> “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.
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.
I guess if you don’t have prowler or package theft problems, they aren’t really necessary. I personally have found my Nest cameras indispensable. Ironically, if police would just do their job on property crime, they wouldn’t be so needed.
I used to have things stolen off my porch frequently. After installing a Ring camera, that ended immediately and never happened again. It did seem to work as a deterrent.
What is the issue with a porch camera looking out into a low traffic public space like my own personal driveway? I seriously don't understand the complaint here, and I say this as someone who has a Faraday pouch for my phone and a policy of no AI "assistants" WITHIN the house.
You also know very quickly you have a package at your door, or someone has entered your drive way. If you are home, you can “greet” them which usually scares them off. Even if aren’t home, you can greet them with the speaker. I wake up pretty quickly at night when my nest person detected alert goes off. I live in the back town house, so fortunately I don’t get much random person passing by traffic to set off false alarms.
Nest has the best experience as far as I can tell. The person recognition works fairly well, so I’m not getting alerts for every rabbit or blown tree branch that wanders into view.
Nest is also my favorite. I just wish they didn't completely abandon the main Nest app and didn't force the inferior and convoluted Google Home app as the mandatory app necessary for the latest gen cameras. Such a squandered opportunity.
UniFi cameras are amazing. Superb video quality (better then so called "professional" cameras from the regular security companies), easy to setup (but still an order of magnitude more work then a Ring), self hostable, and from my experience highly reliable.
Agreed. I have a UniFi Protect setup and almost all of the equipment is top notch. I don't appreciate the lock-in inherent in the system (Protect NVR only works with Protect cameras, cameras only work with their NVR, and you can't self-host the NVR on your own hardware), but I'll gladly take it in trade for excellent spousal-approval-factor.
The one exception I've found so far is that the UNVR-4 system software in older models is stored on a very cheap USB flash drive, and I believe they write logs to it too. Mine failed a few months before warranty expired so I just replaced it with an SSD and SATA->USB 3 adapter I had laying around. Works great, is snappy, and should hopefully last quite a bit longer.
For what it's worth you can use RSTP streams from the cameras in most open source NVRs but you can only enabled it from the UniFi NVR thus requiring UniFi NVR hardware to begin with.
My entire setup (3 cameras, NAS, hdds, POE switch) cost me under $1000, and I get pretty much every feature that most of these cloud camera services offer.
- Activity alerts and optional triggers for recording
- Viewing through any browser
- Multiple user accounts
Plus if I want it, Surveillance station has a whole host of other features that I currently don't need, but are nice to have (ex: automated cloud backups, offsite storage, CMS, Action rules, etc)
As a nice little bonus - I pay zero in monthly costs for this outside of the power to run the cameras & NAS
My initial setup cost ran slightly higher than something like Nest or Google Home (ex: I paid 1k vs the roughly 400 it would have cost to buy the cameras from a cloud service) but 4 years in I'm now in the positive on the investment, since I don't have a recurring 14/month subscription charge.
So long story short - It's still my data, it's costing me less over time, and I get feature parity.
The downside is it requires a little more configuration and setup.
I have several Eufy cams and while their hardware is excellent, the software leaves much to be desired.
My biggest gripe right now is when you get a notification and tap it on Android, you get such a cut down UI, it doesn't even have a scrubber and you can't fast forward or rewind. Just a completely barebones player you can't control. Once you exit that and go to the camera history, you get a normal player with controls. Makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Reolink have cameras which keep the video local, but support RTSP and can upload video to an FTP server (old school, I know) of your choice. I run my own FTP server and keep the video streams in DigitalOcean spaces with a 24 hours object expiration policy, fairly cheap NVR.
>Ironically, if police would just do their job on property crime, they wouldn’t be so needed.
if the last several years have taught us anything its that police only do there jobs when they feel like it. whether that processing rape kits, stopping gunmen, stopping property theft, doesn't matter that wont do it.
When police are incredibly understaffed, they don’t do their job because they don’t have many to do it. Granted, everyone is understaffed these days, so it’s not just a police problem, and prosecutor/judges in my county make things harder for them by auto releasing the property-crime offenders they do catch (doesn’t matter if they have 10 warrants for times they didn’t return to court after being released from previous arrests).
It’s not just the police’s fault that they are ineffective, the politicians (that appoint judges and prosecutors) and the people that vote for the politicians take a lot of the blame also. And even after that it’s just a bad time for labor and crime.
These problems predate the pandemic and fallowing recession, trying to blame it on the immediate labor shortage is unreasonable.
And since when has being weak on crime every gotten a judge of prosecutor elected in this country? Politicians go out of their way as a mater of course to look tough on crime to the point that it a problem of its own.
no offense intended, (maybe you have some inside knowledge and perspective that I don't) but this seems to be a little disingenuous to say the least.
Yeah, our court system is vastly underfunded...police generally aren't, though some departments are having enormous difficulty finding qualified people who want to work for them.
Ironically and sadly, it becoming such a hated profession means we really don't want the people who are willing to do it. It's a grave they dug themselves, though.
Police do not decide what rape kits are processed, prosecutors do.
There are a variety of reasons kits are not processed, including the victim not cooperating, the accused confesses or dies in prison, there turns out to not be a case (such as: victim claims Bob raped them, but Bob was at dinner with someone else and his phone/credit card records confirm it, and so on.)
Prosecutors don't just go "fuck women, don't test these kits lying around!" despite what you might be led to believe by a lot of folks trying to generate outrage.
Where the hell do you all live where this is a common problem? Out of all of my friend and relatives, 100s of people, none of them have ever complained about vandalism/theft.
I was in a similar situation until a rash of thefts began happening around my apartment complex a little over 10 months ago. Something changed, whether some porch pirates moved in to the complex, or some crime ring decided to start exploiting our area. The police and apartment management had no answer, and it turns out their security cameras are absolutely useless.
Yeah a similar thing happened at a rental property we own. Someone in the neighborhood learned the code to get into the building and started stealing packages. Changing the code would help for a few days and then it would happen again. I haven't heard about the issue in a few months, so it seems like they've fixed whatever the problem was. My guess is someone was watching people input the code and then using it later to get in. Another owner recently moved out, so maybe they were the weak link? Who knows.
I live in a big city and package theft is fairly common here, happens to me a few times a year. The shipping company always replaces though, this has never cost me anything and so there's not much pressure on me to contribute to the police surveillance apparatus over it.
Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. We don’t have it as bad as some other neighborhoods (like Bitter Lake or Queen Anne, or anywhere South Seattle), and the part of Ballard I live in is pretty nice for the nearby area, but property crime is still a huge problem. It was worse last year when there was a huge encampment set up at the Ballard commons.
I’ve been hearing similar problems in many big cities as well (Portland, SF, LA, Austin, …) but you might be more immune to the trend if you live in a suburb instead (eg Bellevue or Kirkland rather than Seattle, but thefts are beginning to intrude even there).
It’s mostly Ballard. You won’t experience the level of these problems in much of South Seattle. Neighborhoods such as Seward Park, Mt Baker, Madrona, Leschi, and Columbia City are quiet and low on property crime. Never had a car break in or heard of a package theft in a decade of living on the south end.
All the biggest cities in the UK and the USA suffer increasingly severe property theft problems and lack of interest from the police in prosecuting them
I live in a big metropolis (Birmingham, UK), and have had no issues, The place I had it worst was when I lived in a cute 17th century village in the Oxford countryside. Had several packages stolen in the year I lived there.
I have friends in NYC, Boston, Houston, Dallas, and Seattle and they have never mentioned package theft or vandalism. Maybe I'm wrong in assuming that since they don't mention it that it must not be a problem for them.
I'm sure we could pull up ring footage of thieves in each of those cities as anecdata, but it would just be pedantry. At least here in LA, the looting of our train cars got so bad that some companies just started bypassing the city.
Personally, I live in the valley (SFV of LA) and haven't had issues, but I live in a low-middle class area full of russian/persian immigrants. I wonder if wealthier areas are targeted?
Lower class neighborhoods usually have a lot of safe guards built up over time because “they are used to the problems” whereas middle and upper-middle class neighborhoods are just getting their first taste of the problem in the last few years and are still pretty soft as targets. If you are a package their, go after the rich people who are less likely to have some kind of protection.
Maybe, but it's also probably still extremely rare and internet discussions oversample people who have been victims. I've only known one person here in LA who's had any of their packages stolen in the past few years, and that one turned out to be due to a bizarre personal vendetta.
Bikes are stolen often here in Southern California. There is a camera system here, but thieves wear hoodies/hats/look-down, and in any case no one bothers chasing after them anyway.
what is a prowler. how does a camera prevent package theft? you get information about who took it but it doesn't prevent them from taking it, or get it back. deterrence only?
Who said anything about deterrence? Get you packages as soon as they are dropped, scream out the window when someone decides to check your door handles, go down stairs with a baseball bat if they keep at it. Cameras enable all of that, we are basically in the DIY of crime prevention because the police can’t really help us.
yeah my personal view is that these cameras do nothing except widen police surveillance capacity but I'm somewhat interested in what the people who buy them think they are doing.
I expect people who buy them haven't personally witnessed what it looks like to report property crime—even fairly major property crime—to the police. Which is to say, they don't realize that there's almost no chance they'll do anything about it at all except issue a report for insurance (if you want one, and probably for a fee just to add insult to injury) even if you come to them with all kinds of evidence, up to and including clear video of faces and license plates. They probably imagine it going very differently from how it actually goes.
My personal experience from a home invasion where the individual caused a not insignificant amount of damage to the home resulted in nothing more than the police merely filing in a form and handing me a receipt.
My personal experience from coming home to a burgled also ended with the same situation. The police came, waited from crime lab to take prints, prints were not recoverable, no follow up. This was even after several attempts at providing the assigned detective detailed information from the bank on how the criminal's attempted to use a stolen checkbook to withdraw money from a bank account. The detective later explained that he's too busy to look at information provided via email.
Yep. I've seen (and personally experienced) individuals and small businesses suffer property crime ranging from low thousands to upper five figures. Not once has any amount of evidence, including the aforementioned faces-and-license-plates video evidence, or in another case multiple credit card transactions at places that assuredly have cameras covering both the register and parking lot (and at least once at a hotel, which means they made a copy of an ID, even though it may have been fake), convinced the cops to do anything whatsoever aside from offer to issue a report for insurance (for a fee, the assholes). I've even seen a case of this plainly being an ongoing spree with video placing the same people and vehicles multiple places. Cops didn't care, even though the criminals were still working and hitting places every day or two.
Middle-class white people in every case, just to eliminate any race angle. Maybe richer folks have a better time, IDK. This isn't even the allegedly-lawless-hellhole of San Francisco or anything remotely like that.
Cops in my area did a sting operation to find out who was putting trash into one of the municipality's wealthy benefactor's trash bins at night. They also did a six month investigation to catch some high school kid who spray painted "BLM" on a street, but completely ignored whoever wrote "WLM 2" next to it the next day.
The police know who they work for, and they will expend all the resources they have to go after people they simply just don't like, no matter how petty the crime.
The crime lab said it was rare for them to make an appearance. He said if there had been a dead body, they'd have brought out all the toys to do forensics. I gently reminded him that I would have been the dead body in question, and the whole conversation was soured after that.
Alot of the footage is passed along on next door. People do connect the dots, eg they tell you where the guy who grabbed your package is camping, then you can try to go retrieve it yourself.
