8 ms·

Amazon's Ring to stop letting police request doorbell video from users

87 points by nickthegreek 3y ago

toomuchtodo 3y ago
https://archive.today/bSN6Z https://archive.today/bSN6Z
- neom 3y ago
  Adding in company blog post in case anyone else is interested: https://blog.ring.com/about-ring/ring-announces-new-neighbors-app-features-sunsets-request-for-assistance-post/ https://blog.ring.com/about-ring/ring-announces-new-neighbor...
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    > This week, we are also sunsetting the Request for Assistance (RFA) tool. This is pretty narrow wording with no explanation of why. I'd be a lot more bullish about this if it talked about some new commitment to user privacy, but I'm a bit suspicious there's just a new tool somewhere.
    - sitzkrieg 3y ago
      i agree, this all reaks of a pr charity piece while it actually just went dark like everything else
tastyfreeze 3y ago
Good, that is the way it should have been the whole time. The default view of government by businesses and people should be as an adversary. It is the duty of everybody to tell the government to stuff it when they aren't following the rules we have laid out for them.
- ijhuygft776 3y ago
  They will still be able to access the data... using secret laws this time.
  - psunavy03 3y ago
    Going to a judge for a warrant is not a "secret law." The intelligence community is legally barred from collecting on US persons anyway, and they also DGAF about petty crime, because they have more important national security-related fish to fry.
    - smolder 3y ago
      > The intelligence community is legally barred from collecting on US persons Only for their made-up definition of the word "collecting", which in some cases is "retrieving the data which we have already collected and stored".
  - quirk 3y ago
    Yes this is the weird part. Since this activity was always voluntary, I wonder about the real reason for this policy change.
  - paxys 3y ago
    We are taking about a random local cop here, not the NSA.
    - ijhuygft776 3y ago
      You obviously haven't heard about parallel construction (or evidence laundering)....
- sandworm101 3y ago
  This isnt a traffic stop. Companies of size have daily relationships with law enfocement. While they certainly have obligations to customers, we cannot expect companies to be aggressively confrontational in every situation.
barbazoo 3y ago
I wish those doorbell cameras would blur the background in such a way that passersby and neighbors' houses don't show up in their video. If this was the case it wouldn't matter much whether people or the manufacturer itself share the video.
- pintxo 3y ago
  This should be a legal requirement.
  - anon291 3y ago
    You have a legal right to view your property. A better law would simply say video that is viewing your property from the outside cannot be used as evidence or something like that.
    - jmcgough 3y ago
      Ya but people end up recording a lot more than just their property.
      - anon291 3y ago
        You have a right to the view from your property whatever that may be too. I don't understand the issue here. If someone is a busybody neighbor and looking out their window all day they can also be called to testify against you. People's property is and should be treated as an extension of themselves in this matter. Using a camera to view you doesn't change the fact that they are the ones doing the viewing. I fully agree governments should not be participating and they shouldn't have a secret backdoor. I also agree that you should have the expectation of privacy in your house (hence why I question whether the video ought to be admissible). However, handicapping people's equipment is against even the most basic principle of private property.
        vineyardmike 3y ago
        The whole argument here is that it isn’t just your property. Filming your property… and something/someone beyond is where the question lies. Generally people don’t have the expectation of privacy when in public (aka on the street) but I would think we conversely don’t expect “not private” to include “video of every time I’ve left my front door”. Like, if you’re in a public park and someone takes a picture that includes you, generally we say that you consented by being in public. If someone takes a picture of you every morning as you jog by the park because they’re stalking you, we don’t extended “implied consent” to that. If you aim a camera at my house, does that count as implied consent, or is it closer to stalking?
indymike 3y ago
I'm completely ok with the police asking me for video from my doorbell. I'm not ok with the police using the third party doctrine and asking the hosting service for my video without asking me. That video is every bit my property as the files in my desk drawer and should be subject to the same protections.
- ses1984 3y ago
  Pretty sure if you read the fine print that video is not your property, but even if it was, how can you enforce that if it’s not on your own servers?
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    Which in itself blows my mind. Imagine if Canon told me the pictures taken with my camera were not my property.
    - graemep 3y ago
      At one point one of the big camera manufacturers tried using DRM to force use of their software to process image. I cannot recall when one or exactly what the restrictions were. I think it was with RAW image.
    - ses1984 3y ago
