Amazon’s Ring to Partner with Flock
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Amazon's Ring is partnering with Flock, a network of AI cameras used by law enforcement, sparking concerns about mass surveillance and privacy; the discussion highlights the tension between security and individual freedoms.
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Even public information clearly describes how it is the "CIAs" one trick pony, whether it's orchestrating a "color revolution" for "democracy", instigating conflicts and war to feign innocent self-defense, implementing social engineering and Constitutional subversion, or implementing mass surveillance specifically. It's the same wife-beater and child rapist type pattern of grooming abuse that then feigns innocence and deflects blame to anything and anyone else.
Most people are really not all that different than any run of the mill battered wife (even if only in the making), psychologically. I get it a lot when I point out what a trap and an illegitimate, enemy entity that the EU is (not to pick on the EU, because it also applies to the US and many other places, but it's far more pronounced with the "EU-cultists")... You get the constant predictable defenses of the love-bombing "abusive boyfriend"/wife beater in the making responses. "you don't understand", "the EU really loves me", "you never want anything good for me", "he showers me with all kinds of benefits and slick marketing", "we are going to be happy forever".
It's sad, and as someone that has watched that cycle unfold even in my own family, it's really kind of demoralizing and somewhat depressing to know exactly where it's heading and being unable to counter the forces that have roots a long long time ago, forces of nature. So, the US and the EU will have to suffer that which is predictable and was preventable, no matter how much they wanted to see the world through rose colored glasses.
Maybe for humanity's sake, China can free the world of the scourge of this cycle and the psychopathic, narcissistic, maniacal group of people that causes it all... if they don't just kill all life on the planet because if they can't be in control then no one can be in control.
Since then we've forgotten how to enforce anti monopoly and media ownership rules. Similarly we've somehow completely turned campaign financing into an open competition for bribes.
And when there are more companies it's easier to tell people to buy a different one because that one is doing something shady. When Amazon does it, you recommend that unsophisticated people do what, use a Chinese camera which is presumably shunting the feeds to that government?
Unpopular take, I know, because it demands that people actually understand the technology they're using and where their data flows, and almost nobody has the skill, time, attention, money, and mindspace for that... but that's the only way to be a responsible networked camera user.
This isn't a capitalist or any other "ist" problem. It is a problem with society and social norms.
The cameras are there because people want them to be. The cameras get used because it is not politically toxic to do so. The use continues because the people objecting to the current abuse don't object on a principal level, they love the jackboot. They'd just rather see it used to levy ruinous fines upon middle class scofflaws (got I hate that word and the people who use it unironically) than whisk brown people off the street. Sure, different people would screech if the powers that be pivoted in that direction but at no point does the screeching add up to change because only the people who hate a specific abuse screech at any one time.
yes, some people genuinely do, and some people don’t.
some people have absolutely no understanding of what surveillance tech is doing and where it is going.
in terms of the “ist” problem you refer to, at the end of the day, the real answer is to deny anyone that amount of power. whether it’s corporations, religions, governments, or billionaires. none of these should have enough power to sway the world to terrifying places. none of them, including govs, billionaires, or corporations.
somehow we need to achieve separation of money and state with as much vigor as we used to separate church and state.
we should be incentivizing the power from all of those groups to be dispersed as much as possible.
This used to be called "equality under the law" and laws that could not be written equally or enforced equally were not written or overturned by the courts.
The US in particular had discrimination encoded in law for a long time. It took Rosa Parks in 1955 to end "white only" areas in public transport, and it took until 1965 until racial discrimination by law was finally outlawed.
"Equality under the law" always depends on who is considered to be part of the group that enjoys said equality. Even today, many countries still have laws on the books that discriminate between ethnicity and/or country of origin and/or citizenship. Just look at us in Europe - you usually have to be a citizen of an EU country to hold public office for example, residency is not enough. Or you got border patrol clearly profiling whom to control at a border checkpoint - whites get left alone and unbothered, non-whites get the full experience of what border control is allowed to do. That's not just discrimination, it's showing citizens that happen to have non-white skin that despite them being equal citizens by law, in practice there is no equality.
Focusing on race or any other distinction among the peasants is categorically missing the point. This isn't about peasants vs peasants. It's about peasants and small groups of peasants vs big moneyed interests. Some small time tire shop gets fined into oblivion for letting chemicals go down their drain meanwhile Jiffy Lube does that all day and doesn't get picked on because their lawyers can craft a story about why it's fine. In the old days everyone or nobody could dump it down the drain. Some homeowner can't put up an ADU because "hurr durr wetlands" but some megacorp can buy his land and put up a solar farm in the same damn wetlands because they can put fancy stuff on fancy letterhead and put it in front of the regulators. 100yr ago either everyone could build there or nobody could.