Personally, I was motivated to get a Ring camera after a couple instances of porch theft. In the years since it has never happened again. So there is some deterrent value.
I would never install a smart device INSIDE my home. But I don’t see why people are freaking out about door/driveway cameras.
I don't know, I don't live in a place with driveways so it's hard to say how I'd feel about them. Where I live these cameras all face the street and public sidewalk, a place I feel is adequately surveilled already.
Anyway I had a few packages thefts over a few years and did nothing about them at all. I haven't had any in about a year though so clearly it's working.
I live in a community like yours and IMO you're just hurting yourself. Your home is probably already covered by everyone else's cameras and they can just pull the footage from them. It seems like the only person that doesn't have access to recordings of their own home now is you.
OP already responded to your comment, but I'll bite and argue that, in your hypothetical, they're not hurting themselves.
First, they're taking a stand based on principal. That they're successful in doing so is a win for them. Second, to your point, they're still covered in case of theft because their "home is probably already covered by everyone else's cameras and they can just pull the footage from them". Assuming they're on good terms with their neighbors, this request should be pretty easy and quick to fulfill. If they're not, local PD can still get a warrant for the footage.
> First, they're taking a stand based on principal.
I'm all for that, but taking a stand doesn't benefit the individual. Taking a stand is for the benefit of society and requires the collaboration of society
> Assuming they're on good terms with their neighbors, this request should be pretty easy and quick to fulfill. If they're not, local PD can still get a warrant for the footage.
yes and that process is just objectively much more difficult than pulling the data from your own camera, which takes all of five seconds versus an order from a judge. That means they're life is worse.
It doesn't, though. If they are aware of the tradeoff (that in order to have the privacy they want, it will take longer to get any footage they may need), and they find that the tradeoff is worth it, then their life is not "worse". After all, that's why they made the decision to begin with - because they believe that their life is worse with them than without.
But it's not more privacy, that's the entire basis of what I'm saying. In this hypothetical, you're already monitored by cameras. The only difference is that the subject doesn't own them. The privacy is the exact same in both.
One person making such a principled choice may encourage another, who may encourage another, and so on. If enough of us make principled choices we don't necessarily have to live like this.
Actually across the street from my house is a fence and so I only have neighbors on the sides, because of that my home is not being videoed.
But also because for me the minor inconvenience of not constantly videotaping my house is overwhelmed by the opportunity to stand on a principle. Sure it doesn't do much to Amazon or anyone else but at least I know I am not participating in the Orwellian surveillance state. It also gives me the opportunity that when people notice and ask about it, to inform them about it. A lot of people didn't realize that this information was available to the government to use at their discretion as well.
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.
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.
My smart phone is not recording video all the time and uploading it to somebody else's computer. It does send location pings to the cell tower when turned on... However, I can easily turn my smart phone off, or leave it home or somewhere else. Security cameras and thermostats and refrigerators aren't so easy to just turn off.
There are billions of smart phones out there, and hundreds of thousands of technical minds both working at the companies who make them, and owning and checking them for these things.
Please provide a singular credible source for your statement.
My view on this is that we're not going back and it would be silly to try to do so. Once you have the technology to record, track, and ultimately apprehend criminals, simply not doing so in the name of ideological purity becomes increasingly obscene. What we need are courts that understand the technology, prosecutors who fear censure for overreach, and fair laws about standards of access to the data.
It's here to stay. We just need good rules around its use. The benefits are too compelling.
Did you just wave away all concerns and criticisms of an increasingly aggressive surveillance and police state as “ideological purity?”
People use that word because they think their own biases are realistic, but it doesn’t get more ideological than believing that giving police and courts more surveillance power has benefits that are “too compelling.”
This isn't about "ideological purity" nor technology: My home is literally the only place where my family and I still have some form of privacy, is it too hard to understand that we don't want random strangers having the power to lurk into our lives 24/7?
You're confusing random people looking whenever they feel like with a well run system the GP is asking for.
Maybe the way is to store the footage or a decryption key locally so the police have to physically get it off you (and you can't refuse) if they want access and can't drag-net. That's what's traditionally done with business's surveillance cameras.
That still doesn't protect my sovereignty if my neighbour points their camera at my drive way (which was described by another commenter in this thread).
Rules change. The people in power change. They may say "fuck those rules" in the future. The only way to prevent abuses like this is to not surveil unnecessarily.
What, we're just going to skip over the fact that the police can beat the shit out of you and throw you in jail for a few hours, largely consequence-free, before any of those parties even get involved?
"We can't surveil criminals because the cops will beat them up before they're even charged" does not seem to me to describe a problem that has absolutely anything to do with cameras.
Yes, you can opt in, but the Ring mobile app insists on generating your passphrase for you instead of letting you choose your own. Which means Ring could still perfectly well know what your passphrase is, even though it's supposed to be "private", since it's their code in their app generating it. Sorry, not buying it.
Edit: Also, at least according to HowToGeek [1], you lose some significant features if you enable E2EE.
(Edit to edit: My Ring app gives me an even more comprehensive list of features that are disabled if you enable E2EE. Since among them is Shared Users, which is how my wife and I can both see our Ring videos, I don't see how this is any kind of actual support for E2EE. Surely a significant portion of Ring's customers have more than one family member who wants to have access to the videos.)
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”)
This will maybe be too snide, but I want to say it: what an utterly ridiculous system we've contrived for ourselves.
People want to live in suburbs, where their residences are separated from commercial areas. This starves city and town centers, leaving only big businesses that are capable of thriving on high volume sales.
But we still want the convenience of walking down to their neighborhood store, so we've constructed an entire economic system built on shipping things in disposable boxes around the globe and getting them to people's doorsteps within two business days.
But, it turns out, this makes it really easy for someone to walk up to your door and steal your package. So we pay the same companies that starve our neighborhood businesses for the privilege of being surveilled, in turn externalizing the cost of their haphazard practices onto law enforcement and the victimized parties.
More middlemen, more theft, more surveillance, more waste. What a farce.
> But we still want the convenience of walking down to their neighborhood store, so we've constructed an entire economic system built on shipping things in disposable boxes around the globe and getting them to people's doorsteps within two business days.
1. Generally they don't come from across the globe to your doorstep after your order, but from a nearby fulfillment center.
2. Getting things quickly from online shopping is just as nice in cities (actually nicer, because you can get a broader variety of goods quickly) as in suburbs.
Where, pray tell, does the fulfillment center receive them from? Shipping happens regardless (I know my local hardware store doesn't make vacuum cleaners), but the waste of individual boxes and delivery for every single item on demand is obscene.
You're right that it's just as nice in cities, if not nicer. But that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make it not a maladaptation within our economic system.
> You're right that it's just as nice in cities, if not nicer. But that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make it not a maladaptation within our economic system.
Also, please note... a frequent mistake in economics is to conflate positive statements ("Ordering online causes additional emissions and use of cardboard and packaging products") with normative statements ("it is wrong to waste cardboard and emit carbon for the convenience of online shopping"). Every agent in the economic system has their own normative beliefs and utility function. Hume showed us you can't get to the normative statement through positive observations.
Am I missing something? Isn't it significantly more efficient for a van/truck to follow a computer optimized route to deliver 100s-1000s of orders per tank of gas than me driving to and from Home Depot to buy one thing?
In isolation on one purchase, yes. But much like the introduction of credit cards, it's made consuption frictionless and so more purchases are being made than might otherwise would have been. Also, packaging from shipping, facilitating for returns (depending on retailer)
> Am I missing something? Isn't it significantly more efficient for a van/truck to follow a computer optimized route to deliver 100s-1000s of orders per tank of gas than me driving to and from Home Depot to buy one thing?
Maybe, maybe not. Packaging takes energy. This alone tends to mean the breakeven distance is many miles-- very rural and low density suburban may come out slightly ahead, but most other uses don't.
But beyond that, the trend for e-commerce is many small orders and individual boxes and more trips, while the typical person taking a single purpose trip to Home Depot will buy more. (Or-- has an urgent need for something that can't be satisfied soon enough by e-commerce).
> Hume showed us you can't get to the normative statement through positive observations.
Hume and I disagree :-)
The original comment was a normative one: I think our current scheme is wrong, in a moral sense. I think it's also wrong in an economic sense, but that's just a cherry on top.
The latter. But that's one among many sufficient reasons: I also think it's indicative of an economic and social policy that encourages civic alienation and delocalization.
The more snappy way of saying it: we're maximizing short term advantages (any plastic crap I want in 48 hours, shareholder value) at the cost of long term advantages (cities and towns worth living in, a sense of community rooted in part in supporting local businesses, not needing surveillance in every aspect of our lives because we've automated out the tacit security of being around other humans.)
Is it always wrong to prioritize a short term advantage over a long term advantage?
> cities and towns worth living in
Like-- this is something America has really just not understood how to do. It doesn't have much to do with e-commerce (which is still popular in places that do know how to do it).
> a sense of community rooted in part in supporting local businesses
Sometimes having a strong local business is great. But in the best case, you're limited by the tastes and curation choices of a small number of vendors-- you lose the value of the long tail. And in the worst case, you find yourself beholden to an actively exploitative and/or hostile supplier.
> not needing surveillance in every aspect of our lives because we've automated out the tacit security of being around other humans
We're personally safer and more secure in our effects than in any time before in US history (well, the best point was a decade ago, but still-- we're about the same as then). It has nothing to do with surveillance or e-commerce, and only minimally has to do with suburbia vs. city living.
In the end, I think you've just got "this feels wrong to me". I bet I could look at a choice that you've made and I'd recoil from it as wasteful and repugnant, too.
P.S. Thank you for indulging me in this conversation. I'm going to be teaching AP Microeconomics for the first time next year, and as much as anything I'm practicing being the devil's advocate.
> Is it always wrong to prioritize a short term advantage over a long term advantage?
Nope! But I think this is an instance where the long term advantage is much more "important" (morally, sociologically) than the short term one. You're welcome to disagree, naturally, but I think there's a growing sociological/sociopolitical consensus that our current mode of life and consumption is overwhelmingly unsustainable.
You're completely right that this just isn't something the US is good at, full stop. But I see the proliferation of delivery as part-and-parcel of the problem, rather than an unrelated phenomenon that somewhat ameliorates local issues. In other words: e-commerce thrives because we've economically primed it to thrive via other bad social and economic decisionmaking.
> But in the best case, you're limited by the tastes and curation choices of a small number of vendors-- you lose the value of the long tail. And in the worst case, you find yourself beholden to an actively exploitative and/or hostile supplier.
This is true, and it's part of the tradeoff. But I'll note: in sufficiently dense cities, this collapses back in on itself. From my apartment, I can walk to my choice of a dozen independent grocers, hardware stores, &c.
And it's not as if Amazon doesn't reflect this as well: my understanding is that much of the current Amazon experience is sifting through rebrands of the same basic product (especially in the context of consumer electronics, where it's all the same IC/SoC in a different plastic case). If that isn't an exploitation of diminished choice, I don't know what is!
> We're personally safer and more secure in our effects than in any time before in US history (well, the best point was a decade ago, but still-- we're about the same as then). It has nothing to do with surveillance or e-commerce, and only minimally has to do with suburbia vs. city living.
Absolutely right again. I should have said "the perception of safety," which perversely has tracked against actual safety. I lay a lot of the "blame" for that at the feet of forces that encourage civic alienation (again, car-centric living, decline of local businesses, &c.).