      The canon camera is self sufficient writing to your memory card. The ring doorbell is functionally useless without the server side components (afaik, I could be wrong). The whole issue arises because the video isn’t stored on your own servers. Those server side components provide a lot of value and that’s why people choose to buy those products, as opposed to similar products that are just dumb wifi cameras.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    He's not asking about how to enforce it, I don't think. He's wishing that things like your e-mail, videos in the cloud, etc, required a warrant for the police to search, instead of just a subpoena to a third party. The article falsely implies that a warrant is required, but in practice police can just subpoena the information.
paxys 3y ago
The title incorrectly implies that police can no longer ask users for surveillance video, while the actual change is that Amazon itself is going to stop sharing it without a warrant. You can of course do anything with your video you want, including giving it to police.
- g42gregory 3y ago
  It looks like Bloomberg wrote this misleading article and put this title up, deliberately, on purpose. I don’t think it’s the OP’s fault. I wonder what else Bloomberg publishes on, in the same way?
  - paxys 3y ago
    You don't have to wonder. Read like 5 more lines beyond the title and figure it out for yourself.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - redcobra762 3y ago
    Can you help me understand why the article/title is "misleading" or what their motive would be to do so "deliberately, on purpose"? I genuinely don't get the angle here you're suggesting Bloomberg has.
    - g42gregory 3y ago
      The poster above me pretty much explained it. The article suggests that Amazon won’t let the police to ask for videos anymore, which does not sound bad. In reality, Amazon was giving the videos to the police without warrant and, I am assuming, without notifying you. Now, that’s bad. So Bloomberg covers this up. Also, they call it “modifying public safety stance”? How about calling it “stopping privacy violations”? Also notice, they interweave the real information into the article so that they could say, well we actually told you all of this. But they are artfully trying to create a misdirection.
FriedPickles 3y ago
Ring offers video end-to-end-encryption (E2EE) on at least some devices, in which case they can't access the footage even if they want to (short of sneaking it out of the app post decryption). I hope they'll find ways to support more features when E2EE is enabled over time. https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/Understanding-Video-End-to-End-Encryption-E2EE https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/Understanding-Video-...
- notyourwork 3y ago
  Is it stored encrypted and only decrypted with my key? If not, e2ee doesn't really prevent hosting provider from sharing your content without your consent.
  - smolder 3y ago
    If not, it's not e2ee!
MPSimmons 3y ago
This is literally the reason I didn't buy Ring, and instead bought Eufy.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Ooof. https://www.theverge.com/23573362/anker-eufy-security-camera-answers-encryption https://www.theverge.com/23573362/anker-eufy-security-camera... > First, Anker told us it was impossible. Then, it covered its tracks. It repeatedly deflected while utterly ignoring our emails. So shortly before Christmas, we gave the company an ultimatum: if Anker wouldn’t answer why its supposedly always-encrypted Eufy cameras were producing unencrypted streams — among other questions — we would publish a story about the company’s lack of answers.
CommanderData 3y ago
Do Ring doorbells allow users to connect directly to video streams via RTSP or similar?
- gh02t 3y ago
  Short answer is no. It's been a while since I last looked at it but the long answer is "kinda in a hacky way, with a lot of work, and Ring is gonna fight you the whole way because they want you to pay." Example: https://github.com/tsightler/ring-mqtt-ha-addon https://github.com/tsightler/ring-mqtt-ha-addon
_heimdall 3y ago
I wish more people that wanted cameras would invest in systems that store all recordings locally. Video recordings can be very important, personal, and/or important in criminal investigations. If you own the camera and put it on your property, please don't allow all recordings to be sent to a emote server you have no control over. And seriously please font leave the camera accessible to the public internet 24/7, it may be convenient but its also begging for trouble.
- sigwinch28 3y ago
  Storing CCTV footage on-prem is at odds with preserving said footage. It’s usually easier for an intruder to destroy or steal the physical storage device on site compared to gaining access to an off-site storage device in an unknown or practically inaccessible location. This is especially true for residential properties. Do you hide it in a wall or in an attic somewhere?
  - belthesar 3y ago
    If we're considering the adversaries here as both a centralized provider for recording access and storage, and the intruder who might look for a DVR and destroy it, then it's reasonable to want a way to decentralize all copies of the data and also not want untrusted individuals from having access to the decentralized copies. The argument GP provided wasn't that off-site storage was bad, but that off-site storage in a SaaS platform that is easily identified as a destination to subpoena by virtue of seeing the Ring brandname on the doorbell and/or cameras is risky and in their opinion undesirable.
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    It really depends on your threat model, like anything else with privacy and security. Storing the tapes out of site would probably work, honestly on-prem is so uncommon that I'd expect any intruder to think the cameras are connected to an online service anyway. If I wanted to get clever I'd have a dummy setup of some kind. Stash a few real enough looking and literally label it "cameras". I'm not worried about defeating Danny Ocean here, I'd be surprised if an intruder even looked for the storage system let alone would recognize it.