We've given our regulatory agencies massive, massive, discretionary power and insanely broad mandates. And what winds up happening is that they pick on the small and the weak because those targets are plentiful and easy. We created dragnet surveillance to "stop terrorists" (it was a crappy argument even then) and it gets used to round up brown people or chase down and bankrupt a random business because 1/20 of their trucks had a plate that was illegible to toll readers for years on end. We told the EPA to make the water clean and they go harass farmers for digging trenches. Don't get me started on the FDA and opium. NYPD couldn't get away with stop and frisk (well, they could and did for far too long but that's not the point) but law enforcement across the country can now stop damn near anyone for any BS pretext because a technological obfuscation layer gives them pretext (much like the fake bomb detectors we were selling to the Iraqis back in the day) and the scale and division of responsibility makes it hold up in court.
If one person or a small group can't do a thing then a big group shouldn't either. And if a big group can do a thing then the small group.
If it's ok for ICE to just stop brown people then it's ok for NYPD to do stop and frisk. And if that's not ok then adjust the law.
For what it's worth I fully agree with you!
The thing is, this just isn't achievable with modern politics. The big guns will always lobby for them to be exempted in some way, and even if only by funding the enforcement agencies only so limited that they have no way of enforcing the law againt the big fish.
And on top of that you got Conservatives (or whatever tries to sell themselves under that label these days) and Wilhoit's (misattributed) law [1]:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit
So why wouldn’t any accept capitalism and ignore its flaws?
"The Government" is not a entity with "wants" or "needs", it's a collection of people with their own motivations. Motivations that usually end up being about power or money, or a combination, because the people who end up in the government are capitalists.
> why it was the 2nd most important thing to those
I mean, not really? The 2nd amendment includes stuff that they didn't even think of originally when creating the constitution, so just because it was the second amendment that went through, doesn't mean it was "the 2nd most important thing", the most important things are the original articles in the constitution, so the amendments must start ranking at 8th place or something like that, 2nd amendment ends up being the 9th most important thing if we were to rank things like you did, but honestly.
The main issue is that its power only grows. No one sane would propose to reduce his influence and/or make his job harder and everyone has ideas on how to make his job easier. It's not about capitalism, communism or anything else. The only thing that plays a role is how many somewhat independent influence blocks you have and whether you have a system to stop the power creep and 'we only have to vote it in once' problem.
And it's not even strictly about 'easier' from the perspective of the worker. I imagine if you deal with police work and such spying probably seems a lot more reasonable since you're very exposed to the bad part of society, which does skew your view of the world, no matter how rational you think you are.
ICE are fat and woefully underqualified.
Surely in 2025 a ragtag group of people with some revolvers, pistols, hunting rifles, and a small minority owning assault rifles, with limited ammo will be able to fight against the most well-funded armed force with tanks, IFVs, assault helicopters, aircrafts, missiles, rockets, and military infantry armed to the gills wearing NVGs.
People who think 2A will do anything in case your government actually turns violent on you are just trying to maintain the illusion of control.
Elected in part by the useful idiots on HN and many other places. They were so ignorant of how government actually works they were happy to give it this power. They foresaw the jackboot being used to stomp petty criminals and fellow middle class types who don't "pay their fair share". But they had never cracked open a history book because if they had they would know that sort of stuff is never a top priority.
There's another word we can call them: juvenile.
Are we sure that formalized populist regulation is the boogeyman? Like, really absolutely super duper double-checked certain?
These people don't care, they might put on a fake persona that pretends to care, but you outright don't care if you work at these places. You get a job somewhere else when you care.
What you hear from them isn't caring, it's just a way for them to pretend they are someone they aren't. The person they pretend to be would not be working there.
(Context, IBM helped the Nazis with recordkeeping.)
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II
IBM did a ton of business with the Nazis.
Cops need a warrant to track your phone, check which tower it connected to or tail your car for extended period of time.
Cops do not need a warrant to use Flock system. They have an app where they can simply put your license plate and they will get a path showing every move of your car as tracked by the flock cameras, and there are a looot of them (e.g. near San Jose: https://deflock.me/map#map=16/37.335318/-121.881316). And thats without the integration of ring.
This essentially allows them to GPS tag anyone, with no warrant, while "following the laws". So no, it's not all the same.