> I bet I could look at a choice that you've made and I'd recoil from it as wasteful and repugnant, too.
I'm positive that you could! That's why I'm trying to avoid an individual critique, as such -- I don't blame people living in suburbs, or for shopping on Amazon, or for driving everywhere. The economic incentives are all right for those things, and I have my own economic incentives that push me to do things that are absolutely wasteful and repugnant. The critique instead is directed as the incentive structures themselves which, if we can collapse or undermine them, will hopefully result in better human action without the stress and tears of a blame session.
(I also appreciate your indulgence. I definitely started out with some extra snark, and the fact that you tolerated it is a testament to fairness and levelheadedness when you could have rightfully ignored me.)
> Where, pray tell, does the fulfillment center receive them from? Shipping happens regardless (I know my local hardware store doesn't make vacuum cleaners),
Yes, the steps before are very similar to fulfillment centers vs. to distribution centers servicing retail and to individual retail stores (not quite the same-- you need somewhat more fulfillment centers). It's just the last step from the fulfillment center to your house that are different.
> It's just the last step from the fulfillment center to your house that are different.
Right. It's that last step I'm criticizing. But even the former deserves some amount of attention, given the scale and proliferation of disposable consumption that Amazon has encouraged.
> Where, pray tell, does the fulfillment center receive them from? Shipping happens regardless (I know my local hardware store doesn't make vacuum cleaners)
Yes, exactly -- the shipping happens regardless. It's certainly more efficient to ship 20 of each widget to a store than it is to ship 20 widgets to 20 homes, though. But then people have to get to the store to buy those widgets, and often they will drive to get there (not everything is going to be available within walking distance).
> but the waste of individual boxes [...] is obscene.
Yes, this is bad. Personally I try to mitigate this by batching my purchases so more things arrive per box (admittedly, sometimes I don't do this), but some shippers will still break up a single order into multiple boxes spread over several days, which sucks. I do occasionally end up with an item that's shipped directly in its own packaging (that is, no extra box around the item, and it arrives in the same box that I would have picked up off a store shelf), but this is pretty rare, and of course there are many items where this wouldn't work (and would be more wasteful, not less).
> But that doesn't make it right
I'm curious as to how you're defining "right" and "wrong" here, and it does feel like some of your argument is based on "this feels icky and anti-social", and not entirely on objectively-bad externalities. I think the transportation aspect of these deliveries is a bit overblown, as transportation has to happen regardless, and people driving to a store to buy things is probably not much better (and is sometimes worse) than a box truck or van stopping door-to-door to drop things off (walking to a store would be the ideal, but I suspect this wouldn't replace as much driving or online ordering as we'd expect, even in places where it's possible). The packaging waste is definitely a consideration, but I've seen this getting better over time, with more reusable/recyclable paper products being used, and less plastic. We still have a ways to go here, though. To be clear: I do agree with you that much of this is objectively worse than visiting a store to make the same purchase, but I think calling it "obscene" is an overreaction.
I don't think the urban/suburban divide really covers it, though. I live in a city, in a neighborhood with an okay amount of local retail, but I still order a lot of stuff online and have it delivered.
I usually get my groceries delivered. It saves me an hour of driving to the grocery store, shopping, paying, driving home, and making several trips up and down four flights of stairs to bring the items home. I'm totally happy to pay a delivery charge and a tip to not have to deal with that. Yes, I do walk to the local grocery if I just need a couple items, but I usually do a larger delivery grocery order around once a month.
Neighborhood stores can't stock everything, especially in a city where space is expensive. Looking through my last 3 months of Amazon orders (24 orders), I see only three items that I could have gotten by walking somewhere locally, and they were all things that were part of a larger order that was mostly stuff I could not get locally. And that's just Amazon; I definitely have purchases from other online retailers over the past three months, and for the most part I'd guess they're all things I couldn't get within walking distance either.
My neighborhood shines when it comes to restaurants, bars, parks, and personal services (hair cuts, mani/pedi, that sort of thing). A good variety of groceries are available within walking distance, and even some more exotic stuff (there's a high-end cake bakery a couple blocks away, for example), but otherwise most regular purchases aren't easily fulfilled with a short walk. Most of those other purchases would require a 45-60 minute bus ride, or a 15-20 minute drive (with no guarantee of finding what I want). And if I need to do that, I'll probably just order it online instead.
I do agree that the situation isn't ideal. I generate a lot of cardboard and paper recycling waste, though fortunately not that much plastic. I'm not sure about fuel usage: if I have to drive somewhere to buy something, it might be a wash compared to a delivery vehicle bringing it to me. And the package theft problem (and the "solutions") we've created for ourselves is ridiculous.
>> People want to live in suburbs, where their residences are separated from commercial areas. This starves city and town centers, leaving only big businesses that are capable of thriving on high volume sales.
What are you supposed to do really? I grew up in an urban environment (NYC) and embraced urban living. The reality was that it wasnt sustainable w/o being a multi-millionaire. I'll give real examples.
I take a 20min subway/bus to a store purchase a terracotta planter, or perhaps a box of cat litter. You then have to carry that 5 or 10 pound item. You realize the subway isnt working, today. You need to take an express subway. Now you have to switch trains but you realize the escalator and elevator also isnt working. So you drag it up the stairs, across the tunnel, and back down the other side. You could hitch a ride on a friend's car, but there is congestion pricing, or a $11 toll on the tunnel, and throw in another $40 for parking. These things used to work in the 1990s, also in the 2000s, but eventually things all failed in a big way (and the failure of public transport was a big part of it.)
Good luck if you are disabled, or have knee problems, or have a baby+stroller also.
I tried really, really hard to live in an urban environment, but it was eventually a failure. I now live in the suburbs. We order cat litter and have it delivered to our doorstep.
No, i dont want to live in the suburb. But I cannot afford to live in the city. If I could freely take cabs everywhere like a multi-millionaire I would live in the city. Short of that, i didnt see much option to stay.
People say crazy things like "oh you should just bike everywhere." OK, how does my mom with osteoporosis bike? How does a disabled person bike? Where on the bike do you place the 10lb cat litter box?
I am very definitely not a multi-millionaire, and I've lived in NYC nearly my entire life. It's a big city and things certainly vary by availability, but there's a pet store 4 blocks from my apartment (in a not especially dense, mostly residential neighborhood).
What you're describing is the pathological case. The similar pathological case for the suburbs is a 20 minute trip to Costco, only to get stuck in an extra hour of traffic, do your shopping and return home, only to realize you forgot the one thing you really needed. That, like yours, is a real example (from the few years I spent in college, in a suburban area).
(For what it's worth, I agree completely about disabilities, and it's shameful that NYC has continued to ignore basic accessibility needs in the subways. That being said, the NYCT buses are pretty great about accessibility, and serve a corresponding demographic.)
>> What you're describing is the pathological case.
I have both children and happened to have a knee injury for several years. That turns a huge number of seemingly normal things into "pathological cases." Ever try bringing a stroller up and down a subway stairwell? Ever try bringing a stroller into a usually crowded bus? Ever try literally anything mass transit related with a child or knee injury? I dont think children are that uncommon here. Sure, if I had a full-time nanny that would solve the problem, but then as I said, its all easy with money.
Also, not sure if you live in the wealthier areas of NYC (read: those with multiple subways), but things magically become easier and easier in wealthier areas. Now try living in a neighborhood with a single train line. Now see what happens when the train just randomly starts skipping your stop all the time and going express. Poor-people problems.
Groceries with a child...not hard.
Groceries in the winter with a child? Hard. Groceries in the rain with a child? Hard. Possible, of course, but its also possible to live in a tent in the forest.
At some point, practical starts to overtake merely possible.
Interestingly in the suburbs, all these things are possible for those on mere mortal salaries. Hence, despite literally having "NYC" in my username I no longer live in NYC.
Finally. Suppose I did get a stuck in traffic job for an hour with a baby in tow on the way to Costco...it isnt really the end of the world...you turn on the radio and spend the time. Its not like its freezing and i'm standing on a subway platform praying the next train is not going to skip my stop while my baby cries from weather exposure or while my knee gives in.
- 100x more livable sqft, so it can be affordable for everyone.
- 3000sqft condos that rival lux family homes in the suburbs for space.
- All building should become mixed use. Parking underground, retail on street level, offices on the first N floors of the building, and residential higher up for the views.
- More vertical green space on the buildings.
- More horizontal green space between the buildings.
I'm also partial to building walk/bike ways above current roads such that roads are covered / "underground" i.e. don't cause noise or pedestrian deaths. Retail would be located where people walk.
You're waaaaay overthinking it. Building whole system of analyzing that at scale is very costly, and totally unnecessary.
Amazon, as any other carrier, depends on the insurance (self-insurance in this case) and statistics. Some % of package theft will happen, and it's all priced in into their business cost.
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.
In a lot of jurisdictions the seller is liable for the package till the consumer receives it, often explicitly calling out doorstep delivery as being insufficient to remove that liability. The seller might separately have a claim against a carrier or thief, but the law is on the side of the consumer regardless of whatever else plays out. Plus, legalities aside, it's usually cheaper to satisfy the consumer than to take the long-term PR hit of their goods sold being costly gambles.
Contradicting myself a bit, I did once have a rather unpleasant experience where I required 4 encounters with Amazon customer service before they would stop charging me for a delivery they failed. It was eventually not a problem, but the hours spent weren't substantially less than a lawsuit for the same (the costs were drastically less at least).
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.
Does Amazon actually offer the option to sign for the package? (I've never really thought about this, living in a nice neighborhood)
I mean, the customers know what they are getting into I guess but it is still bad if the dominant online store doesn't offer any way to securely get their products.
I am sure Amazon sees it that way, but I am not at all sure customers see it that way. The "Buy It Now" button doesn't exactly show INCOTERMS.
Ultimately, this is all a zero-sum BS game until we start talking about actual solutions, but I don't know enough about what Amazon offers to have an opinion about who needs to do better. If Amazon offers porch locker delivery and convenient central locker locations, sure, let's push customers to use them -- but if Amazon refuses to deliver to porch lockers and offers central lockers that are 20 miles away and open 10am-3pm, let's push Amazon to do better.
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.
I live in a block-long grouping of condos in Brooklyn. Every so often the management company sends out exterminators and one day as I was talking to him he pointed to these environmental monitors installed on a lamppost on our block. He says “what’s with that, the government spying on us?” and I explained it’s just some environmental data collectors, but pointed to my neighbor’s Ring and mentioned “although that thing records me every time I enter or leave my condo”. He said “oh, I have one of those, it’s great”. He didn’t think there was anything wrong with the fact that Amazon was sharing the videos with law enforcement without consent. The cognitive dissonance was maddening but not at all surprising.
The difference is that one of those things has a benefit. When there's a mysterious box that does some vague thing that you don't care about, it's safe to hate it. It's not helping you in any observable way, so opposing its existence is a safe, easy decision. But the Ring camera is providing him with a benefit, so evaluating whether to oppose it requires putting a cost on "spying on us" and weighing that against the personal benefits, which takes up a lot of mental load and consideration, so we ignore the vague costs against the concrete benefits.
People often care about these sorts of high level, idealistic concerns like "privacy" and "freedom" right until you offer them the smallest "concrete" benefit. Look at 23andme. Hey, can we take your blood, analyze your DNA, and send it to the police? No? What if we also told you what percentage Western European you are, would that convince you to pay us for the service?
