This article sounds like it's calling for Ring to stop streaming video to the police without the owner's knowledge. But if you keep reading, you realize that it's calling for Ring to block the owners from streaming to law enforcement with their own PC. From the end of the article:
> "[Amazon and Ring] are not involved in any way with any of the companies or the city in connection with the pilot program. The companies, the police and the city that were discussed in the article do not have access to Ring’s systems or the Neighbors App. Ring customers have control and ownership of their devices and videos, and can choose to allow access as they wish."
Seems like a weird take to me. Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? And is it legal for you to live-stream it? Those are rights you'll need to trample on to do something about this Ring/police thing.
> But if you keep reading, you realize that it's calling for Ring to block the owners from streaming to law enforcement with their own PC.
There is a difference in incentives and scale between those two circumstances, however.
I know that the normal Ring user doesn't have the ability to store all the video being streamed, and isn't incentivised to care about random people walking by their house. Most people are selfish, they care about recording interactions with their property, not every innocuous event.
The same is not true for a government body. They have incentives and capability to store everything, for an unreasonable timeframe. They have reason to not just care who might approach the house, but to track every single passerby.
This sort of mass collection of information generally requires a warrant, for good reason. This kind of project is designed to skirt the law without violating it, to further increase the power differential between the police, and those they claim to be protecting by these measures.
> Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? And is it legal for you to live-stream it? Those are rights you'll need to trample on to do something about this Ring/police thing.
It's already been establish that it's legal for the normal civilian to do that. Public square stuff. However, the police are on the receiving end, in this case. They've found a little loophole that may or may not be quite legal, and are intent on exploiting it.
Ring are assisting them in this.
You don't need to trample on public square laws to end this. You just need to require police to get a warrant, even for publicly available information, because it should be acknowledged that _what_ they can do with that information is vastly different than what you or I could.
Exactly. There is a difference in kind that results from the difference in degree. One person recording their front door isn't an issue. Each person recording their own front door isn't an issue. The conglomeration of all those front door recordings into a single frictionless searchable product is a massive, massive privay issue.
I think the point is that Ring is facilitating this program and they don’t have to.
I think there’s a pretty big distinction between a single home or even many choosing to livestream and a company providing the means for police departments to setup centralized mass-surveillance.
People buy ring cameras for "law and order" related to their own properties, if anything this is the natural progression of this type of product. What is your argument to say someone who wants to opt-in to this kind of thing and why they shouldnt?
So when I read the article, I know there are a lot of people who trust the police in their community. They are fine with "mass surveillance" (though they would never see it like that) to help keep crime down.
Much of that may be racist in nature to keep minorities out of neighborhoods, but much of it is also people trying to keep their amazon deliveries from being stolen.
It's not hard to see that far into the future where police departments offer an app that will tell you who is at the front door before you open it -- and something like that will probably triple the sales of home security cameras.
Do they? I think cameras are like police, they are only for after something happens. Their presence can be a deterrent.
This does not have to be a natural progression. That’s only true if we collectively decide we’re better off having centralized government surveillance.
Following any incident the police could do their jobs and respect the constitution by actually talking to people and requesting they assist rather than implementing mass-surveillance to avoid doing work.
You shouldn't be surprised to discover that the definition of "when" and "area" can be very flexible to maximize data collection. Car break in happened 6 months ago - good enough justify a crime having occurred. The break-in was 20 miles away? Well, that's driving distance, so it qualifies as the same "area".
Look at your local PD's crime map and you will discover that this is a recipe for perpetual mass surveillance. Good luck keeping this footage from the NSA and FBI. I'm counting down the days to the first person who'll be busted and their Ring will be the first hostile "witness"
But Ring cameras aren't usually pointed at their own properties. They're mostly pointed at public property (the street) and their neighbors across the street. Your right to feel safe stops at my right to have privacy from you.
You have no expectation of privacy in a public space. Its the reason I can record you all day if I want.
People don't understand this (clearly). Most of us just choose not to record others because we don't give a shit about you, or have any sort of vested interest in you.
Think of the children. Hackers may hack these cameras and start following children home.
Edit: I was being sarcastic and bringing up what everyone does when they don’t have a valid reason to oppose something put out the old think of the children bit.
How would you propose Ring stops it? Change the T&Cs to disallow sharing your video with the police while still allowing sharing with your friends? What if a private company says it's your friend and collects it on behalf of the police? What if a group of vigilant neighbors want to pool all their videos together so their own volunteers or staff can monitor them? It's kind of hard to allow something for normal people while disallowing it for the police.