They definitely need to follow the law when they get it from the Telco, but Cops can use their CSS/IMSI catcher all they want, theres almost no way to tell. But they can not then go to court and say "Yeah—we listened to their phone call and searched the car."
With this its no problem. No Hailstorm to buy for the entire force and there isn't any federal oversight on this sort of thing as near as I can tell. If you think police don't do crimes I've got a bridge to sell you.
That part you can't do. Unless the battery is removed, phone can be turned back on remotely.
They can do it right up until the battery truly discharges. You can’t turn off WiFi/BT for real either. Icons will go dark and your WiFi and devices won’t work, but underneath the radios are still plenty active and powered on.
- You can disable this feature
- Disabling radios from Control Center behaves differently than from Settings
https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...
https://ring.com/search-party
People are buying these things out of fear anyways. I thought they'd be happy big brother is watching.
I live on a bucolic cul-de-sac in a house that I've lived in since the mid 1970s. Most of the neighbors are the same. I never in my life expected a random person to drive down the street, drag a lady out of his trunk, chase her around the cul-de-sac, and stab her to death in front of my house. I never expected to find the body in the woods 40' from my side door. This is when I also learned that nobody comes to clean up after a crime like that and that if I didn't want pools of blood in front of my house and a 50' streak of it crossing the circle or the splatters all over the mailboxes that I was going to have to go out there and clean it up myself. I was in PTSD therapy for a while after that. I'm glad the Ring camera caught some of the activity.
After an event like that, it's easy to lose a sense of security in your home. How are you supposed to sleep the night after that happens, when the perpetrator remains at large? You can't lock your doors hard enough or do anything at all to feel secure. That lack of sense of security does not go away in a day or a week or a month. It goes away when you can find "normal" again. It helped us to find normal by installing other cameras around the house.
I don't want Ring or Arlo or anybody to be automatically sharing my camera footage with anybody. Even with the murder event, it was my choice to go through the footage and share it with the authorities. I don't support authoritarian "law enforcement" activities, I don't want anybody tapping into my camera feed to find lost pets or for any other reason. They shouldn't be allowed to do it. Like many other services we all use, we're more of the product than the customer, as our data is harvested and used for other purposes.
Personal security is different than targeted advertising. Most people won't know they need or want a camera until after they have experienced something that makes them feel less secure in their home. I just hope they have the wits to read the Terms and understand what they're opting into before automatically accepting all of the opt-in-by-default data sharing.
But I definitely would not want to live in that world. And I think that's true for most people. It's kind of interesting too because there's some really nasty arguments one can make about this like, 'What, you'd rather see children kidnapped and even killed than consenting to surveillance that won't even be looked at unless you're under suspicion?'
But it's quite disingenuous, because with any freedom there is always a cost, and that cost is often extreme. 40,000+ people die per year because of our freedom to drive, yet few would ever use that as an argument to prohibit driving.
I think it's the opposite. I think people would prefer the peace of mind of living in a high trust society. People like predictability and being able to trust people. I also think people would enjoy that laws that people pass are actually applied and we can efficiently apply the will of the people to the country.
>with any freedom there is always a cost
Laws ultimately would be what restrict your freedom, not the enforcement of them. I don't think freedom should rely on poor enforcement of laws.
Your perceptions of other peoples' views are also off. Even with the current scope of government surveillance, 66% of Americans say that the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits. [1] And laws would not be what limit freedoms. Government and authority is not some abstract holistic entity. It's made up of people, like you and I. Would you feel comfortable with me being able to surveil every moment of your life? The difference between me and the person who would end up doing so is not this great gulf you might imagine.
For instance Snowden revealed that NSA officers would regularly collect and trade sexually explicit media obtained from surveillance. [2] They'd also use their position to spy on their love interests to the point it gained it's own little sardonic moniker 'LOVEINT'. The people that would be looking through those cameras are just people. And the government leadership overseeing these groups would include those prone to go off to an island to screw minors, or more upstanding fellows like Eric Swalwell, cheating on his wife with a Chinese spy while serving on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that oversees the entire US intelligence apparatus, and would oversee this sort of surveillance.
We're all just people, warts and all.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/11/15/key-takea...
[2] - https://time.com/3010649/nsa-sexually-explicit-photographs-s...
In such a society, people don't steal because thieves have been removed from society. You can trust others because they have proven through their life that they are trustworthy. By trust I was talking between the people in society and not about the government trusting that people would not break laws. Humans are not perfect, so it's a bad assumption to assume that citizens will not break laws.
