that it doesn't record my front driveway, just theirs. and they lost their shit. They confirmed they record audio and video. They asked if there was a problem. I said no problem with them. I'm not comfortable with the audio/video recording me or my friends conversations if company comes over to talk to me on my porch or driveway. I really didn't need to tell them anything, it's self evident why someone wants a camera point away. Needless to say, after I asked them in the winter, one of them refuses to speak to me and crosses the street and avoids me. These people use surveillance to supervise their kids, and don't care about the fact that their neighbors (me) could be recorded, and they could be hacked or footage access by random people, because Amazon isn't exactly the king of privacy. I believe these cameras haven't decreased crime. They also don't really add more security. It's a shame though they are everywhere, with disregard for privacy right on people's property. So yes, I'm biased. I have no love for Ring.

krnlpnc 4y ago
If feasible a physical barrier on the porch along your property line might be the simplest option. Simply block the line of sight, and optionally install white noise generators on your side to mask noise.
MichaelZuo 4y ago
If your houses are close together I don't think it's reasonable to have an expectation of privacy on the driveway or front porch. After all sound at normal speaking volume can easily travel 100 feet on a quiet day, if there's nothing in-between.
- doublerabbit 4y ago

MengerSponge 4y ago

I'll change my tune when news like this breaks about Apple, but I paid extra for a HomeKit video camera because Amazon's data policies give me heebie-jeebies. I get a notification and a live video on my TV when someone shows up on my doorstep, but not when someone walks by on the sidewalk. It's easy.

CubsFan1060 4y ago
Do you use HomeKit cameras or HomeKit Secure Video cameras?
- MengerSponge 4y ago
  HomeKit Secure Video on a Logitech Circle View. It is decidedly aight. It's expensive, but it works well enough. The video was high enough quality that the local police could ID the guy who stole letters from my mailbox a few months ago. But it's easy and reliable and notifies us when somebody drops a package on our doorstep.
  - CubsFan1060 4y ago
    My biggest gripe is the searching. Other systems let you say "search for videos with an animal". HKSV is basically just a long list of videos that are hard to search through. Sure hope they fix that.
Pakdef 4y ago
Why wait? host your own...
- MengerSponge 4y ago
  If I host my own, I know how to get openCV to only get notifications when a particular feature is detected, but can I get a live preview as a picture-in-picture on my TV while I'm watching NBA basketball? Or while my girlfriend is watching college basketball? I don't think there's a reasonable solution for that. Buying a HomeKit hosted camera, and AppleTV, and the prerequisite WiFi network upgrade costs about two hours of my time. Could a standalone camera, ethernet/wifi connection, server, and software be stood up for fewer dollars or less time? I really doubt it.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

They don't need your consent to give police their footage.

orthecreedence 4y ago
Right, this is the issue. Don't install surveillance devices on behalf of a megacorporation and get butthurt when they use the footage for something you don't approve of. How the fuck did people go this insane?

johndhi 4y ago

I mean, duh. The law obliged companies to turn over internet related data to law enforcement and not tell the data subject about it if law enforcement asks in the right way. This can be said of all data Amazon or any other tech company collects.

mabbo 4y ago
The full title of the article includes "WITHOUT A WARRANT". The law doesn't oblige anyone to provide police with information without a warrant. Amazon is choosing to do this.

jazzyjackson 4y ago

IMO the primary utility of Ring is for Amazon to surveil their delivery contractors, without a doorbell cam it’s trivial for a delivery person to set the package on the porch, photograph it as “proof of delivery”, and then walk away with said package. So the deterrent effect is good for the consumer in that it prevents theft, and good for Amazon because they can contract out to just about anyone to deliver packages, no trust required (or, “trust but verify”)

techdragon 4y ago
For bonus points they can then point the finger at the local thieves that happily try to identify and then shadow Amazon delivery contractors and steal valuable looking parcels based on whatever gut instinct they have for value based on size/shape/weight of the packages. Amazon proves the delivery and now it’s the local Polive Department’s problem. They are literally selling customers an excuse they can use later against the very customer that buys it.
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  That really does sound like one of their incentives for having these... never thought about that.
- jrh206 4y ago
  In your example the thieves have nothing to do with Amazon or their drivers. I don’t understand how this could be construed as Amazon selling an excuse for something they’re not responsible for.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    Amazon used to get stuck holding the bag. Now they can make the customer hold the bag.
    - berberous 4y ago
      I mean, the customer should hold the bag in that scenario. Amazon completed the delivery.

crikeyjoe 4y ago

troyvit 4y ago

Often when a story like this comes up I go off on a search for clothing and accessories that help disrupt the AIs these cameras use. The attempts at this fall into 3 categories: works of art, college projects, and organizations that are no longer selling. One exception might be https://adversarialfashion.com/ https://adversarialfashion.com/, though it seems focused on license plate readers.