Ring afaik doesn’t allow anyone live-stream access other than the owners and those directly added to the app. Now we’re talking about the ability to give the police department a livestream, something neighbors can’t currently do. They don’t have to build it.
I don’t know how else to explain to you that this is different functionality. When someone is added to the app they have complete control over your Ring, this is not the same thing.
Is it better or worse to have an open panopticon like this (live streamed post privacy), or a closed one where the government & friends get access but normal people do not? At least this this accessible to all.
>> Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? And is it legal for you to live-stream it?
What if it offers a view of the house across the street? Or into their window?
Also, it's one thing to have a camera record 24/7 so footage can be reviewed later. It's very different to add motion detection and face recognition to ubiquitous live streams that include views of other peoples property.
I stand corrected. This cannot be used by police at all. A police officer would have to be present at the time of the video and not reliant upon that video for observation of the criminal act. If the officer requires use of the video then that video would require a warrant prior to its viewing by law enforcement.
If you're talking about the Streisand Effect, that isn't concerned with legality or morality. It just says that the attempt to suppress information can publicize that information farther than it would have been without the attempt. That could apply just as easily to nude pictures of your children as anything else.
>Seems like a weird take to me. Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street?
In some countries, yes. It is illegal to point a camera at a public place without alerting people that there is a camera there.
Here in Sweden our version of the FCC (I gues, PTS) have actually written permission to apartment owners that they're allowed to have peep hole cameras in their doors. For example a lot of senior citizens have this so they don't have to get up to see who's at the door.
So that was an exception they had to make because otherwise you're not allowed to point a camera at a public place willy nilly.
> Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street?
In the US, anyway[0], yes it is. You do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy when you're on a street, sidewalk, or yard (whether it's your yard or not).
[0] Every state is different; this is to say there is no national law prohibiting it (I'm not sure the federal government has jurisdiction for this kind of thing), and to my knowledge no state has a law explicitly prohibiting having a personally owned camera facing a public area like this.
> Now, our worst fears have been confirmed. Police in Jackson, Mississippi, have started a pilot program that would allow security camera owners, including Ring owners, to patch the camera streams from their front doors directly to a police Real Time Crime Center.
Sounds like Mozilla is for user freedom with their purchased hardware only when users behave as Mozilla wants them to.
This is my take as well, what they have written is really dishonest. You could replace ring camera with mobile phone and make their same arguments and people would look at you like you are crazy.
It's still an available
24/7 live stream even if they aren't accessing it constantly.
Further, they haven't provided any details on how they will effectively control access, the area a crime would allow access to, how long the cameras could be accessed, or how they would handle false reports. Saying they won't abuse it isn't enough.
Constraining other peoples freedom, or otherwise possible ways to harm other people in any form is not included into the freedom people push for.
Your argument is kinda like saying if you prevent someone from hitting someone else your are against fredome because that person should be free to hit anyone they want to hit. Just that's a more subtle topic then hitting someone.
“People doing things on private property” doesn’t quite capture it — we’re talking about creating a giant mesh surveillance network for the police state.
Until someone passes a law that permits the police to use this without permission and/or requiring people to own such devices, concern over this is hysteria.
You have the right to shoot a gun, but if you murder someone while shooting it, you're criminally liable. You might accidentally capture someone on run from an abusive ex who works for the police department with access to the video feeds. They already have facial and license plate recognition, why wouldn't the police be using it on the ring feeds as well?
Don't sue the cops, sue the people shooting the video and indiscriminately distributing it.
For a little background, I built a system to share video exactly like this around 1995 in a very popular restaurant I worked at. I also interned at a local ISP, so I had unlimited dial-up and FTP/WWW space for free, so I set up the accounting laptop in the back office with a Snappy video capture device that would take a crappy still image every 10 minutes from the security cams, dial into the ISP on one of the 3 telephone lines, and FTP the image so it would show on the restaurant homepage to let people know how busy it was. It was very common to get shoulder to shoulder crowded, so I figured people would like to know in advance and wait 20 minutes to make everyone's lives easier. This was like 320x200 resolution on crappy multiplexed security cameras. You couldn't make out faces. I contacted the local media to let them know that the website was going to launch soon. There were other features for other local businesses to create their own pages, sort of like geocities or myspace. They called me back and said they never do website announcements, but the live video stream was very interesting to them. We did an interview, and they sent me the article they were going to run after I launched, it painted the still image service as "1984 is here", and you would give up your privacy if you went to the restaurant. They must have told other people, because by the end of the week I had lawyers contacting me and threatening me with lawsuits if I launched. The website launched without the live image.
No one cares anymore. All of the people the media were trying to scare are the same people uploading their entire lives to for-profit corporations like facebook and instagram, and they're doing it in full HD with their names attached.