"When there's a mysterious box that does some vague thing that you don't care about, it's safe to hate it. It's not helping you in any observable way, so opposing its existence is a safe, easy decision"
This sounds like the justification of stupidity. If you don't know what it does it ignoring may or may not be safe.
If you can't observe a benefit to you (I assume you mean obvious and causual observation) doesn't mean it doesn't benefit you.
It's like you've codified ignorance to make it sound reasonable. This is the same level of thought my cat uses to interact with the world.
It doesn't seem like because he's describing it directly and offering no criticism.
He also says " so we ignore the vague costs against the concrete benefits."
Which implies him and people like him or around him. Normally if someone wanted to indicate that they would say "some people think.." or "in their world/mind"
I didn't read it as justifying the stupidity, but explaining why people feel OK engaging in it. It came across as a good explanation of why so many people are so happily thoughtless.
“Thinking is hard work. That may be the reason so few engage in it.”—Henry Ford
" so we ignore the vague costs against the concrete benefits."
At the end of the first paragraph. He could mean "we" as in people though. He also didn't qualify the statement with something like "Some people.." "Many think..". Finally he offers no criticism of why it may be bad to think like this.
However, you're right and reading it now after the comments people made makes that seem more of a possibility than when I first read it.
Human minds navigate the world through heuristics; applying logic is an exhausting method that - for most people - must be reserved so it's available for high-leverage situations.
It's explainable by looking at polls for how Americans feel about major institutions. Gallup did one for various public and private institutions: https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-... and what they found is the only two major institutions that maintain a universal (across political affiliation and other demos) positive trust rating are small businesses and the military. Everybody else either varies a lot or just has universal low trust.
You'll note from this source that "big technology companies" score above all 3 branches of the federal government. Part of this is how partisan politics has become, so one party will have a majority of people expressing trust in an institution their party controls, the other hardly anybody, resulting in a fairly low score for the presidency and supreme court. Congress, it seems, is so universally despised it doesn't matter who controls it, it sits at single digit trust percentage.
In light of this it becomes understandable why somebody would be fine with big tech spying on them at the behest of the police (another institution with pretty high universal trust, though it does vary depending on political affiliation a bit it's considerably higher than any federal institutions), yet react with suspicion from something set up by bureaucrats from a federal agency.
Or that they are in cahoots with "The Government" and will gladly share any and all data through back channels because AWS has very freaking lucrative contracts with them.
Or if you live in a two-party consent state that you don't consent. That should be enough. Someone that doesn't respect your consent doesn't respect you.
The recording as I understand it would still be illegal in a one-party consent state. Conversations that OP has in their house with their guests and/or children are being recorded by none of: OP, OP's guests, or OP's children. It seems to be very sketchy what they're doing.
I feel the same way whenever people freak out about smart speakers, laptop webcams and doorbells – but have had a smartphone (with microphone, camera, GPS, OTA updates and unrestricted up/down connectivity) on them 24x7 since 2008.
The camera may be acting as a deterrent (if they didn't have any additional thefts) without it being obvious.
I never would give a neighbor a hard time about a camera pointing at a publicly visible spot on my property- just into windows and other semi-private locations.
That includes both audio and video. I ascribe to the "it's legal for journalists to go through your trash, so if you want privacy, shred your trash first" philosophy.
I added a new camera that includes the school across the street and if the cops come by and ask for footage, I generally provide it (they asked for a breakin across the street, but my camera wasn't pointed there).
One important details is that I buy fairly generic cameras that aren't talking to the outside world/cloud services although it's still a risk.
In the US you don't have any expectation of privacy in public (or at least severely limited) and the courts have upheld again and again that recording public areas, even from a private area, is completely find. Some jurisdictions require notification or consent for audio recording, but not all.
I find it really unfortunate that the US is so blatantly disregarding data privacy.
In a world of eroding freedom, lack of data privacy can become a severe safety risk.
The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the reversal of Roe v. Wade and Russia's recent moves give me an idea of dynamics that can turn dark quickly.
RvW is an interesting point here - I routinely saw people camped out recording every entry point of a Planned Parenthood for example, including separate cameras pointed lower to capture licence plates. I'm assuming they later post these online or run some kind of ALPR on it for harassment.
Yup, and the same people are outraged that people are posting home address details of Supreme Court Justices. The same court that ruled it was legal to post the home address of obstetricians so people could protest in front of their homes.
People and companies in US don't know what 'privacy' means. All software companies (maybe except Apple), car companies (especially Tesla), telecoms, etc. just collect huge amounts of customer data not giving a damn about consent.
Front yard, visible from the street, probably "public" in most jurisdictions. Backyard, or somewhere shielded from view without entering yours or someone else's private property? I would argue that is "private" space that should be protected but it would probably come down to the specific circumstances to be certain.
Sounds like relations between these two neighbors is already pretty bad -- the guy crosses the street to walk on the other side? Because he was asked not to point his security camera at someone else's property? Some people are just... children.
At least that I can understand. It has implications on right of way, usage, easements, property values, etc. without even getting into issues of adverse possession (which combined with property value issues can become real trouble).
The line between "please don't point your camera onto my property" - something I would respect as a courtesy regardless of the law - and "I'm going to cross the street not to interact with this person" goes straight through mental illness in my opinion. Normal, stable people do not behave that way.
You don't have a legal expectation of privacy anywhere visible from public property, including even the inside of your house viewable from a public easement/street.
Because of this, it's legal for someone to point a camera right inside your window or front door. It's also illegal (public indecency) for you to be naked in your own window or open door.
If I set up a telescope to look inside your window most people would call that an invasion of privacy, even if the telescope was set up on public property. Having a high resolution digital camera where images can be zoomed and a very sensitive microphone that can pick up conversations is similar, in my opinion.
in my neck of the woods if your far enough away that someone has to use binoculars or some other artficial means, even eyeglasses, they are breaking the law. you, the one being observed are not at fault.
Mine is; amazon drivers take a snapshot every time they deliver a package (I guess this is proof it's been delivered?). Many people can easily walk up to it, unimpeded. Hell, neighborhood kids run onto my front yard and sit in my trees (get off my lawn!!!). It meets every necessary definition of "public", while still being property that belongs to you.
I think video recording laws are largely influenced by 2).
I can angle my Ring camera to my smoking hot neighbor so I can record her doing yardwork. Creepy AF (breaks rule 1) but at what angle is it not obviously deliberate? Turned 10 degrees toward her lawn? 30?
Point being, I think US recording laws are too liberal but we need a defineable limit for privacy.
Maybe photon distance? Capturing photons traveling further than 30m into the aperture is invasive? (half kidding)
Ok, but what if I am trying to monitor my driveway where I park my vehicle but the hot neighbor's flowers are in the same line of sight just beyond my parking space? It's not always feasible to block a portion of the view without blocking the entire reason for having the camera in the first place.
I think a German court would ask in such cases which has more weight: a) your interest in security, or b) your neighbour's interest in privacy. I think the default is b), but there are cases where a) has more weight, for example if your house was already broken into and you can reasonably explain why this exact angle is crucial for your security. Just catching some flowers in the picture does not make a strong case for b).
From the street photography articles I've read; if you can see it from a public space then its fair game, which I think is reasonable. But in your scenario the camera is on your private home, so most people would expect reasonable privacy from being recorded.
Yes, if it's in public it's fair game thanks to the 1st amendment.
The nextdoor homeowner probably has a right to setup a tripod, a laser pointer (or a similar bright spot light) and point it directly at the neighbor's Ring camera iris.
i would ask my nieghbour if they care about it or not, perhaps make a guest feed if they are agreeable to mutual camera coverage, let them have some opportunity to see what is on camera and where it points
It's interesting that Germany makes a distinction between observing and recording images or video, while the US does not. The US does distinguish (typically in state law) between listening and recording. Recording is different from watching/listening. It's reasonably possible to know who is present at any given time, but not possible to know in advance who might hear/see a recording in the future.
I do, however think Germany's law goes a bit too far: as I understand it, use of surveillance cameras on private property without warning signs is illegal even if a person would have to be trespassing to be recorded. I do not think trespassers should enjoy a right to privacy with regard to their trespass.
It's not just about trespassers, it's also about anyone who was invited onto the property that's under surveillance. Guests, workers and contractors who are invited onto the property have a right to know if they're being recorded or not.
> US does distinguish (typically in state law) between listening and recording. Recording is different from watching/listening. It's reasonably possible to know who is present at any given time, but not possible to know in advance who might hear/see a recording in the future.
I'm not sure how universal is, and it's not always reasonably possible to know who is listening. You can listen from afar. But I would think most states have eavesdropping laws that include overhearing. Here is an example from my state, Kentucky.
In that law, it's specifically by using a device, presumably one that enables the user to hear things their unaided ears could not. The law doesn't cover eavesdropping by being present and undetected using unaided ears.
A similar law could be written to cover viewing using magnified optics; existing laws in the US are usually written in terms of a reasonable expectation of privacy, which is not always clearly defined. I think anything viewable from a public place with an unaided eye would probably not fall under that category.
I heard that when cameras were first invented, some cultures rejected them because they believed they were stealing their souls. Sounds like some silly superstition but I have a feeling that what both them and you are really worried about is the fact that people looking at a photo of you are only seeing a small slice of your "soul" or personhood disconnected from the social interactions that would normally occur if they were looking at you in real life. So it's more a worry about losing control of your influence over how other people perceive you, which is a major part of being human.
The older I get the more superstition makes sense. I used to think older people were superstitious because they were more likely to have existential crises (since they were closer to death) but now that I'm middle aged I've realized that it's because human reason is surprisingly slow and the universe is surprisingly big and there's just too much to work through from first principles.
I've been having a similar change but it's not only about there being too much for us to work out from first principles but also an awareness that human minds seem to have a need to believe things which is orthogonal to knowing the truth or being logical. We don't believe in superstitions and religions because we want to make practical use of that knowledge or because it's the logical conclusion from some reasoning - we do it because the act of believing satisfies some biological need. It's easier to believe things when they're not obviously false but truth isn't really what's important about it.
When I see people saying "You idiot, of course the earth isn't flat!" or "All religions are stupid.", I just think they haven't understood the value of belief, even, or especially, false beliefs.
This whole philosophy of valuing truth and using science and all that is fairly modern and seemingly unnatural. I wonder if it's creating an emotional cost in all the people who rejected emotionally or biologically valuable beliefs in favor of being right.
Germany's entire threat model, at a cultural level, is 100% different from the US due to differing histories. Germany is concerned about how networks of tattle-tale can be used by fascists to organize oppression. Americans are concerned about how crime flourishes in the unobserved corners of urban environments.
These are both, basically, bogeymen. But the German bogeyman is the Nazis returning and the American bogeyman is the transient murderer.
> These are both, basically, bogeymen. But the German bogeyman is the Nazis returning and the American bogeyman is the transient murderer.
Eastern Germany had another authoritarian surveillance state after the Third Reich. I have no good reason to be confident that it will not happen again. It could as well happen in the US, considering recent history.
An authoritarian surveillance state that is paired with digital surveillance is the grim reality of at least hundreds of millions today and that model seems to be on the rise internationally.
Anyone who thinks that the power of the surveillance state won't be abused is naive. The existence of "benign" surveillance hinges on those with power always acting in good faith and never faltering. There are practically zero repercussions for abusing that power, and little to no checks and balances, either.
I live across from a school; hundreds of people see my house exterior for days. I wouldn't apply a different rule to a security camera.