Pakdef 4y ago
I think that they might be more likely to look at the pictures with a bunch of license plates on them
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  Or you'd get miscategorized as a car which is probably the best case scenario.
  - Pakdef 4y ago
    not very often a car moves around with multiple tags visible from one direction...

eth0up 4y ago

I tend to drop a link to Motion when such subjects arise. It's been a stalwart companion for years and is usually in Linux repositories. https://motion-project.github.io/ https://motion-project.github.io/

Pakdef 4y ago
My favorite one. I run a script on_event_end to make a backup on my VPS and also, on_event_start, I record audio: on_event_start ffmpeg -nostdin -f alsa -i pulse -c:a libmp3lame -ar 44100 -b:a 128k -ac 1 -f mp3 /home/user/motion/%Y%m%d%H%M%S.mp3 & I just wish they would have chosen a different name, it can be hard to find in a web search.
- eth0up 4y ago
  > I just wish they would have chosen a different name, it can be hard to find in a web search. It's an apt and good name, but definitely not search friendly.

lacker 4y ago

What I would like to see is for the police to actually track down crime when people give them video evidence. Here's a video of someone stealing a car, stealing a bicycle, breaking into a house. Go arrest them! Instead, the police just ignore reports like this. I think it would be fair to do something like, if you are convicted of a crime, the police keep your face and other biometric data on file for the next five years. Then if you get caught on video committing another crime, they can just use face detection to know it's you. The way it works now, the power dynamics are all wrong. It shouldn't be Amazon listening to the police who ignore the people, it should be the police listening to the people, and Amazon just sells people a data service.

anigbrowl 4y ago
If you get convicted of a crime, the police will keep your biometric data forever. What leads you to imagine they don't?
- lacker 4y ago
  I am not an expert, but right now it seems like the police generally keep around your biometric data, but they don't keep it in a very useful way. I can't walk into the police station, show them a video clip on my phone of someone breaking into my car last night, they scan the video and it says "we found them, this is John Q. Smith". The data is on a piece of paper somewhere, or it's in a database that is rarely used for whatever reason. So in practice it's like they aren't storing it at all. If the police did keep biometric data in a useful way, I think our society would have to be more explicit about what biometric data we want the police to keep. I don't know what the right answer is, but something like, if you are convicted by a crime then your biometric data is at least kept for a few years, that seems reasonable to me.
  - n8ta 4y ago
    Seems more likely they are storing it in a useful form but just don't care about your problem. Or perhaps a larger agency than your local pd is making use of it.
4y ago

kornhole 4y ago

I worry less about the police than I do about Amazon having this surveillance in the first place. The former head of the NSA sits on the board of directors and they have multi billion dollar contracts for services to the intelligence agencies. Please if you want to surveil your property and people nearby, choose devices that capture it locally or to your private cloud. You can then choose to hand it over to police when warranted.

throwaway0a5e 4y ago
>I worry less about the police than I do about Amazon having this surveillance in the first place. The former head of the NSA sits on the board of directors and they have multi billion dollar contracts for services to the intelligence agencies. That's just being worried about the police with extra steps. An F15 doesn't stand on a street corner and a surveillance dragnet doesn't kick in your door.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Those extra steps are important because they create legal deniability. For example, local jurisdictions (or judicial outcomes) tell police they can't do X, Y, or Z because it's government overreach. So police just look for corporations that engage in those activities and purchase the data from them, with your tax money. So instead of the Stasi you end up with Corpsec.com, but it's OK because there's a middleman making a dollar, good old capitalism.
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    When the local police kick in your door it doesn't matter whether BigPerkyTips.com "made a technical mistake" told them you were a dealer or the glowies shoveled parallel constructed crap at them. In neither case will anyone be held accountable. Until we hold the people closest to the bad outcomes accountable for the bad outcomes nothing will change.

dikaio 4y ago

To be fair, consent is given by these corporations constantly over any allegation so whether with or without consent you can safely assume these corporations are not on your side. For me, I try not to get caught up in the day to day arguments of it all and just donate to organizations like the EFF.