87 points by nickthegreek 3y ago

toomuchtodo 3y ago

https://archive.today/bSN6Z https://archive.today/bSN6Z

neom 3y ago
Adding in company blog post in case anyone else is interested: https://blog.ring.com/about-ring/ring-announces-new-neighbors-app-features-sunsets-request-for-assistance-post/ https://blog.ring.com/about-ring/ring-announces-new-neighbor...
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > This week, we are also sunsetting the Request for Assistance (RFA) tool. This is pretty narrow wording with no explanation of why. I'd be a lot more bullish about this if it talked about some new commitment to user privacy, but I'm a bit suspicious there's just a new tool somewhere.
  - sitzkrieg 3y ago
    i agree, this all reaks of a pr charity piece while it actually just went dark like everything else

tastyfreeze 3y ago

Good, that is the way it should have been the whole time. The default view of government by businesses and people should be as an adversary. It is the duty of everybody to tell the government to stuff it when they aren't following the rules we have laid out for them.

ijhuygft776 3y ago
They will still be able to access the data... using secret laws this time.
- psunavy03 3y ago
  Going to a judge for a warrant is not a "secret law." The intelligence community is legally barred from collecting on US persons anyway, and they also DGAF about petty crime, because they have more important national security-related fish to fry.
  - smolder 3y ago
    > The intelligence community is legally barred from collecting on US persons Only for their made-up definition of the word "collecting", which in some cases is "retrieving the data which we have already collected and stored".
- quirk 3y ago
  Yes this is the weird part. Since this activity was always voluntary, I wonder about the real reason for this policy change.
- paxys 3y ago
  We are taking about a random local cop here, not the NSA.
  - ijhuygft776 3y ago
    You obviously haven't heard about parallel construction (or evidence laundering)....
sandworm101 3y ago
This isnt a traffic stop. Companies of size have daily relationships with law enfocement. While they certainly have obligations to customers, we cannot expect companies to be aggressively confrontational in every situation.

barbazoo 3y ago

I wish those doorbell cameras would blur the background in such a way that passersby and neighbors' houses don't show up in their video. If this was the case it wouldn't matter much whether people or the manufacturer itself share the video.

pintxo 3y ago
This should be a legal requirement.
- anon291 3y ago
  You have a legal right to view your property. A better law would simply say video that is viewing your property from the outside cannot be used as evidence or something like that.
  - jmcgough 3y ago
    Ya but people end up recording a lot more than just their property.
    - anon291 3y ago
      You have a right to the view from your property whatever that may be too. I don't understand the issue here. If someone is a busybody neighbor and looking out their window all day they can also be called to testify against you. People's property is and should be treated as an extension of themselves in this matter. Using a camera to view you doesn't change the fact that they are the ones doing the viewing. I fully agree governments should not be participating and they shouldn't have a secret backdoor. I also agree that you should have the expectation of privacy in your house (hence why I question whether the video ought to be admissible). However, handicapping people's equipment is against even the most basic principle of private property.
      - vineyardmike 3y ago
        The whole argument here is that it isn’t just your property. Filming your property… and something/someone beyond is where the question lies. Generally people don’t have the expectation of privacy when in public (aka on the street) but I would think we conversely don’t expect “not private” to include “video of every time I’ve left my front door”. Like, if you’re in a public park and someone takes a picture that includes you, generally we say that you consented by being in public. If someone takes a picture of you every morning as you jog by the park because they’re stalking you, we don’t extended “implied consent” to that. If you aim a camera at my house, does that count as implied consent, or is it closer to stalking?

indymike 3y ago

I'm completely ok with the police asking me for video from my doorbell. I'm not ok with the police using the third party doctrine and asking the hosting service for my video without asking me. That video is every bit my property as the files in my desk drawer and should be subject to the same protections.

ses1984 3y ago
Pretty sure if you read the fine print that video is not your property, but even if it was, how can you enforce that if it’s not on your own servers?
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  Which in itself blows my mind. Imagine if Canon told me the pictures taken with my camera were not my property.
  - graemep 3y ago
    At one point one of the big camera manufacturers tried using DRM to force use of their software to process image. I cannot recall when one or exactly what the restrictions were. I think it was with RAW image.
  - ses1984 3y ago
    The canon camera is self sufficient writing to your memory card. The ring doorbell is functionally useless without the server side components (afaik, I could be wrong). The whole issue arises because the video isn’t stored on your own servers. Those server side components provide a lot of value and that’s why people choose to buy those products, as opposed to similar products that are just dumb wifi cameras.
- mlyle 3y ago
  He's not asking about how to enforce it, I don't think. He's wishing that things like your e-mail, videos in the cloud, etc, required a warrant for the police to search, instead of just a subpoena to a third party. The article falsely implies that a warrant is required, but in practice police can just subpoena the information.