I understand some folks have different privacy standards than me. I'm not asking you to follow my privacy rules, as they are a bit more open about public spaces than many people enjoy.
If somebody wanted me to not point my camera at their driveway, a legal threat would be the absolute worst way to achieve it.
The neighbor has a catalog of audio recordings of conversations had on the porch 24/7.
Does this school have traffic 24/7 and do you broadcast everything from your front steps via a megaphone (and keep recordings)?
There are many comments here about video/audio recordings from public onto private property however there are various degrees of recording.
If there was a public park across the street from your house and someone setup surveillance-level equipment pointed at your front door, I'm not sure there is a rational judge who would consider this "oh well, they're on public land, nothing we can do here".
> I understand some folks have different privacy standards than me. I'm not asking you to follow my privacy rules, as they are a bit more open about public spaces than many people enjoy.
Private spaces that are publicly visible do not automatically become public spaces, though.
We're talking about my front yard. I can go on street view and see exactly what everybody else driving by sees. The only change is that they scrub faces and license plates, which I could do using AgentDVR + DeepStack.cc and some scripting.
If you tried pointing a camera over my fence into my backyard, then I start complaining.
> We're talking about my front yard. I can go on street view and see exactly what everybody else driving by sees. The only change is that they scrub faces and license plates, which I could do using AgentDVR + DeepStack.cc and some scripting.
I think a major difference is that a permanent camera allows documenting who is entering and leaving a house at which times, while street view or driving by do not. Even a nosy neighbour behind the curtains would most probably not be able to gather a complete history.
Yes, agreed! Your front yard is a private space, even though it is publicly visible. You have every right to afford as much public access to it as you please, but the mere fact that you're the one who has the right to make that decision means it is a private space.
> a legal threat would be the absolute worst way to achieve it.
I agree, just asking is always a sensible first step, as well as making proactively sure that your camera does not invade anyone's private space, but I can see how that can happen unintendedly.
Your trash analogy doesn’t hold up because trash becomes “public” once it’s on the street which isn’t part of your property. “Publicly visible spot on my property” is a meaningless phrase; it’s still my property, and I’m legally (here at least) allowed to raise an objection to the recording of it.
I can’t and wouldn’t object to someone recoding the sidewalk in front of my house. I can, and absolutely will, object to someone recording my yard. You might not see a distinction but there absolutely is one.
> “Publicly visible spot on my property” is a meaningless phrase
Indeed, your property or not, it's still a "publicly visible spot", and the creep is legally (in the US at least) allowed to be creepy in this way over your objections
> I can, and absolutely will, object to someone recording my yard.
The creep can, and absolutely will, object to your objections, and be allowed to continue (in the US at least).
Privacy requires constant vigilance, in terms of electing lawmakers.
I can't ask the people who drop their kids at the school across the street not to look at my yard, so why would I complain about a camera? Because it's always on and recording? Still not convincing to me. My exterior yard (the part not surrounded by a tall fence) is for everybody to look at. In fact lots of people stop by my house to look at our amazing maple tree and start conversations with us.
I think main differentiator is that an individual human is unlikely to stand in one place just watching for an extended period of time. It actually was very expensive to do that kind of surveillance not that long ago, which is why it was not deployed without a good reason. Camera, on the other hand, is cheap. Individual creep is preferable to a panopticon.
Exactly. The high cost of human eyeballs trained on a specific target for long periods of time introduces a negative feedback loop which tames the overreach. Cheap, ubiquitous cameras with virtually unlimited storage eliminates that self-regulating mechanism and degrades the trust between members of a society.
None of these things really bother/worry me. This is mainly a threshold argument- a thing that was hard got easier, but didn't fundamentally change what is possible for a dedicated adversary.
1) Human stands there and watches your property. A description of what happened on your property is subject to whether or not people believe this human, and the fallibility of human memory. This human cannot be there 24/7, and must -- at minimum -- break to sleep, acquire food, and use the bathroom. In reality, they'll have many other demands on their time that mean they can't (or won't want to) spend much time watching your property.
2) A connected, always-on recording device that captures what's happening in high definition, 24/7 (assuming it has an IR light; if not, ok, more like 12/7). This becomes an indisputable, permanent record that can be replayed as often as anyone wants, and that most reasonable people would believe, without question, as reflecting what is truly going on.
How are these two things not fundamentally different? This is approaching "definition of fundamental" territory.
The scale of difference between $25/hr for a human and less than $0.01/day (amortized over the lifespan of the camera/service) changes the economics entirely. The circumstances before and after are paradigmatically different.
I don't think we're arguing with you anymore about whether or not you could be bothered, just that you somehow seem to think that there's no (or only a minor or incremental) difference between a human watching your property and a camera recording it, which is objectively false.
And of course no one can resist trying to correct someone who is Wrong On The Internet.
Also I think it's because it sounds like you're refusing to sympathize with people who might be uncomfortable with this sort of thing. Are you the kind of person who would reflect on this issue and say, "this doesn't bother me, but I can see why it might bother someone else, so I wouldn't point a camera at my neighbor's house"? Or are you the kind of person who would say "this doesn't bother me personally, so I'll just do whatever I want and ignore how other people feel about this"? You are definitely giving off the latter vibe here, which is anti-social and selfish (not the kind of neighbor I'd want to live next to, regardless of this particular issue). Hopefully that's not who you are, though, and we've all just gotten caught up in the argument and are appearing one-dimensional.
I dunno, I think I explained my position, my reasoning, my priors, and came to a reasonable conclusion. I'm certainly not insisting I'm right. But what I know I can do is install a camera in a visible location and be open to people approaching me and asking for changes.
I've also read the relevant california and federal laws (not in detail) and concluded what I'm doing is not a violation, in letter or intent. I'm not looking into people's windows, or their backyards.
[D]idn't Aristarchus and the Pythagoreans propose heliocentrism in ancient times? If only they had prevailed, we might have had Real Science millennia sooner. What was their evidence?
Well, you see, fire is nobler than earth and the center is a nobler position. So fire has to be in the center. QED.
There are many names for this sort of thinking, but "scientific" is not one of them.
Wat? I didn't say scientific, I said reasonable. In the legal meaning of the term ("just, rational, appropriate"). I'm not making a scientific argument.
Would you also be fine with people filming you through your windows? Why not, after all it's visible from a public space with the right angle. And windows are just part of another kind of "fence".
In the end it's private property and that makes it private by default. Nobody can forbid you from looking at it, but imho filming is just as invasive as parking the car there while having greater potential for abuse. Filming has intent that goes farther than just randomly looking around.
I use drapes and shapes to get privacy for my windows. My intent Here is to prevent school shootings and help investigate crimes that occur on my property or my neighbor's property. Definitely not my intent to stare at my neighbors in their private lives and they understand that completely.
How are cameras supposed to prevent school shootings? The best they can do is let you watch cops do nothing as we could see in Texas. Prevention is much more important and much cheaper but that's not done either.
And I don't know why I'd spend money in anticipation of a potential crime in front of my home, donating data to Amazon in the meantime. The police is already tracking phones and using other methods no single camera can match.
I think it's totally uncalled for to call me a creep. I'm saying other people can point their cameras at my yard. When I point my camera I seriously consider that others don't share my values. And if they came over and asked nicely, I'd move the camera (it currently points at a neighbor's driveway). At least I'm open and honest about it.
>I think it's totally uncalled for to call me a creep. I'm saying other people
No I think it is called for, you clearly aren't getting it. The things you are saying, the behavior you're outlining and the justifications you are giving for it make you a creep.
>can point their cameras at my yard. When I point my camera I seriously consider
>that others don't share my values. And if they came over and asked nicely, I'd
So you perform an act of intimidation[1], and then expect your neighbors to come to you and ask that you stop? This is not the behavior of a good person, no matter what you've convinced yourself. Good people do not intimidate their neighbors and then expect to be given the benefit of the doubt on top of it. This is the kind of thing a creep does to force interaction with them and then escalate their intimidation tactics.
If you truly weren't a creep and you wanted to put a camera up, you'd ask your neighbors for permission first. Get their consent and then proceed only if they give it. So really at best you're a creep who doesn't see a problem with intimidating their neighbors at worst you're someone who doesn't understand or care about consent.
>move the camera (it currently points at a neighbor's driveway). At least I'm
>open and honest about it.
Seriously, nothing about your responses here are showing that you're open and honest. You sound entitled and presumptuous. I'd invite you to please try to view this from a perspective that isn't your own.
[1] You started out saying this, remember? - "The camera may be acting as a deterrent (if they didn't have any additional thefts) without it being obvious."
The camera is acting as a deterrent by being intimidating, so at least you agree that a camera can be intimidating.
I appreciate the principled point you’re trying to make about public recording specifically and anticipatory deference more generally, but you’ve turned it into a very personal attack on another community member and that doesn’t feel very appropriate to this site.
I can only second this. If this were my neighbor I would get a restraining order against them. Recording your neighbors kids in the yard to me sounds borderline problematic.
I just can't find any sane justification for behavior like that.
If you tried to get a restraining order for my camera which incidentally overlooks the neighbor's driveway (no kids playing there), you would be laughed at. I'm not breaking any law, nor do I have any ill intent. The kids I incidentally tape are in a school yard across the street from me, and after Uvalde, both the cops and the school admins would welcome another source of information to help them prevent school killings.
Think of it this way- before any of this happened, the cops came to my door and asked politely if we had a video camera facing our neighbor's yard, which would have provided some useful evidence on a car breakin. They didn't say "oh, hey, it's creepy to videotape your neighbor's front yard which is in plain view and has no fence." Combined with the laws of my state, it's clear that videotaping my yard and the neighbor's front yard is not illegal, and in general, seems to be non-creepy.
Normal, law abiding citizens aren't intimidated by security cameras generally, which is why most people can go out to shops and stores which almost certainly are recording them and not give it a second thought.
Would you label a gate or a lock as "intimidating" as well?
That isn't what's being discussed here, but it's still a type of intimidation. Being law abiding really doesn't matter because pointing a camera at someone's property is a type of intimidation and harassment.
But to answer your question:
>Would you label a gate or a lock as "intimidating" as well?
No I wouldn't, but that isn't to say I couldn't imagine a scenario where it could be used that way. For example, say you move to a new place and you're different from the locals. You notice your neighbor watching you with suspicion when you come home from work everyday and they make a show of watching you while putting a big padlock on their garage door or something. There's nothing illegal or even really wrong about doing that. It's just kind of crappy and not very neighborly. The behavior would be weird and creepy.
>I can, and absolutely will, object to someone recording my yard. You might not see a distinction but there absolutely is one.
You certainly can raise an objection but it has no legal weight behind it. Anything that is in public view can be legally filmed. I think there may be some federal prohibitions against filming sensitive government areas though not sure if these have ever been testing in court. Walk around naked in your front yard or in your house in front of an open window you are eligible to be legally (though maybe creepily) filmed.
> if the cops come by and ask for footage, I generally provide it
Yeah, I see nothing wrong with this: The law has to ask you, the owner of the camera, for the footage. No legal process can circumvent your knowledge of the footage request, and you can review the footage prior to handing it over. This is all possible because you made good non-cloud infrastructure decisions.
This is basically how it should work, but the fact that Amazon is a third party means the government can legally compel them separately from you being aware. There's no fix for this: Cloud storage is a critical failure of the design of the Ring system.
