I had a ring and loved it. I don't really understand most of the negative coverage of it.
The Vice article says Ring is "delivering footage to cops without your consent" but if you click through the links this refers to cases where Ring handed over the footage after police got warrants. I realize Ring can act faster than most companies - but if you set up your own security system and the police got a warrant you'd have to hand over footage too. You cannot choose to not consent to a warrant in any case. Ring notifies you so it's not like they are being deceitful.
I realize a lot of people on HN are super privacy minded and a Ring is not for them, but realistically if you buy a Ring you WANT to protect your home/family in which case you would happily hand over footage if police were investigating a robbery next door. That's going to protect your home/family too, which is the entire point. I understand if you are in the 1% of people that wants a home security system but doesn't want to help your neighbors then you shouldn't buy it, but that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people.
>In a complaint, the FTC says Ring deceived its customers by failing to restrict employees’ and contractors’ access to its customers’ videos, using customer videos to train algorithms, among other purposes, without consent, and failing to implement security safeguards.
> According to the complaint, these failures amounted to egregious violations of users’ privacy. For example, one employee over several months viewed thousands of video recordings belonging to female users of Ring cameras that surveilled intimate spaces in their homes such as their bathrooms or bedrooms. The employee wasn’t stopped until another employee discovered the misconduct. Even after Ring imposed restrictions on who could access customers’ videos, the company wasn’t able to determine how many other employees inappropriately accessed private videos because Ring failed to implement basic measures to monitor and detect employees’ video access.
>I realize a lot of people on HN are super privacy minded and a Ring is not for them, but realistically if you buy a Ring you WANT to protect your home/family in which case you would happily hand over footage if police were investigating a robbery next door.
that's a pretty cherry-picked case. how does 'protecting your family' apply when your own footage is misinterpreted to convict a family member?
surveillance panopticon goes both ways, it can just as easily provide what appears to be damning evidence against the actual innocent.
here's my problem: evidence gathering has outpaced reliable evidence interpretation. Ring doesn't solve this problem, but it does amplify it. This isn't all catching criminals and guilty, as with any surveillance there are second order effects as well as just absolute inaccuracy.
How many innocent husbands/wives have been dumped by significant others by sheer misinterpretation of GPS data or otherwise seemingly damning evidence from a phone or mobile account?
The People In Charge do this daily and with far greater consequence for those that find themselves under the gavel.
> I realize a lot of people on HN are super privacy minded and a Ring is not for them, but realistically if you buy a Ring you WANT to protect your home/family in which case you would happily hand over footage if police were investigating a robbery next door.
I don't follow the logic. The police are not your friends. They are not the good guys. Their job is not to protect you or your neighbor. It's to put people (possibly you) in jail--as many as they can. Handing surveillance footage over to the police only makes their job easier. It does not necessarily "protect your home/family". In general, getting involved with law enforcement, even as a crime victim or witness, is fraught. Let alone as a subpoena target or person of interest. Best to be as invisible as you can.
I don't really think this is paranoid. Encounters with the police come with a non-zero chance of being put in jail, injured, or even killed. The upside is questionable.
Many of us live in places where if a neighbor is robbed the chances the robber will come back to the neighborhood again and maybe rob us is several orders of magnitude higher than the chances that anything bad (or even mildly inconvenient) will happen to us if he give the police all information we have that might help identify the robber, and where police will in fact use that information to try to catch the robber.
In most jurisdictions in the US cops won't even investigate a burglary unless somebody gets hurt. They simply have too many higher priorities.
Yes if you can give them video of the bad guy that helps, but only a little. They now have the burglar's face, but that doesn't give them the burglar's address. Maybe your camera got the license plate number of the burglar's car? Won't help: Burglars mostly use stolen plates nowadays because so many people have cameras.
Your best hope is for the burglar to actually hurt one of your neighbors, or the burglary wave becomes so egregious that elected officials notice and put pressure on the cops.
Cameras are not magic crime-stopping devices: They still require police to take action, and when police are motivated to take action, cameras are useful. For simple property crimes which the cops won't investigate, cameras don't do much. You're better off making your home a harder target with heavier doors, bars on the windows, etc because those things encourage the burglars to move on to the next house. Cameras don't do that. Why? Because the burglars know everything I've written above.
This argument seems to be trending towards a dangerous precedent - government actors are always good and you shouldn’t have a problem giving up your privacy.
The issue with warrants against Ring is you don’t own your data and law enforcement can go around you to get your video footage. If instead they had to issue a warrant against each household, it wouldn’t be as easy to invade your privacy.
Sure you can refuse providing images - if they involve you. It's a clear cut case of self incrimination. With Ring, you are inviting a stranger onto your property to record non stop footage, and they can never refuse any disclosure.
Why would you be cautious of that, if you have nothing to hide? Suppose police has an unsubstantiated theory about your actions on a certain date, perhaps after using illegal evidence or false witnesses. They can now use parallel construction to build a case against you by using surveillance data you can't control.
They can even go fishing around the neighborhood until they find a random somebody that was out of the house at that specific time of the night. With an extra bit of circumstantial evidence, your life is derailed.
I think the issue it’s that you don’t control the system so you never know when your video is accessed. With local systems or something like HomeKit, the video is inaccessible to anyone but the user. If the cops want the video, they have to come to that persons home and ask or bring a warrant. Meanwhile, Ring cameras have a freaking portal for cops to access video as long as they claim to have something resembling a warrant.
Most people cannot see beyond the scope of their narrow lives. Therefore we see so many "it does not matter if google reads my emails". People to not think that it might be wrong that google reads everyone's mails, even people in the offices, government boards, etc. Amazon, and Google have the power to know everything about everybody.
The problem is that we do not know how companies treat and uses their data.
The problem is that it is hard to prove that something is abused, because data or somewhere. Your data could be constantly abused, and you would not know about it.
Corporations have multiple times shown that you cannot trust them with your data. Governments have multiple times that you cannot trust them. Sometimes tracks were lost because corporations intentionally removed proof of their wrongdoings on their servers!
If a system can be abused, it will be abused.
Just think what would Korean people think that people in America voluntarily install surveillance systems in their houses. Huh.
That is how we reach the final conclusion. America has never experience totalitarianism, and it cannot be brushed with a simple statement 'it will never happen here'. Even with the smallest chance of happening, it is so drastically dramatic scenario that it need to be stopped at all costs.
> if police were investigating a robbery next door
Assuming they’re doing that. It’s not always the case that police are obtaining or using warrants for virtuous reasons (see the Marion County Record raid, for a recent possible example)
>The Vice article says Ring is "delivering footage to cops without your consent" but if you click through the links this refers to cases where Ring handed over the footage after police got warrants.
I don't care if they have warrants, my property shouldn't work against me.
The Vice article says Ring is "delivering footage to cops without your consent" but if you click through the links this refers to cases where Ring handed over the footage after police got warrants. I realize Ring can act faster than most companies - but if you set up your own security system and the police got a warrant you'd have to hand over footage too. You cannot choose to not consent to a warrant in any case. Ring notifies you so it's not like they are being deceitful.
I realize a lot of people on HN are super privacy minded and a Ring is not for them, but realistically if you buy a Ring you WANT to protect your home/family in which case you would happily hand over footage if police were investigating a robbery next door. That's going to protect your home/family too, which is the entire point. I understand if you are in the 1% of people that wants a home security system but doesn't want to help your neighbors then you shouldn't buy it, but that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people.