>66% of Americans say that the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits
The article you linked was about the current benefits. This is different than what I am talking about where laws are able to be effectively be enforced.
>Would you feel comfortable with me being able to surveil every moment of your life?
What do I get in return from you? Nothing? Then I have no reason to do so.
>NSA officers would regularly collect and trade sexually explicit media obtained from surveillance.
This should be made an instantly firable offense, like it is in the tech industry for accessing personal data of users. There should be alerting when such data is accessed to ensure that systems are not being abused.
This is a very "Star Trek" view of the future and even Star Trek repeatedly demonstrates that the perfect society is an illusion.
You can't really have endless redundancies and, at scale, this becomes even more true where the vast amount of data and processing becomes ever less viable to filter. And when you had 24/7 footage of everybody at every moment, that takes scale and ups it to an inconceivably vast level. More generally I think removing thieves from society, with extreme prejudice, is a far more pleasant path forward for everybody than treating everybody like a potential thief.
that is a fantastic argument to force reduced driving and shows up in virtually all discussions about car safety and public transit.
Your doorbell photo of a car was really the only evidence to convict someone of murder?
I'm glad I live somewhere that needs more proof that.
Even in the most dystopian sci-fi future where a hostile and totalitarian government watches everything everybody does, they would still use the information to investigate boring everyday crimes.
The (non rethoric) question is, are people willing to pay the increasing price of non-crime related surveillance as we see diminished security margins.
The owners I know consider it a convenience device.
Personally not a compelling enough reason to buy the camera in the first place, but those non crime notifications end up being the most common once it's up.
They are toys
Once Amazon started rolling out other stuff and it was clear they were setting up a private panopticon, I trashed it and went with Blink, adding five wireless cameras as well. Blink isn't much better, but they're not as broadly compatible and don't have as many bells and whistles yet - but they're getting there.
The next step is to roll my own stuff. I expect I'll have that done by the end of the year.
I'll also note that none of my Blink cameras are pointing outward from my home. The closest to that is that I have one mounted on the front corner eave, but I made sure to point it so that it's looking at where I park my vehicles, and turned off motion detection for the small area of the street that it can see.
What I don't understand is that most of the ones I've seen others install are mounted under the eaves of the house, pointing outward. What's the purpose of that? They're not going to capture anyone actually trying to mess with your property. Most of mine are mounted in trees (front yard) or on posts that I installed for that purpose (back yard).
IMO it properly reflects that what looks like an active affirmative choice by the user is actually not.
This f shameless pretention of doing something noble - barely helpful above normal practices btw. - while manipulating clueless users into turning on mass-surveillance is revolting and disgusting. And ordinary employees figured this out, phrased, created content, implemmented, pubished, and are maintaining this dirty practice. Many times with (very misplaced) pride. Shame on all of them actively participating in this coward scheme!
Even if it only provides deterrence, and a slight chance of after the fact punishment, I don't feel idiotic for buying a "doorstep Webcam", the door is visible from the street so there is no expectation of privacy and I really don't care that someone else could access those recordings.
If I had indoors cameras they would be in a private network. But for a front porch camera the easiest to install IOT junk is perfectly serviceable.
My wife is extremely upset about all of this, and I'm not going to be bullied out of the opinion that 24/7 cameras are actually a good thing.
The police knew the guy (young adults with bright orange hoodie are quite uncommon here) and they told me that he already did this a few time before moving in my neighborhood and that they never had enough evidences to do something else than fine him.
Also I think the police are bored in my city because there were 4 patrols cars in the street when I got back home.
just don't get ones owned by evil megacorps who have openly said they'll sell access to ICE
The reason Ring is popular isn't just marketing or network effect, it's that it works. Before Ring and clones, security camera / DVR combos were really hard to make effective, I tried. Maybe you'd have a totally reliable system with good video, but it'd fail to notify you when you need it to, or notify way too often. Battery power was infeasible because cameras couldn't sleep. Phone notifications were DIY. A long compounding list of things could go wrong and make you miss an important event or fail to record it entirely. I'm hoping those have caught up by now, but haven't found any.
At what point will the police request a warrant to run their own Search Party without consent?
A dog isn’t even on par to identifying humans. But let’s suppose if there’s a shooter on the run and my camera detects it, would I share that. Yes of course. Why wouldn’t I?
“Search party lets you use your outdoor Ring cameras to help neighbors in your area”
Note: doesn’t mention pets yet. Then:
“Starting with lost pets, Search party will…”
What comes after lost pets? Very open ended
endangered animal conservation groups looking for rare birds
Are there any wireless (running power to these locations is not an option) doorbell cams that record to local storage instead of the cloud? I refuse to pay a subscription for these things.