So, I completely see how cool this technology is, and some good that can be done with it, but anyone involved is setting themselves up for trouble.
Yeah the cultural shift in that regard boggles my mind.
Most people don't understand the significance of what they're forking over. I wish someone would do a documentary where some creep follows you around all day writing down where you go, who you look at, what you buy, what you say, read, etc. and connect the dots for people about how today's major web properties are doing exactly that.
It's like how nobody really cares if some guy they can't see in a back room at the airport can see through your clothes but if they were instructed to strip naked it would never fly.
Once upon a time it was bad manners to even take a picture of someone without asking. I hate it when people indiscriminately point their damn cameraphones at me.
Oh man, check out How to with John Wilson on HBO. I love the show but he’s recording people on the streets of NYC and must be relying on the fact that he’s in public to be able to record them without impunity and it bothers me. The story telling he can do with it though is both deep and hilarious though.
The new "attack anyone disclosing anything about anyone" is "attack anyone disclosing anything about anyone specific", (but ignore the real problem). Your dream documentary would be sued out of existence before the entities the documentary exposed felt any heat.
In all of the EFF's writing they make it sound like the police are tapping into Ring cameras and snooping without owner being aware. In ALL scenarios they have written about, it's been users pushing their content to the police. The owner of the Ring camera is either specifying to share a specific bit of footage around an event to their local police OR in this case the owner is specifying they want to stream their Ring / Security footage to some service which the police can use. They always mention this as an aside like it's not important.
I am so frustrated with the continued alarmist reporting from the EFF around Ring cameras. Can't we get information without all the fear mongering? Look at the title of this article and look at the comments. People don't read the content-- they just read the title.
I, for one, do not want people plugging their security cameras directly into the police department, especially when they capture public and semi-public spaces.
To add to the discussion, I haven't seen anyone mention that this will effectively give the police departments the ability to do surveillance without a warrant
Congrats, you probably don't live in a high crime area. The people opting in to these services definitely want them, and usually because they were victimized in the past.
It's unfortunate that constitutional rights are in constant tension with surveillance, isn't it? Technology and people's irrational fears have been pushing that balance in pretty much one direction only.
Same goes for home cameras doesn't it? There is no way for individuals caught on camera to protect their privacy, there are no signs across the street saying you are under camera supervision, no protection from invasion of privacy? True, police cameras go places that are private, but then we expect (though probably don't have rights to) privacy driving our car down the street, or even stepping onto someone's private property for legal reasons.
> no protection from invasion of privacy ... then we expect (though probably don't have rights to) privacy driving our car down the street
That's the key difference. In the US, public places aren't generally afforded any privacy protections and thus video can be recorded and shared. Police go many places that aren't public, so a significant portion of body cam footage is likely illegal to share.
Of course in this particular case (Ring live streaming) there's a question about whether it's legal or acceptable for police to engage in such practices on a wide scale. An end user doing something once simply isn't the same as a large government agency doing it many times over.
I agree. After I moved to a new place (in South Bay), I found that many of my neighbors had some kind of video doorbell installed, usually Nest but sometimes also Ring. Initially I was quite horrified by the fact that when I'm taking a stroll around the neighborhood I would be captured by all these cameras. And if I'm having a conversation while walking it's quite easy for the neighbors to overhear. This all changed when I decided to install Nest Hello myself. You get this inexplicable satisfaction from having a camera that watches passers-by and knowing they aren't messing with your property (even though statistically you probably know they won't). It really taps into that part of human nature.
Dont you think its is a huge leap, comparing a private company allowing citizens to share their private property (their security footage) with law enforcement to a totalitarian government?
given that the surveillance view and scope of a ring camera isn't necessarily confined to the owners' home, it doesn't seem far-fetched.
It's a system by which bystanders are footing the bill themselves to add nodes to surveillance networks that may be used in an authoritarian function with little permission from the node owner in the unforeseeable future.
You could make this same argument for cell phones, computers, commercial CTV, commercial data, why are we worried about this now because of some residential security cameras.
Not live streamed to police. Warrant required for location data last I checked.
> computers
Don't generally share anything other than analytics data. Might upload content to one or more clouds with user permission. Data certainly not easily available to police without a warrant.
> commercial CTV
Again, not live streamed to police. Access often requested (and typically granted) in person during the course of an investigation.
> commercial data
And again, not live streamed to police. Warrant typically required.
> Warrents arent required for things people give to the police willingly.
I never claimed they were.
> Commerical data is definately being provided to police and other government agencies without warrants.