On one hand, it bothers me that I can't walk around the block without ending up on a dozen security cameras because everybody has a video doorbell. You can modify the motion and privacy zones to exclude certain areas such as the sidewalk, but I'm willing to bet most people do not do this.
On the other hand, I've personally had success with the police and court systems based on video evidence I could provide from my doorbell camera. Also, previously I had a long-lasting issue with a neighbor at my old house who would get really nasty about my yard and other issues (I suspected old age and mental issues) that completely ended once I put up a security camera to record the area he was doing this from.
If I do end up ever getting more security cameras, my plan is to show my neighbors exactly what angle they're recording and make sure they're OK with it. While I technically have the right to record whatever I want to in my state, I'd rather not make anyone feel uncomfortable. I recently came across a video where someone ended up pointing IR lasers at their neighbor's cameras and it was an effective way to disable the cameras without breaking any laws [1]
> You can modify the motion and privacy zones to exclude certain areas such as the sidewalk, but I'm willing to bet most people do not do this.
I have to do that or I get notifications constantly. I told my front cameras to only say something if someone shows up on my front step, or drives into my driveway. I don't want to get a notification every time someone walks down the sidewalk, or when the neighbors get home.
Although honestly, I get lots of notifications for the neighbors anyway. Because they seem to think a 30 foot wide road is narrow and they end up using my driveway regularly when getting into and out of their own. Not really a camera problem though.
Def sounds like shitty behaviour from your neighbours.
In terms of decreasing crime I live in Oakland in a duplex. Downstairs was empty and crooks broke in and stole a bunch of stuff over several hours earlier this year. We only had a camera doorbell for our upstairs unit and I have footage of one of the crooks walking around the corner with a crowbar, seeing the camera and immediately turning around and walking away. The camera was a huge deterrent for them and I believe the only reason our upstairs didn't get broken into where we were fast asleep.
We now have cameras on every door + a floodlight in the backyard.
You could do that. The cheapest and easiest option is just to get yard signs saying that you are recording 24/7. Nest, Ring, and others sell there. There are plenty of generic ones too. If you want to use video cameras as a deterrent, you need to make sure people think you actually have them.
I sometimes see people with their cameras pretty well hidden. That's not going to work as a deterrent!
I use both strategies. I have an obvious camera on my porch pointed at my front door. I also have a camera hidden in a bush near the opposite side of the porch. Any potential troublemaker turning away from the obvious camera gives me a perfect view of their face from the hidden one.
And so you may have a different opinion of your neighbor. They share a different opinion. Some Karen's think it is shitty for you to park in front of their house on a public street.
I am also no fan of Ring or similar, though the reasons are slightly different. We lost our cat recently, and I went round my neighbourhood knocking/ringing on every door to ask around.
It was a strange experience as around 30% had these ring doorbells. It was unpleasant to know I was being recorded and judged, and often as a result, not answered.
I vowed at that point we would never consider one, if only because I don't agree that everyone should be treated with suspicion by default.
>"It was a strange experience as around 30% had these ring doorbells. It was unpleasant to know I was being recorded and judged, and often as a result, not answered."
Ugh, the idea that these things would be encouraging neighbors to become unneighborly by using Ring cameras as screening devices is truly dystopian. Helping neighbors with pets that have gone astray seems like one of the most basic neighborly and and potentially reciprocal interactions. I really hope you found your cat. I agree with commenter above that the prime utility of these for Amazon is as a form of delivery receipt mechanism for the army of Amazon's last mile contractors. The panopticon eye effect of the Ring network appears to be just another externality foisted on society by Mega Corp.
I had two suspicious people come to my door (separate incidents) which resulted in me getting a video doorbell (I'm going to migrate from a cloud one to a closed circuit one).
I've also had two cases of salespeople who didn't understand the phrase "not interested". One escalated to me threatening a trespass call before he left. (This is with No Soliciting signs clearly visible)
If it's 90° on a hot summer day and they are wearing a big bulky jacket, that raises eyebrows.
Are they wearing a uniform? If they are pretending to be part of a company and not wearing a uniform, that is suspicious.
What about the time of day? ADT sales people don't knock on my door at 8pm at night.
How are they acting? Are they waiting calmly? Are they checking their pockets or waistline? Are they glancing around seeing if other people are around?
Are they hiding their face?
Did they ignore a no soliciting sign?
Did they walk by and check out the property before approaching the door?
Did they knock on my neighbors door first? Or did they come straight to my door?
Did they park? Where did they park? Was it a company vehicle?
How many people is it? Are those people dressed in a similar way? Are they all standing together or did one of them wander off?
If you don't answer immediately, how do they act? Do they get annoyed and wander off or do they become insistant? Do they escalate to knocking or shouting?
I guess it depends where you live and what experiences you've had so far. Your 'pre-test' probability I guess. I doubt there is much I would see on a video feed that would stop me finding out for myself who they are.
I find this viewpoint very strange. Why are you jumping to the idea that you're being treated as suspicious, and being judged, and being avoided as a result of that judgement?
What if people were just...doing something else? At work? At the movies? Driving? Pooping?
Do you feel judged when you walk up to doors with peepholes?
Because when you can hear that people are clearly in, and you know yourv video feed is available to them, and no one answers the door after waiting and ringing twice, it's a reasonable conclusion. Especially when this seems to be a feature of those with Ring doorbells.
Sure, but you're assuming it is something about you which prevents them from answering the door. Maybe they just get a lot of door to door salesmen and ignore the door bell when they aren't expecting anyone.
You should keep your cat inside and not leave it free to roam the neighborhood killing wildlife, and then going to disturb your neighbors when it does exactly what a cat does and runs away.
I haven't been offering my judgement or opinion to or on my neighbours. My judgement is on the device, and to be honest, I might well have installed one of these devices without realising how it may make others feel.
The story about the cat was just a background line to give context for why I was calling on my neighbours, but it could be any number of reasons, I might even have been saying hello after moving into the area. That's not enough information for you to judge, or to know that we picked up the cat as a stray and took it in, but it is very much an outdoor cat and we're ok with that - it is after all, where we found it.
It would have been better for local wildlife to take the stray cat to the pound, rather than just enabling it but letting it roam regardless.
I was against Ring cameras because of the privacy implications, but the neighbors that own Ring cameras being the ones that managed to avoid being interrogated about a "lost" stray cat is the most convincing argument in support of them that I can imagine.
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.
That’s probably legally true in the US, but is that the best we can do?
It’s valid to question the value of laws. Sometimes I wish I did have more privacy in public.
But more importantly, technology has completely changed what non-privacy looks like and is tragic to me that laws haven’t caught up.
There’s a huge practical difference between “someone within 100ft, probably a neighbour who I know, might hear me and probably instantly forget what I said, but 99% of the time no one is there” and “100% of your conversations are recorded, transcribed, and stored forever by a profit-maximising behemoth with various other unavoidable tentacles into my life, and also they might sell or give that data to other companies also the police”.
This is a similar problem with data brokers... yes my records are public, but for most of history that meant going down to city hall and putting forth effort... should the law around public records be different when data brokers vacuum up all that public data and resell it digitally? We've lost many practical barriers to privacy.
There's a huge difference between casually overhearing a conversation because you also are outside versus having actions/words recorded for eternity, and potentially analyzed by a third party (Amazon, Google, etc).
I'd say an apt comparison would be a neighbor occasionally hearing what you're saying (and possibly cozying up to their closed front door to listen), versus your neighbor coming out onto the porch every time you're talking, attempting to join the conversation, and even filming you with their cell phone to share with their friends. The latter is wildly socially unacceptable, and at the very least we'd shun someone who did this. Unfortunately most people seem to ignore electronic devices in their social analysis.
I'm not sure I agree - if you have the right to observe, listen and record using your meat implements (eyes, ears, brain), then you should have the right to do so using a digital augmentation of the same (cameras, microphones, storage).
Because there is no clear distinction between the two. You're certainly entitled to listen with your ears and write things down aren't you? Can you use a hearing aid to help you listen? What about binoculars to help you see?
Clearly it's impolite to peer into your neighbours windows with binoculars, and gossip about all the conversations you overhear with your hearing aids, but you've got the right to do so, don't you?
What about observing your neighbours through a peep hole in your door (or wall)? What about setting up a camera instead of a peep hole? And what if you want to see the camera feed from your phone? Reference it for later? Where is the line? All of these, including pens and paper, are technological augmentations to our innate capabilities. I'm not against banning them per se, I'd just like a clear idea of why we ban some and not others.
> I'd just like a clear idea of why we ban some and not others.
Can you think of any reasons why we would want to ban some and not others? It reminds a bit of something that Emma Goldman might say: people have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.
I can't think of any deontological reasons, no. It seems to me that people are just more apprehensive of the more recent innovations. I can point you to writings in the past advising what to avoid writing down. This taboo has clearly shifted.
Say in 1000 years from now everyone has cameras and storage media implanted in their persons, I suspect the public consciousness surrounding what is and isn't expected to be recorded would change. I don't however think that your fundamental liberty as a human being should depend on the public consciousness, but rather be derived from principles/axioms.
Pardon my ignorance, but I thought deontology evaluates actions by measuring them against a set of rules. I find it hard to believe that you can't imagine any rules that would prohibit filming someone else's home.
And infringing on this imagined-from-first-principles right would cause serious repercussions. No regulation could ever be as beneficial as losing this imagined-from-first-principles right. We must let corporations and the police state that serve them have and use this data.
It's not imagined-from-first-principles, it's in fact attempting to define the very axioms that ought to constrain law in the first place. What does it mean to be "free" do something?
If you avoid this question, you can justify just about any tyranny so long as it can be argued to be "beneficial" (spoiler alert: this is how the worst atrocities in history have been justified). In other words, the ends don't justify the means.
Incidentally overhearing a conversation and recording 24/7 then uploading anything interesting to a third party's servers for them to do who knows what with it feels very different.
I'm curious what others think of the ethics of a non-internet connected camera? Does that really resolve the issue or do you still consider it wrong to have residential security cameras that capture the sidewalk/street outside the house?
I think it’s not as bad as it removes many of the worst elements, but I also think there is a question of how limited/incidental the surveillance is of other people: e.g. I think there is a difference between picking up people on the sidewalk on the 20ft or so directly in front of your house, vs having the camera also pickup wide angle view of the whole street and all of your neighbor’s comings and goings.
Privacy doesn't have to be a binary, GP probably expected a modicum of it in that they assumed their conversations could be heard by their neighbours should they be listening in at the time, but is uncomfortable at the idea of a digital record of each audible outdoor conversation being kept in perpetuity, that the neighbours and any third parties with access the footage could use against them if their relationship went sour (which it now seems it has...). The "expectation of privacy" argument should really only be used when discussing whether recording should be legal, not when determining whether someone is a jackass according to social norms.
You got it. I'm on my front porch, and clearly anyone on the street walking by could hear me. But to know that it's possible to record my entire conversation is creepy.
I've learned my lesson and now invite people to our backyard, which is free of any cameras.
You're comparing apples and oranges. One is legal and the other isn't.
They absolutely have the right to record audio that is audible on their property. It used to be the norm that if you don't want your neighbors hearing you the onus is on you to speak quietly in a private place. With the increase in such devices the norm too will shift to "know that a device is recording audio in certain zones"
That's not exactly true. Many states have laws outlawing recording "private" conversations without the consent of all parties. As far as I know that would even include recording someone having a private conversation with you on your own property. Whether or not someone talking on their own property and their voice carrying over their property line would qualify is up for debate.