paxys 3y ago

The title incorrectly implies that police can no longer ask users for surveillance video, while the actual change is that Amazon itself is going to stop sharing it without a warrant. You can of course do anything with your video you want, including giving it to police.

g42gregory 3y ago
It looks like Bloomberg wrote this misleading article and put this title up, deliberately, on purpose. I don’t think it’s the OP’s fault. I wonder what else Bloomberg publishes on, in the same way?
- paxys 3y ago
  You don't have to wonder. Read like 5 more lines beyond the title and figure it out for yourself.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- redcobra762 3y ago
  Can you help me understand why the article/title is "misleading" or what their motive would be to do so "deliberately, on purpose"? I genuinely don't get the angle here you're suggesting Bloomberg has.
  - g42gregory 3y ago
    The poster above me pretty much explained it. The article suggests that Amazon won’t let the police to ask for videos anymore, which does not sound bad. In reality, Amazon was giving the videos to the police without warrant and, I am assuming, without notifying you. Now, that’s bad. So Bloomberg covers this up. Also, they call it “modifying public safety stance”? How about calling it “stopping privacy violations”? Also notice, they interweave the real information into the article so that they could say, well we actually told you all of this. But they are artfully trying to create a misdirection.

FriedPickles 3y ago

Ring offers video end-to-end-encryption (E2EE) on at least some devices, in which case they can't access the footage even if they want to (short of sneaking it out of the app post decryption). I hope they'll find ways to support more features when E2EE is enabled over time. https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/Understanding-Video-End-to-End-Encryption-E2EE https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/Understanding-Video-...

notyourwork 3y ago
Is it stored encrypted and only decrypted with my key? If not, e2ee doesn't really prevent hosting provider from sharing your content without your consent.
- smolder 3y ago
  If not, it's not e2ee!

MPSimmons 3y ago

This is literally the reason I didn't buy Ring, and instead bought Eufy.

ceejayoz 3y ago
Ooof. https://www.theverge.com/23573362/anker-eufy-security-camera-answers-encryption https://www.theverge.com/23573362/anker-eufy-security-camera... > First, Anker told us it was impossible. Then, it covered its tracks. It repeatedly deflected while utterly ignoring our emails. So shortly before Christmas, we gave the company an ultimatum: if Anker wouldn’t answer why its supposedly always-encrypted Eufy cameras were producing unencrypted streams — among other questions — we would publish a story about the company’s lack of answers.

CommanderData 3y ago

Do Ring doorbells allow users to connect directly to video streams via RTSP or similar?

gh02t 3y ago
Short answer is no. It's been a while since I last looked at it but the long answer is "kinda in a hacky way, with a lot of work, and Ring is gonna fight you the whole way because they want you to pay." Example: https://github.com/tsightler/ring-mqtt-ha-addon https://github.com/tsightler/ring-mqtt-ha-addon

_heimdall 3y ago

I wish more people that wanted cameras would invest in systems that store all recordings locally. Video recordings can be very important, personal, and/or important in criminal investigations. If you own the camera and put it on your property, please don't allow all recordings to be sent to a emote server you have no control over. And seriously please font leave the camera accessible to the public internet 24/7, it may be convenient but its also begging for trouble.

sigwinch28 3y ago
Storing CCTV footage on-prem is at odds with preserving said footage. It’s usually easier for an intruder to destroy or steal the physical storage device on site compared to gaining access to an off-site storage device in an unknown or practically inaccessible location. This is especially true for residential properties. Do you hide it in a wall or in an attic somewhere?
- belthesar 3y ago
  If we're considering the adversaries here as both a centralized provider for recording access and storage, and the intruder who might look for a DVR and destroy it, then it's reasonable to want a way to decentralize all copies of the data and also not want untrusted individuals from having access to the decentralized copies. The argument GP provided wasn't that off-site storage was bad, but that off-site storage in a SaaS platform that is easily identified as a destination to subpoena by virtue of seeing the Ring brandname on the doorbell and/or cameras is risky and in their opinion undesirable.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  It really depends on your threat model, like anything else with privacy and security. Storing the tapes out of site would probably work, honestly on-prem is so uncommon that I'd expect any intruder to think the cameras are connected to an online service anyway. If I wanted to get clever I'd have a dummy setup of some kind. Stash a few real enough looking and literally label it "cameras". I'm not worried about defeating Danny Ocean here, I'd be surprised if an intruder even looked for the storage system let alone would recognize it.