silisili 4y ago

After years of avoiding 'smart home' bs, I finally caved on a doorbell camera and a few other goodies. After doing a lot of research, this is the reason I avoided Ring. I ended up landing on Eufy as it stores data locally. You're free to back it up, and cloud services are completely optional(I don't use them). No complaints, feel free to ask if anyone has questions.

asojfdowgh 4y ago

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/18/amazon-ring-largest-civilian-surveillance-network-us https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/18/amazon... https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/31/22258856/amazon-ring-partners-police-fire-security-privacy-cameras https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/31/22258856/amazon-ring-part... Its not an accident, its the entire reason why they make the doorbells

gffrd 4y ago

It blows my mind how quickly people put up home cameras with zero thought to * (1) what gets captured * (2) who gets what gets captured Walk down the street of any middle-class neighborhood in a major suburb: a healthy chunk have cameras. Let's say 60%. So, you and your family are being passively surveilled on a massive scale … for the benefit of someone who's not you preventing another someone from stealing their bike. Is this a reasonable tradeoff? Is it fair to others?

Pakdef 4y ago
In addition to that, they pay a lot for the service... someone I know just had 3 cameras installed and pays $80 a month for cloud storage... Buying your own and hosting it yourself would pay for itself in just a couple months with something like Reolink RLC-510A and a cheap VPS https://www.lowendstock.com/ https://www.lowendstock.com/.
helen___keller 4y ago
> Is this a reasonable tradeoff? Is it fair to others? Devils advocate: You word this in a way that implies it is negative, but the fact so many people do it suggests many or most people don’t agree with you. Maybe having cameras around makes the average person feel safe? It sucks for you as a privacy minded individual, but ultimately who are you to tell your neighbors they can’t have cameras on their property? The street itself is public, there’s no implied right to privacy for what can be seen from the public road. Truthfully many American suburbs have only ever had privacy by chance, many places in more urban locales there’s always eyes from the public street. It’s just happened that because cars are efficient and convenient, nobody walks by or spends time on the sidewalk in the modern American suburb. That doesn’t mean they have no right to do so.
- gffrd 4y ago
  > Maybe having cameras around makes the average person feel safe? Interesting point! Attempted interpretation: "I'm a person walking by a house that has a camera, and it makes me feel better knowing there's a recording of what's happening to me … in the event that I'm robbed/harassed/assaulted/etc." Also: no need for an alibi, when there's record of you being pretty much everywhere. I wonder if anyone has studied whether cameras being present in communities increase the net level of trust with which people operate? I would assume the net benefit would be "everyone's less worried/suspicious, so operates with greater baseline trust." This feels like similar territory as social media, where we (humans) tend to think the system operates with the same set of rules/principles as normal socialization, but vastly underestimate the scale in which we're now operating.

UberFly 4y ago

All the more reason to keep the video footage within your own network. A Unifi system or similar.

shadowgovt 4y ago

This is exactly the sort of thing that David Brin discussed in Transparent Society. In this case, people should be aware that Ring owns that footage, not them, so final decisions on how its used will rest with that company

robg 4y ago

Who would have thought that consumers would accept a surveillance state by absorbing the upfront costs?

at_a_remove 4y ago

Looking at most Ring videos, they don't seem very useful for tracking anyone down, more of a "yes, a porch pirate stole your stuff." Their position is such that the license plate -- assuming they even come in via a vehicle -- is visible. Plate readers need to be in a different place, with a different aim. Plus, Rings are wireless, and too many thieves are just using a wireless jammer.

darknavi 4y ago
> too many thieves are just using a wireless jammer. Is this actually that wide spread? I hardwire all of my cameras but I've never heard of wide-spread wireless jamming in house-hold crime.
- Pakdef 4y ago
  They should cut off the power instead... it would take care of both.
  - at_a_remove 4y ago
    It's a grab, not a heist.
    - Pakdef 4y ago
      In a heist, they probably would have battery backups anyways...
- at_a_remove 4y ago
  Around here, I have seen a few clips of it.

thewebcount 4y ago

I just saw this article[0] about how the constant scams we're subjected to on a daily basis are a big problem for more than just monetary reasons. If companies weren't allowed to collect so much data, and weren't allowed to just share with whomever they wanted to, this would be much less of a problem. Many of these scams are possible because of the huge trove of personal information collected by companies like Amazon, Google, etc. Whether they lose control of their data to hackers or sell it to untrustworthy "partners" doesn't really matter. If they didn't have it, they couldn't sell it or lose it. [0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/13/scam-fraud-fatigue/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/13/scam-fr...