That's actually a good point. I'd like to see if someone has done an analysis on this. Factors to consider:
- Whether the recording was intentional (i.e. if I set up cameras for security, and it so happens to record all your conversations on your front porch, this is unintentional, but if I set up a microphone by the wall, it's intentional).
- The type of communication - most resources I'm finding discuss phones and similar channels.
From what I could find:
I just checked one state: Video recordings are fine, but if they capture the audio of the conversation, then it's a violation of the law.
Other places define a violation of reasonable expectation of privacy to require an explicit intent to eavesdrop - so if it's a side effect of my security system, it's not illegal.
In a number of states, your front porch or backyard are not considered private places. If the conversation is between you and someone else (not the neighbor), then by federal law, intentionally recording the conversation is illegal (neither party consented). When it's unintentional, it'll probably vary from state to state.
In most places they can point the cameras onto the exterior of your property. But if it can see inside a bedroom (even if the window is open and no curtains are drawn), it can be a violation.
Interesting side effect of searching for this: Video monitoring of your baby may be illegal!
I wonder if these laws run afoul of the ADA - You can't do zero-party consent audio recordings - but you can record video, which could just as easily capture a deaf person's conversation using sign language. Basically, it sounds like this law affords protections to only certain, non-disabled citizens.
I agree but to a point. I am curious how this plays out when what is recorded wouldn't necessarily be audible or intelligible by the human ear but is able to be picked up and amplified via post processing or more sensitive devices.
Will we then just have to always assume that a device is recording audio in all zones?
Countermeasures will be figured out, but it's an interesting thought process.
It's a scary thought process, but yes - you will have to assume it and technical[1], not legal countermeasures will be thought out.
Sure, one can have laws, but these kinds of laws are incredibly hard to enforce when it becomes trivial for everyone and their grandmother to break the law. It's frankly much easier to police Lyft/Uber usage than this.
I agree the parent is wrong that they do have the “right” (really more it’s not-illegal) but don’t think it doesn’t mean it’s not unreasonable and obnoxious.
I really wanted to avoid any legal issues with them. We decided talking/texting is best. My wife is a litigator, and even she didn't want to go there.
If you share a wall with a neighbor, it's always best to try and resolve things through direct communication. Our kids still play together, and they still come over and vice versa.
I made my point, and they actually engaged in helping mitigate my concerns. I certainly can't ask them to remove their camera, so that's why we took this approach. They met us half way, but clearly felt something more when one of them over reacted.
Laws are the lowest common denominator of social behavior. Not illegal - does not mean it’s not anti-social behavior.
I also the think there is a practical difference between occasionally/potentially being observed when entering/leaving your property, and having your comings and goings surveilled 24/7/365
I've wrote about it before on HN, but a local busybody saw me committing the crime of walking down the street in my own neighborhood on their Ring camera and used that as pretext for calling the cops on me, who then harassed me for being "suspicious" without having actually looked at the footage themselves at all.
Unsurprisingly, I am not a fan of the surveillance state that's found itself at my literal doorstep.
Sounds like your real problem is your neighbor being a jerk. If they didn't have Ring that wouldn't stop them from calling the cops on a "suspicious" person.
I think there's a big difference between a busybody staring out the window sometimes and being upset with what they see versus a busybody with a 24/7 security system that pings them at all hours of the day with alerts and video clips about "suspicious" activity it detects, along with apps like Nextdoor, Citizen and the Ring Neighbors app that allow the paranoid to continuously share said clips and create local echo chambers of paranoia, suspicion and distrust.
In this case we have no idea whether that happened, or whether the crappy neighbor was just looking out their window at that moment. It is silly to blame a doorbell camera for this.
When the cops that stopped me bring up the fact that I was acting "suspicious" according to a neighbor's Ring recording, I can easily blame the doorbell camera for the interaction.
For what it's worth, that same neighbor could have called the cops to harass you after seeing you walking with their own eyeballs, or the ancient art of lying to the cops that they saw anything at all. The presence of the Ring in this story adds nothing to the risk scenario
I've been walking in the neighborhoods I've lived in everyday for literal decades, and this only became a problem recently.
The difference here is that Ring and its companion apps like Neighbors continuously send their users scary alerts and video clips of innocuous neighborhood activities they'd otherwise miss entirely, or just ignore. I see this all the time with such apps like Nextdoor and Neighbors, where in the past loud sounds in the summer would be written off as fireworks and ignored, but now we have legions of people working themselves into frenzies about how "gun shots" were detected, with calls to action for video evidence of the "perpetrators". What then happens is that people start sharing clips of their neighbors doing essentially nothing and accusing them of actually committing crimes.
There are multiple homes near me that just point cameras straight out into the street, recording everyone else's comings and goings. This seems deeply anti-social to me, not much different from spying on the neighbors with binoculars. Meanwhile, police in San Francisco now propose that they should have realtime access to private networked surveillance systems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32077528
I don't mind people in my neighborhood running security cameras as long as they store the footage locally. I can't consent to the terms that a managed service provider presents them with respect to footage I am in or conversations I have. I am concerned that given a sizeable enough populace with locally stored footage, that it could become the target of robo-warrants for proxy-surveillance, but we're a bit off from that.
The reason I support people running their own security cameras is because I recently had a woman go off on some wild diatribe about how my property looked (which actually belongs to my landlord) and she became very upset to the point of trying to force my front gate open as I shut it. Since then she's gone on some proxy wars with other people in the neighborhood. Obviously her behavior will continue to escalate and because I have no cameras I have no way to show she was willing to use force and intimidation from step 1.
Depending where you live this might be illegal. In the U.K. you have an obligation not to record your neighbour’s property, and not to record conversations of members of the public.
Yet every local facebook group is full of the curtain twitchers posting pictures of "person walking past, looks suspicious, keep save everyone x" in blatant disregard for the law, yet nothing happens
A very interesting piece of info is that «microphones that can pick up audio from up to 25 feet away». The Evening Standard is a British newspaper, and the article tackles the legal matters, but does not mention audio recording. Maybe an overlook, or maybe concerned people should check the audio related regulations further.
> Video doorbell owners must be careful not to place their cameras in areas where they might breach neighbours’ privacy. Any footage detected outside of your property is likely to breach UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws
I think you can set up a video camera pretty much anywhere you want, but there are a lot of laws about audio recording. I would check on your state's laws. I don't even think this would be covered by 1-party consent.
The front porch is a "public" area, in the sense that there's no expectation of privacy. It's as legal as if you were taking an iphone video or live photo of your car in the driveway and happened to catch the neighbor in the background.
Ring does have the ability to set "blackout zones" in the camera's FOV, and as a good neighbor the ring owner could have excluded the neighbor's driveway/porch with a few clicks.
The front porch is a "public" area, in the sense that there's no expectation of privacy.
Parent commenter is correct. The laws in your area are not the laws in every area. Some states and cities have restrictions on recording, even in public areas.
Illinois is one of the states with laws that prohibit many kinds of incidental audio recordings, while video is allowed. As was explained to me by a downstate communications lawyer, it's because the laws were passed by mobbed-up politicians before video was a thing, in order to protect mobsters from federal investigations.
Even today, when you see undercover recordings taken by local TV news stations in Illinois, there's never any audio.
According to this article [0] by the senior counsel and ethics officer for the Illinois Department of Central Management Services,
> The threshold questions are whether the conversation is private, and whether the recording is done secretly. The law allows recording if the conversation is not private, that is, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy as defined above. Also, there is no violation unless the recording is “surreptitious,” defined as “obtained or made by stealth or deception, or executed through secrecy or concealment.”
You cannot record voice in Illinois for example. I'm pretty sure this is the case for most all party consent states.
If you post a video with voice online you are breaking the law in Illinois, unless all parties gave you consent. I don't even know how something like RING camera is legal since it is being uploaded to the cloud and the parties don't consent to it.
Edit: Illinois actually made some changes to the law, that allows recording of voice in public spaces.
This is one of the perennial tug-of-wars in the general principle "Your rights end where my nose begins."
If you're emitting pressure waves or reflecting radiation flux and it crosses into my property, am I allowed to record and analyze it? And both the law and morality basically say "kinda, maybe, I dunno, depends." To wit: it's generally considered gauche to take photographs of you doing harmless things in your backyard, but if you're building a meth lab back there, you can be certain a neighbor will take photos and submit them as evidence. But how do they know it's a meth lab without looking in the first place?
The rights and responsibilities around data storage and analysis are context-specific and complicated.
> 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.
My sister has cameras on the outside of our house. When neighbors asked her to point them away from their houses, my sister also lost her shit. Even when the police came by, she got so upset that the police re-aimed her cameras when they got her distracted.
For some reason people who get involved in shootings try to hide their guns in our neighborhood (there are some unique cars and unique landscaping in this neighborhood). Her cameras have resulted in the police recovering about a dozen guns during 2021 and several arrests when the perps come by a few hours later to pick them up.
I asked them to point their front porch camera so that it doesn't record my front driveway
Ring also lets you set up privacy blocks on recorded footage, so you could ask them to black out your driveway.
I did that with the camera that shows my driveway, due to the curve of the driveway, it also shows part of the neighbor's house, so I blacked out their windows in the camera feed. I sent them a screenshot and asked if they wanted me to black out their entire yard, but they were fine with my video capturing any activity in their little used side yard.
Depending on the state you live in, e.g. California has two party consent to record audio, meaning if you don't consent then what they're doing is illegal.
Is your front porch "public"? Usually things like this hinge on a reasonable expectation of privacy and I think a conversation at your front door can be expected to be relatively private.
are you certain this applies to things occuring in public? IANAL but it strains reason to believe it's illegal for cameras in public to have audio recording enabled.
First-- this is a summary of statutes for recording phone calls; the laws are not always the same in each jurisdiction for making an audio recording in public.
And we're in a thread where someone is describing a scenario where neighbor A records person B talking to child C. Neighbor A is not a party to the conversation. Whether a state has a one party or two party statute, this behavior would likely violate it.
It might be hard to sue Ring; they'd claim they were not responsible for capturing a neighbor conversation and it's intended for use on your own property.
And to sue the neighbor, well, you'd have to know that they actually were capturing your conversation and feel like suing your neighbor.
I haven't been following this very closely, but my assumption is that the proliferation of recording devices have rendered these laws impractical to enforce, thus somewhat moot.
My guess is that only applies to private conversations? If you're talking with someone in public (and arguably the outside of your property is public) do they need your permission to record you?
I just got a Ring cam and during setup it asks if you'd like to black out any regions to prevent recording neighbors, so that may be an option they just aren't aware of. Doesn't solve the audio issue if they aren't willing to disable it though.
Yes, in fact, during the engagement, they even showed us where the camera trigger zone is, which they reduced to their driveway, and even added the blackout region for when I'm on my porch, as the wide angle of the lens made it impossible to point it away from my front porch. They were really cooperative and I tried to ensure that I wasn't being demanding.
I even tried to meet them half way and said you can keep recording audio and video, now that I understand the trigger zone, but I was met with hostility the next day when I saw one of them in person.
Although, even with the trigger zone, they can just live stream it anyways, not that they are that kind of people, but clearly, I struck a nerve with them. I am still friends with one of them, and all their kids. So it's just one family member that sees things differently.
> 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.
Impossible to believe with the ubiquity that they haven't decreased crime. Or at least certain types of crimes.
Prior to this type of video only a small amount of people had security cameras and generally they were easily spotted.
