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I want law enforcement requests to be difficult, and impossible to automate. Imposing barriers to retrieve footage is a factor which I think helps prevent overreach. Although it's probably too late..

I want both digital and meatspace.

The requests should be done in person in a way that naturally limits it to when it would be required rather than just curiosity or convenience.

But the requests themselves, the requesters, the durations, and the judges that signed off on them should be digitally available.

If the police want footage, then the police should go knocking on doors to ask for footage. And the police should expect to be told to come back with a warrant.

Why should those of us who want to efficiently investigate crime in our neighborhoods, and who want criminals caught and prosecuted quickly, restrain ourselves from cooperating with the police we pay to do just those things? It's not like they're asking us for footage of activity inside our homes.

> efficiently investigate

Efficiently investigating is pretty far down my list of priorities in this context. Accountably investigating, accurately investigating, and norm/right-respecting investigating are above above efficiency, though I'm glad if it can follow those.

Having to contact and converse with the owner who put up the doorbell cam contributes to this. Having oversight from a judge contributes more.

Because the police are allowed to lie to you.

Are they looking for a particular person, or when a blue sedan that may look like yours drove by? Who knows — you should always exercise discretion.

>Because the police are allowed to lie to you.

This IMO needs to change, if they can legally lie to you they can lie in court. They do both.

No, police are not allowed to lie in court... and there are limits to how far they can stretch the truth in interviews/investigations.

Legally they arent allowed to lie, but they do. Anyone who has been in court has seen it. You have to have proof they are lying to get them to stop.

That's true of any witness, though. Perjury is a crime, but you have to prove it.

In the trial context, good defense attorneys will be able to introduce contradictory evidence, or will challenge the credibility of a witness by finding facts that make them look bad -- even police officers. With police officers it's a bit harder, though, because the public largely believes (wrongly, I'm afraid) that police are more trustworthy than the general public.

Cops arent just any witness. If they are caught perjuring all the cases they testified against are eligible to be retried.

I have heard this discussed in court as a reason to not find the officer guilty. Records get sealed of course and you cant discuss it.

https://www.innocenceproject.org/prevalence-police-lying/

Lying in court is one thing, but it’s been accepted that the police can use deception to get information.

It makes sense. In many cases, subjects of investigations are unaware of them.

You may never have a situation where you wouldn’t want to share camera footage with authorities. But many people do, for a variety of reasons, and creating a norm where your home is a node of some surveillance network has obvious negative potentials.

The whole ecosystem of fear around home surveillance, Nextdoor, etc is awful and companies like Amazon are exploiting it without regard to the impact that it will have.

> You may never have a situation where you wouldn’t want to share camera footage with authorities. But many people do, for a variety of reasons

... For example?

> Creating a norm where your home is a node of some surveillance network has obvious negative potentials

Would you mind explaining what those are? They're not "obvious" to me.

I agree with you isofar as lying as a means of extracting a confession from a suspect is wrong. But I don't see any harm in providing footage of the outside of my home, and quite frankly, I can't think of a situation in which police would have to lie to me to get it.

I think the problem is that trust in American police is very low.

Given the training and conduct this cannot be surprising.

The number of stories where police act in bad faith is overwhelming.

So I get why people would be hesitant to collaborate -- your neighbor might get shot of you report a door left open.

We shouldn't restrain ourselves. (And we don't, at least I don't).

Let's cut the bullshit: if the cops are looking for someone matching your exact description or time+place with minimal doubt, you are probably not doing the "lord's work" as folks from the Southern US would say.

Agreed.

There needs to be high barriers to request this sort of data.

There should be low barriers to auditing the use/misuse of it.

I agree with that. If someone has a security cam pointed at their driveway, I don't really care as long as the owner has full and complete control over it.

Ring is building a global surveillance network and using dark patterns to get homeowners to pay for it.

Can't wait until they have facial recognition on these feeds at scale so you'll never be out of view of the Amazon surveillance panopticon. Best case scenario is they just use it to relentlessly market to you... worst case is.. worse.

Maybe we’ll all be wearing masks in public by then

Face projectors. https://twitter.com/benfranklin2018/status/11808137101112647...

Nice, scramble suits for everyone

The cameras I have around my house (outside of my Ring) are all Wyze cameras. They cost about $40 a pop and they are end-to-end encrypted if they're uploaded to the cloud. I can also just put a surveilance ready SD card in them to record from (indefinitely or specific events).

Real signatures, and lots of them.

That was my immediate reaction. And it's very common for organizations to assume that we see an email from them or get a phone call or find a website claiming to be them and trust it.

It's amazing how hard it is for people to grasp that I don't know who they are.

Also, to what extent can Ring verify that requests are from a real police officer who is currently employed? How rapidly can they invalidate portal credentials after an officer is fired? Do departments use shared credentials for these portals, and if so, how frequently are they rotated?

Would be great if there was a national database of law enforcement officers' name and badge numbers, that typing in both with a match would show any member of the public an official image of the officer's face. I'd love to be able to authenticate whether someone is a cop before letting them into my home: fake badges are cheap.

Similarly, would be cool to have a facial recognition database, so a citizen could take a picture of a cop's face to lookup name and badge number if they are a real cop, or report impersonation of an officer if they are not found.

Are there any repercussions if Ring discovers that a police department is using their network for unauthorized purposes? Like spying on women and people that have a personal beef with?

I suspect not.

I’m guessing not at all if they follow the same guidelines as Uber’s abuse department.

I was thinking that maybe users weren't seeing the emails.

Look at the stats provided to LE: there were a grand total of zero refused requests. Instead, all the requests were either approved (small minority), or ignored (all the rest). The requests were sent by email. Perhaps the users simply didn't see the emails. Most likely, they went into the Spam folder. Or the users are so inundated with other junk and other email (that makes it past the Spam filter) that they just didn't notice them. Maybe the users don't even look at their email very often.

Has Ring done any research to see if their emails are getting into their users' Spam folders?

Seriously, email these days isn't the greatest communication tool any more, thanks to the spammers. GMail does a pretty decent job of filtering, but not everyone uses it. Look how many clueless people still use their ISP's crappy email service!

As for the IRS, you're right about that: all the spam/robocall/scam calls have basically ruined voice calling on phones. I almost never answer my phone any more unless it's someone already in my contact list, because it's usually someone I don't want to talk to (and if it's from my own area code, it's almost always a scammer).

> Seriously, email these days isn't the greatest communication tool any more, thanks to the spammers.

Do you have any better alternatives?

> GMail does a pretty decent job of filtering, but not everyone uses it.

Yes, anyone not using Gmail is completely inundated with spam every second of every day, is a troglodyte, and how do they even survive? As the posted article shows, the best thing for everyone is to hand over all of our private information, communication, and GPS coordinates to the big tech oligopolies.

Your first paragraph may contain a small error in failing to consider that the perceived safest and easiest way to refuse might be to ignore. An LE request can be intimidating to some and it's not difficult to imagine some preferring to not get involved. Rather than officially decline, avoidance might actually be a common method in such situations. This is possible.

Edit: correct silly wording

I agree with everything you said except this:

> Has Ring done any research to see if their emails are getting into their users' Spam folders?

How would you do that without putting tracking pixels/images/scripts/anything inside of an email?

Do you think they wouldn't do that?

That's rather my point though.

We now live in an age where people pretend to have authority they do not really have as means to enable their crimes?

Inconceivable!