Obviously that claim is true because someone somewhere has almost certainly done so at some point. However, it is a misrepresentation of the overall situation. The vast majority of large tech companies have public policies clearly stating that they require a warrant or subpoena in order to hand over data. Moreover, court records would appear to indicate that this really is the case.
Many of your comments on this article contain non sequiturs and false equivalencies. Honestly, you don't appear to be engaging in this discussion in good faith.
Because that is the specific topic of this thread? The same arguments are brought up with these other aspects, too. Are you trying to suggest that the problems with those other mediums somehow negate the problem here?
Have you actually ever visited China? The US incarcerates, bombs and has more murders (^apart from a few 3rd world hellholes) per capita than anywhere else. What type of government do you call that? "Glorious Democracy"?
This hyperbole helps no one and this forum deserves better. 1 in 5 people on Earth live there, ascribing all the bad things to that many people is disingenuous at best and malicious jingoism at worst.
Not quite everywhere else... unless you are adding # of bombs + number of prisoners + number of murders... not sure that is a meaningful number though :)
It's just that the people without this urge wind up living in BFE or the ghetto (because why would you pay big bucks to live in a suburb if not for the conformism/homogeneity) and the net result is most of the people living in high class suburbs where there's a Ring on every other door have this urge.
> it allows police departments to avoid the cost of buying surveillance equipment and to put that burden onto consumers
As-if we're not paying for it anyway through our taxes?
> ensure active resident participation in the process
Seems like this requires participation of the residents? The existing Amazon/Ring partnership sure does, and, I don't see how (with Amazon/Ring not being directly involved) this could work without the resident agreeing to share the footage?
> This is not a drill. Red alert:
Ugh, this kind of hyperbole doesn't help anything.
This is the extreme end of the spectrum of "all police body camera footage should be made public no matter what".
Police officers record a lot of people in a lot of very bad situations. Those people have a right to their privacy. They didn't give it up just by virtue of them encountering a police officer that was recording them with their body camera. Especially not just because a police officer entered their home and was wearing a body cam recording everything they saw. The courts decide what bodycam footage gets made public.
I wonder how hard it'd be to geolocate these cameras by comparing their stream to Google StreetView imagery, then program a drone with a spray paint can to go visit?
(For bonus points, the drone could paint blood on the top and sides of doorframes of every house without a live-streaming ring camera, so the destroyer will not enter those houses...)
Also, it's not the householder choosing to surveil their entrances that bugs me, it's the householders who choose to feed all that surveillance into the gaping maw of overreaching police and their unaccountable databases.
Like I said, if you're _not_ live-streaming your Ring footage, I'll blood your door so the destroyer passes over you. Even if you have a Ring camera.
Where i live businesses who have cameras refuse to point any towards the streets. Reason? The police comes to hassle, you are labelled a snitch and general discomfort. Granted i live in a low/near zero crime area but still, the police isnt nice always and more often its the police at fault and cameras record so yeah.
I think the next logical step in this is a future where the government is paying citizens a small fee (or a few points of karma/social credit) to access their video feeds.
All feeds, from their door bell, from their self driving car, possibly their smart speakers, and any other place where machine vision provides a service to an individual. The reward will confuse people on what's good and bad for the whole community.
I've experienced enough neighborhood crime and unreported incidents that I can see great value in a neighborhood surveillance network. However, I don't know whether this surveillance network is worth the costs that are to be associated with it. The cure costs more than the problem.
Ring is an Amazon product. Ring videos stream to AWS s3 servers. Video is processed through AI and used in an unlimited number of ways for Amazon's purposes and not just policing. We're going to wind up paying Amazon through taxes for an unnecessary neighborhood surveillance platform that it gets to monetize in countless ways. Politicians, whose greatest contributor to re-election campaigns will be an anonymous source affiliated with a lobbying outfit contracted by Amazon, will insist that the program is valuable but never substantiate the claims with much else than anecdotal evidence. Society functions well enough today without these services and it costs us far less than it will tomorrow. Don't forget that.
Mozilla Foundation is ringing the alarm bells about public surveillance when it should be alarming us about paying more taxes. We'll be paying taxes for unnecessary technology services. The programs will involve long-term contracts, too, so forget about voting in a new mayor to change things.
> "[Amazon and Ring] are not involved in any way with any of the companies or the city in connection with the pilot program. The companies, the police and the city that were discussed in the article do not have access to Ring’s systems or the Neighbors App. Ring customers have control and ownership of their devices and videos, and can choose to allow access as they wish."
Seems like a weird take to me. Is it legal to have a camera on your house pointing at the street? And is it legal for you to live-stream it? Those are rights you'll need to trample on to do something about this Ring/police thing.