Ideally they would record to my server instead of onboard SD card so that the footage can't just walk away if someone grabs the camera.
You can make this point stronger: Amazon is a police surveillance company (with Ring), just not primarily.
Have people never read/watched a sci-fi book/film before?
If it's not running free software and treated in a secure fashion (camera can't talk to anything other than the server, enforced at the network level, etc) then it's not a risk per-se.
However people would rather pay up front and pay subscriptions to get outside companies to run it than run their own their own equipment. In the 90s when I was excited about tech I didn't even consider that aspect.
Sounds good from a security point of view, although it also says they disable functions like having more than one person able to view the camera (having a partner be able to answer the door seems pretty fundamental; they probably just can't be arsed to make such functionality work with safety turned on...)
Of course, just like with Signal or anything else that gets regular updates, they can push an update to your device specifically that sends the decryption key out. You'll always have to trust them to not do something like that, but that's a whole different level from subpoenaing data they have on a hard drive
Because when I reverse engineered my Tuya-based camera-equipped pet feeder, I've discovered that there was an encryption on the video stream, but they only encrypted I-frames and left P-frames unencrypted. Amazon is not Tuya, but IoT is IoT.
My point is, there are myriad of ways IoT vendor can boast "encryption" and "security" on the marketing materials, while the actual implementation could be flawed beyond redemption.
The second best time is today.
Unfortunately the public love this stuff, and are quite happy to have CCTV pointing at your house. Privacy never existed 300 years ago, it doesn't today. Accept your feudal masters and make peace with it, because they won years ago.
I'm not really pro-government, but modern surveillance capitalism really pushes against this view. Put to their own devices, the public will generally (and apparently) flock towards mass surveillance all on their own, and I think one possible implication is that the government surveillance policies are more popular then some folks in HN circles would suspect.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3553976/
"Ignorance is bliss"
2 things.
1. Few people understand most surveillance legislation, including journalists.
2. Most governments use thought terminating cliches involving child safety to force compliance on the middle set of people who dont like surveillance and understand a minimum amount of what the legislation does.
These points leave anti surveillance campaigners fighting an uphill battle. Most people, when they have these laws clearly articulated and arent in danger of being called a pedo for opposing them, oppose them.
When that trade is voluntary, its not really that controversial.
People give facebook tons of data, they dont care because it keeps them in touch with friends. People get upset when the utility of facebook decreases due to enshittification, or if they provide that data to somewhere spooky that they werent aware they were consenting to.
OpenAI is receiving far more data with a far greater privacy impact than social networks. And all this is happening at a time when the US is transitioning from a somewhat functioning democracy to an autocratic and fascist system.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/chatgpt-pa...
Data query around the Netherlands shows about a hundred are mapped so far as specifically doorbell cameras: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2dQw (the tag does not yet seem established in the USA). There are also many thousands of cameras mapped that are either not doorbell-mounted, or simply not tagged to such detail. This is a convenient map to see all of them: https://sunders.intri.cat/
Joking, a little, but seriously: the culture in the US has rotted to such an insane degree. Not only are we not friends with our neighbors, I'm actually scared to talk to them!
The fear in people’s hearts is insane. One memorable one was a Little boy who decided to sell candy bars. I knew the kid from my son’s school. Some psycho followed him for a few hours, tracked down to his home and called the sales tax authorities and the city clerk as he didn’t have a peddler permit. She documented her “investigation”, complete with photos.
its like HOA mental illness. Different people had chased my amazon driver with a phone accusing them of being illegal, calling police for while I was cooking indian food... Ide rather have the crime in the city in contrast to this nonsense
I genuinely believe if I had dog at the time they would had poisoned it for barking once
Because they didn't "follow the rules" or whatever. You see this personality type all up and down HN but usually not so extreme as to call the city about a lemonade stand or whatever.
The city clerk is also the same type of evil. They should have told that person there weren't resources available to enforce or some other lie.
[0] https://maclookup.app/vendors/ring-llc
Then the leaflet drop guys are maybe three different people.
Then there is food delivery, which is rare (because we rarely order) bit still another group of people.
Oh and then there are the Jehovah's witnesses.
Would cameras like these emit any sort of IR light or anything that might be detected from a distance?
Object recognition would depend on them being very obvious from the outside - which Rings do appear to be (I've never seen one in person) but I imagine there will be less-obvious options soon enough, if there isn't already.
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