My sisters bought a Ring camera for my parent's house. They asked me to install it. Before I did I said to my parents "Everything that happens in front of this camera is sent to a 3rd party. Police and others may be able to access this without your permission and you never really know who they are selling data to. Do you still want me to install it?"
They said No. It is still in the box on the counter after over 2 years.
The feature exist and that guarantees the law enforcement will abuse this sooner or later. Opt-in doesn’t mean anything.
You have to be total naive if you still believe that this is a “safe” feature to enable.
It's time for regulation that no images of people may be retained for any commercial purpose without explicit permission of the person whose image is retained. Facial recognition performed on any person who has not granted explicit permission (or, in the case of government, against whom a search warrant has not been obtained) should be illegal. Nor shall any compressed version, broadly defined, of the data be retained (i.e., no training on any sort of facial or pose data without explicit permission of all whose images are used in training).
Penalties should be in the %s of revenue or company assets. Whistleblowers should receive large sums for identifying violations.
In a broader vein, it's time for regulation forbidding the retention or aggregation of any person's data for any commercial purpose other than the one most proximal to the actual transaction in which the person engaged, unless they explicitly opt in.
What would the latter mean? Among other things, targeted ads and recommendation systems would become illegal. Cross-user aggregation (or e.g., a company engaging in any user-longitudinal data analytics) would be illegal. In SQL language, ideally the only time you could do any query with a user ID returning multiple rows for further use would be to serve data directly back to the user. In the long run, such queries should be impossible by requiring something like a) per-user encrypted storage, b) user owned data, c) non-correlatable per-user IDs across transactions.
It will never happen because -- as noted in the article -- many folks in SillyCon valley and government are technofascists, but it should, because our current situation violates all reasonable notions of privacy.
Fuck the police state, and all the technology companies and executives trying to cash in on fascism in the name of "security"
This will be abused by the government, by the police, and every othet nefarious organizations and individuals possible.
I’d be interested to know if anyone has a moderate cost system that doesn’t force you to use a company’s cloud (and thus making them prone to abuse like this). I personally have a POE setup with some commercial grade cameras ($400 a pop), with attached NAS on a private network, and home-rolled a means to access the cameras remotely, but it’s not exactly economical or practical
Key point is police can request, they can't just log in to your cloud and take footage
Then again, doesn't seem like the law matters anymore at least on a federal level.
I was looking at security systems. It seems, Ring makes it very difficult to have any sort of offline operations. Recording onto SD card is limited or impossible. After seeing this, I realize this is likely by design. You have to be connected so that the surveillance state can get access at some point, somehow.
Why don’t we call this by its true name - Amazon? You guys do realize that Amazon intentionally keeps its name off the product for a reason, right? They have Amazon batteries, web hosting, makeup, and every other thing you could possibly imagine. This product though? It’s just “Ring” so that Amazon can avoid the brand damage that comes from facilitating a police state. That is their intention, and they are keeping it at arms length for that reason. The headline of this article should read “Amazon Ring introducing new feature…” not just “Ring”. If we want it to stop, we need to hold the company responsible for what they’re doing.
What's a good dumb way to check on pets via camera/talk to them while you're on vacation? I have ring cameras at home specifically for this use case. but I now want to get rid of them.
I cannot imagine installing surveillance devices in my home but if I did set up cameras they would be on a private network and saving to devices I control.
It seems like people are missing the fact that it's opt-in from the police to the consumer. It's within the end consumer's control to allow the access or not, so by that standard it's not in any way abuse.
It's not Orwellian overreach or, as the EFF claims a breach of Ring's customers' trust, if the customer gives up the data willingly and knowingly.
And lots and lots of people will.
Opt in means nothing in the face of a legal subpoena
As if privacy-minded users needed any more reason to avoid Ring…
This makes me seriously reconsider continuing with my Ring subscription. The chances this will be abused are 1000%.
* At the moment I only have sensors so that Ring tracks movement inside the house. Only when I'm out of the house for an extended amount of time (days), I turn on the cameras.
Are they breaking the E2EE feature, or is this for folks that didn't care/were scared off by the red text that said they wouldn't be able to recover their videos if they lost their trusted devices?
So if I enable this will the police at least use the feeds to only summarily execute me for partaking in my 2nd amendment right to night time home defense, and let the rest of my family live?
"Show proof that you use AI to get promoted." Yep that company won't last too much longer. Managers managing managers managing lemmings.
It feels like what is needed is some kind of protocol for decentralizing the police force (and judiciary downstream). It's a nice idea to have have choices (hopefully it is opt in) but it would be nice to have more choices for protection and law given our current situtation as it is unfolding in various countries.
I'm sad that we're quickly heading towards a future where there will be monitoring of all people, at all times. AI agents will flag people for leaving their house too late at night, or not leaving their house often enough. Our civilization is full of intelligence but it lacks wisdom.
My strategy for Ring when I used it as it was cheapest option with cloud recording and notifications (what's the point of local recordings if someone can just steal them) was to just connect it to a smart plug and then to UPS. I simply disabled power to it just before I got home.
Not only do the prisoners have almost no rights, the innocent are treated like criminals too
> Ring introducing new feature to allow police to live-stream access to cameras
Don't worry, you have nothing to hide, don't you ? They forgot "legaly" in this sentence. Police already has access to it.
I feel vindicated by my choice to have local-only security cameras
Is there some open source alternative to stuff like Ring?
Thanks, I think I’ll stay with the old school non-malware version ;)
Don’t think anyone vaguely tech savvy is buying these anymore
yikes - and I also wonder how many people have these installed inside their house (as in filming the interior).
Reason #37 why I went with Eufy instead.
Such a great feature, for the police.
Wow, that is completely terrible.
I mean what are the privacy-friendly alternatives? Assume others in this market are equally shady. What is the safe, self-hosted solution where we can monitor CCTV from our phones?
Stop putting this shit in your homes people.
"feature"
fuck this bullshit
Let me guess "opt-in" means checked by default and hidden 12 menus deep.
Or worse-yet, opt-in means "Hey our rates are going up, but not if you agree to this" (something comcast did recently).
Or opt-in is stored in some database somewhere and might "accidentally be misread" due to a "bug".
If they want real-opt-in then it should be a SMS message at the time they want to know, and a phone-number you can reach out to for more information. This would give an audit trail at the very least.