3 ms·
There is plenty of money to be made selling home layouts to police Is there?
by matthewmacleod 4mo ago
There is plenty of money to be made selling home layouts to police
Is there?
- Michelangelo11 4mo agoCame here to post exactly this. Is there, really?
- sjbzbeiks 4mo agoI would guess so, they seem interested in the ring cameras https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2025/09/30/ring-police-partnerships https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2025/09/30/ring-police-partn...
- IanCal 4mo agoThe cost of sharing recordings of video you collect anyway is near 0, and this provides videos of public places. What's the value of a recording inside my house to the police? That requires paying a human to go around recording it?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- toasty228 4mo agoThey'd save money if they knew exactly which spot of the wall to shoot through to kill the innocent sleeping person next door, that's at least a few dollars a week in bullets alone.
- nkrisc 4mo agoI can totally imagine the sales pitch to police departments: before you bust down the door of the local journalist who criticized you, look up their home floor plan and review 360 camera footage of each room, so you can get to their laptop before it locks when your surveillance team detects they’ve stepped away to use the bathroom.
- ifh-hn 4mo agoIgnoring the OTT scenario premise; if the surveillance team is able to detect movement like that then the surveillance team already knows where the laptop is. Why would you need a floor plan?
- nkrisc 4mo agoIf you were just using something kind of remote sensing technology to determine where people were in the building, but you didn’t know the layout, you couldn’t be sure. I’ve seen examples of using WiFi or other radio frequencies to spatially locate people through walls, but it doesn’t let you actually see what’s there. So if you combine their position in the building with separately collected layout information about the building, you can better infer their activity.
- ifh-hn 4mo agoPresumably the surveillance team, and all the police about to bust down the door, are at locus in person? They already know the floor plan, occupants present, and there locations. No need to infer anything because they're under surveillance...
- morpheos137 4mo agoyeah the parent was a rather dumb comment. police don't buy intelligence on the population en mass. how could they afford it snd how could they use it without probable cause? if you are already a target of an investigation they can get a warrant for free with due process.
- zzzeek 4mo agoone paragraph in the three mile long TOS the homeowner clicks OK on and problem solved ?
- morpheos137 4mo agoyeah i was replying to the comment that selling intelligence on private citizens to police would be a revenue driver. not that it couldn't be done, just that it would not make significant money. the median critical thinking level on HN has imploded over the past year.
- newaccountman2 4mo agorofl I assume you are being tongue-in-cheek, but too subtle
- aaron695 4mo ago[dead]
- breadzephyr 4mo agoon further reflection, probably not. I have to remember how much home data is already publicly available (as others have noted).