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago

Does any one know of a privacy focused security camera? I live in a rough neighborhood and am concerned about theft, but I have 0 faith or trust in companies like amazon. If I want a security camera that I can check remotely, but I want to own my data and have complete privacy (no snooping by the company, no ability for them to give my data to some one else). Do I have any options for this other than completely rolling my own?

tekeous 4y ago
If you believe what they say, Apple HomeKit Secure Video. If you don’t, Ubiquiti makes a good remote system with on premise DVR.
MikeFez 4y ago
Rolling your own is probably your best bet as being able to check remotely typically means your camera streams are running through a company's servers. Personally, I moved from BlueIris and I've been incredibly happy with Frigate which is configured to pull from my local IP cameras - none of which have direct access to the internet: https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate You can check in via browser assuming you have some method of accessing your local network. Paired with a google coral device (or a beefy CPU) alongside local storage, it also has the ability to detect objects in real-time which often is a feature that requires video processing on a company's server.
wilg 4y ago
I have a HomeKit doorbell camera which uses HomeKit Secure Video and is end-to-end encrypted.

abeppu 4y ago

I get that privacy vs law and order issues get people worked up because they probe at a difference in values. And perhaps in many contexts reasonable people can take different abstract positions. But with Ring etc, I think society gets a really poor law and order benefit in exchange for the privacy cost. We should at least be demanding that if our privacy is invaded we get something out of it. I live in a dense city where minor property crimes are notoriously common. Last year, after multiple package thefts, one neighbor bought a blink camera for the building entrance. It recorded every time me or my neighbors entered or exited, and it recorded when later my neighbor had yet more packages stolen (thieves easily got through a locked gate and front door). But what do you do then? The cops aren't going to do anything with a video of a guy in a hoodie stealing $200 worth of goods. That stuff is never going to be recovered. Nextdoor in our area has tons of these videos. My neighbor still had to learn to be proactive and defensive. A cost in privacy was paid, but no reduction in crime was enjoyed. Here are some proposals for potentially more equitable arrangements: - if the police can have at-will access to our cameras, we should get at-will access to their bodycams. No more of this "10 days after a shooting, family members of the deceased were able to watch key clips of footage selected by the PD" - if the police claim that having access to our cameras makes them more efficient in solving crimes, then let them put numbers on that efficiency so we can reduce police budgets accordingly - if the police claim that having access to our cameras makes lets them solve more crimes, then anyone coming forward with footage of a crime should be able to demand that the police make a credible effort to investigate. Oh, not enough resources? My city is in the top 10 in per-capita police spending in the US, and I see _so many_ cops doing absolutely nothing all the time. If I'm going to live in a creepy surveillance state we could at least have an industrious and effective police force.

bedast 4y ago

Bear in mind that Amazon not only owns Ring, but also Blink.

ascendantlogic 4y ago

I'm shocked I tell you. Shocked that they would collaborate with the growing police state and just enable dragnet surveillance.

arwhatever 4y ago

Do you wonder if the SWAT team ever needs to bulldoze your wall in (rightly or wrongly), whether they might get a warrant to disable your cloud-based security camera(s) just beforehand?

Pakdef 4y ago
Apparently they don't need a warrant for that... Amazon just demonstrated that.

base3 4y ago

I interviewed at ring before they were absorbed by Amazon. The hiring manager tried to close the deal with an inspiring story about using ring cameras to scare "gang bangers" who got too close to his girlfriend. I walked out. I'm white, but I remember Emmett Till.

robbywashere_ 4y ago

Is this sort of thing a boiled frog type slide to surveillance powered totalitarianism or will everyone eventually catch on and demand ubiquitous privacy everywhere?

mike_hock 4y ago
The frog's been slowly boiling for decades now, so the former.

suddenexample 4y ago

I'm probably just being naive here, but can someone enlighten me to whether Google's Nest cameras have had similar issues? Ring seems to have had a long trail of issues with being hacked, collaborating with police, etc. Not looking for hypotheticals here; I know most oppose the general principle of cloud-backed surveillance devices, but I personally (for better or for worse) have a better impression of Google's attempts to ensure user privacy and security.

Pakdef 4y ago
We know that Google has a pipe going to the Government from Snowden's leaks... Apple too. We are due for a new leak though.

berry_sortoro 4y ago

jennyjenny5309 4y ago