Today anyone committing (again a certain type of) crime knows that if they drive into a neighborhood or walk around they will be on a camera somewhere and multiple times. That has to have an impact even if there isn't data to prove it.
I live downtown. The same "folks" that steal things, that I've seen for a better part of a decade, drug addictions and all, still steal stuff. It's just the police are not going to bother with it. One of them tried to steal our plant! Yes, our $5 plant. But I caught them in person, and they apologized, but they were high on some drugs.
Ha, you'd hate me. I have cameras pointing out the front of my house that record my driveway, the road, and incidentally the neighbor's driveways and front yards and such. No audio, though.
I wouldn't hate you! :) Clearly you've engaged your neighbors if they are cool with it. You also mentioned no audio. I even told them it's fine with audio, now that I understood how the system works. Alas, no audio is obviously better as I don't have to ask my friends to walk further away from the line of side of the camera.
Yeah audio is sketchy, I don't want to record that anyway. The impetus for the whole thing was my neighbors having a porch pirate experience. We all got together and since I'm the only nerd in this immediate area, I got nominated to run a couple cameras in case it ever happens again. Not like it'd likely result in anybody being caught, we're realistic about it, but still.
I believe it's the reason Nest defaults to not recording audio, because the law various by state, and even mixed within some states. For 2-party (all-party) states, you can't record audio on security cameras (or at least it's a bad idea, and likely illegal).
>>For 2-party (all-party) states, you can't record audio on security cameras (or at least it's a bad idea, and likely illegal).
You can record audio in public, and a street facing audio recording is low risk, unless the microphone is so sensitive that there is an argument you are picking up audio from, for example, a neighbor's back yard. I think a sign indicating audio and video recording is sensible.
That said, a backyard facing camera has real risks about the video and certainly the audio coverage. A reasonable person would not use audio recording and would carefully manage coverage to exclude neighbor's private spaces.
No, I'm quite certain the parent comment is correct. I'm only familiar with Florida's laws on the subject but I've personally had to deal with setting up intermittent audio recording in a "public" area (private business but not a room that anyone would think is "private") and state law was very clear that we had to make sure there was some reasonable signage to notify anyone entering the area that audio recording was being used.
A sign indicating audio recording was taking place is directly comparable to the standard "This call is being recorded for quality assurance" that's ubiquitous on corporate call queues. That's reasonable enough for consent in the context of security cams. If someone wants to talk on your doorstep after seeing the notice that's reasonable enough, if you don't consent then don't go up to the camera and talk about some private subject.
Unfortunately this is a reason for single family homes on large lots. Privacy. I have large hedges between me and my neighbors which block visuals and all but the loudest noises.
Floodlights are great for security and I like the cams to get a notification when packages arrive or to see if I closed the garage or if there v is any suspicious persons coming on my property, etc. Wyze has great AI person and package detection from my usage. I don’t actively monitor video unless something happened that warranted it. I also do not put it in places that it can pick up neighbors private moments.
There is only one way to reach the mindset of a person like that and that is to install your own cameras on your property and face all of them at his house. Any of them that you can face directly into his windows the better. This may get negative attention here on HN but sometimes a pissing contest is the only way to get through to someone. You already tried the nice approach.
I understand your concern, but if it’s something that can be seen/heard from the next property over, I don’t know that you can reasonably expect such things to be private.
Although now I’m imagining this taken to the extreme, like if your neighbors set up a 24/7 HD video feed with a hyperbolic microphone etc aimed directly at your front porch. That sort of behavior is certainly weird.
I see where you're coming from, but in the US at least there is no legal right to privacy outside/in public. That Amazon can and will turn over recordings - possibly without even a warrant - is horrifying. But that's basically the reality in the UK with CCTV.
Should something be done about it? Sure. But that's where we are.
Can confirm I use them to watch my kids. I don't think they provide any security / can't imagine they would.
Having said that the cameras only trigger recording action that happens on my property. Other places might appear in view but they don't trigger a recording.
Why not take some active measures? Bright IR light directed at the camera. Maybe there's an ultrasonic noise that would effectively disable the mic. I assume there's an auto gain control so a loud enough (but inaudible to us) sound might do it.
It would be a crime for you to use an air pellet rifle and sabotage the device. It would also be a crime if you used spray paint for the same end. I suspect the cameras are sensitive to IR light blinding them, but again, any kind of sabotage could be criminal.
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.
Something to consider would be pointing a directed beam of sound towards the microphone. Bonus points if it’s an endless loop of you saying “I like to spy on my neighbors” over and over again.
You have no right not to be recorded in public in my opinion. You're the one shooting photons onto their property (the camera) that they should be able to do what they want with.
Wild, don't you have any laws against this?
Here in CZ(EU), you can't put camera facing public property just like that, I don't even mention facing private property of somebody else, lol.
Even camera facing your property and like corner of view is public property, I can send formal complaint to "GDPR" bureau, they will warn the property owner, if nothing happens, fine incoming which can be pretty huge.
I don't know about your US "rights". But here it's illegal to record somebody without permission and store it somewhere. Basically against GDPR.
Of course, as a property owner you can request cameras facing public space, but you must be GDPR compliant then and you're put into register and anybody can requests deletion. Also you must provide valid reason for this request.
To me(us) is absurd that you can record private citizens and do whatever you want with it. Ridiculous.
This type of thing is actually one of the cases were GDPR has been enforced, although it varies from country to country. Seems CCTV is most heavily enforced in Spain.
Their crossing the street to avoid you is a confession of having spied on you deliberately. It's their kame-hame-ha of scorn, they have to do it because otherwise you'll see what they've been peeking at, means they're guilty as shit.
Most likely. I certainly didn't bring any of that up, nor will I. I've spoken to this person on a couple of occasions since then for some other matters that were urgent, and they didn't run away. But I'm not going to engage them to talk about the weather. So hopefully they mature and see that they overreacted.
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.
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.
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.
What modern thieves steal are the same thing they have always stolen; items that are resellable. Go to your local pawn shop and you'll see what attracts thieves. Video game systems, power tools, amps, guitars, routers, and tons of bicycles.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. I've found the last group that gets access to invasive surveillance data is the local police.
For a while, Google was offering reverse GPS lookups of phones to the police. ("List all phones in this bounding box at this time in the past"). If you had Google Maps installed on your phone, then you were automatically opted in to sharing the data.
(I think this may be illegal in some US jurisdictions now; though Biden is talking about specific carve outs preventing sharing of GPS traces near abortion clinics with state governments, so who knows...)
Someone broke into a remote building at 2AM. We had video of them doing it with a precise start / stop timestamp for the event, and of no one else in the area. The police said they couldn't ask Google to query the database for them.
So, we're in a situation where the data exists on everyone, but only abusive law enforcement types and creepy marketers are willing to use it.
We can't even really have an argument about the tradeoffs between privacy and security, since the data isn't available for the benefit of normal victims of normal crimes.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You're missing the "informed" part of "informed consent".
20 years ago, if the world's biggest online retailer had a particular security camera that was their most recommended, chances are it would just be a pretty good security camera.
Today, that retailer is deliberately pushing its own products that compromise our privacy so they can collect more data on us in hopes of making more money—and, if that weren't enough, providing it to the police with no warrant, no consent, and no recourse.
In my experience, most "average people"—not tech-savvy people, and not conspiracy nuts—fall into one of two camps on privacy: Either they don't understand that their privacy is likely to be violated by something like Ring, or they do, but they've come to the conclusion that there's no hope for privacy and just given up.
In neither of these cases can true informed consent be possible.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
I suppose it's a reasonable tradeoff to people who can't quantify risk and treat everything as uncertain, have too much money, too few problems, oh! - and whose neighbor just got one.
The same busy-bodies posting long Facebook screeds about how they narrowly avoided a pack of child traffickers at Local Suburbia Shopping Plaza with a picture of two hispanic dudes in work clothes and a work van buying diapers.
I find them to be generally unconcerned with anybody else except for the monthly PFP change.
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/.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry I can't help you, I'm not always in front of my TV (I don't even own a TV)... but there are probably easy solution to cast it to your phone or computer...
But to tell you the truth, I hate looking at the camera footage... I just keep a month worth in my archive and never look at it unless something important happened.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I dislike these beliefs that idealize a world with no trust or cooperation. Humans are social animals and we do our best when we work together. We don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water and private host everything on our own servers because one company is doing something shady. You can own your data on someone else's hardware with strong encryption and common sense legislation that regulates how its accessed.
Reasonable, but your position if taken to extremes can lead to oppressive conformism - eg if you choose not to have or share footage from a security camera, you become an object of suspicion yourself. Relying on 'common sense legislation' assumes a level of probity which is often sadly lacking.
>I dislike these beliefs that idealize a world with no trust or cooperation. Humans are social animals and we do our best when we work together.
I agree. Remember, cooperation and trust brought you such gems as:
The Trail of Tears
Jim Crow
Standard Oil
The Holocaust
MKULTRA
COINTELPRO
The War on Drugs
WWII internment camps
The Rwandan Genocide
The Uiyghur genocide
Systemic Human Rights abuses
Plenty of other bits and bobs of nastyness no one wants to admit to.
The problem with cooperation without strict limits, is that cooperation is the "might makes right" of our time. Network effects are a hell of a superpower, and like all superpowers, there is a responsibility to really consider whether the world truly is a better place with it. When you build these social constructs, you're putting a lot of motive power into potentially only precious few hands.
Cooperation and trust is all good when you're the one watching the local outgroup get curb stomped.
Woe be unto the ingroup that becomes the outgroup due to lack of foresight.
I like humans that aren't focusing on targeting other groups of humans.
Your data in the cloud is the data of the cloud service's.
Your data is protected. Your cloud service resident data is not.
My rule is simple. If I cannot point at the drives my 0's and 1's are ultimately stored on, and the drives I point at do not belong to me, operating in in computers I own, it isn't mine. I don't have a fleet of lawyers to navigate the "technically mine" ToS/EULA minefield.
If I own the hardware, and I own the software on it, it is mine. Otherwise, short of levels of audit I find extremely unpleasant, it's an arms length arrangement I personally am intensely uncomfortable with given the track record humanity has demonstrated with prioritizing short-term self-interest against not doing questionable things in the long term.
I find this simplistic treatment of things, while making my life and software choices fewer in number, and less polished, tends to keep my friends and family out of trouble and harms way. They know the lecture is coming, and they still come see me anyway.
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".
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!
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.
The only person you can control the affairs and effects of is you.
Big data beat the trust out of me. The bigger the dataset, the more likely it is to attract abuse. I started out my computing career with what others described as a near martyr level of dedication to keeping my customers data private. I'm still that, but after working for everyone else in the industry and finding that the moment you give them a scrap of data, you just kicked off a chain of 3 or 4 bulk transfers to people you aren't even aware of...
I can't control them. I can only echo for people the importance of understanding:
no one is nice until proven otherwise. Not even me. Trust only what you have made, or what you yourself have been gifted, and can modify.
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).
They own it legally, and they are absolutely unsuccessful in stopping unauthorized copies. Same with the Ring videos, no? The owner of camera owns the recordings, maybe, but they can't really control disclosure.
I wonder too. I suppose it's not straightforward, maybe there are something written in the ToS and EULA, maybe those things are invalid... the people writing this article weren't sure either. They say that in case you record to a medium locally, you have the copyright, but in case of cloud services, it's unclear.
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?
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.
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?
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/, though it seems focused on license plate readers.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.