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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand the issue here, and it frankly feels like a manufactured outrage from a minority group of activists. If customers voluntarily release a segment of video to law enforcement, so what? That’s their right. People do so in the interest of preventing crime. I don’t have any cameras myself but I completely sympathize with neighbors who have Ring cameras given the huge uptick in property crime here in the last five years. I’m all for amazon building in facial recognition that works across their network of Ring customers and their cameras.

As for the indefinite retention - what do you think happens if you were to give the police evidence that helps nab a criminal in a non-IoT world? They store it and retain it. Why would this be any different?

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I have access to my neighbors ring doorbell so I can keep an eye on my home.

It tells me about all the local crime and tries to make me afraid. People report door to door salesmen as suspicious. Get real.

The real crime here is fear mongering presumably to sell more security products.

Fear mongering? Property crime is up in many cities. That’s real. The fear mongering is from those attacking Internet-connected cameras and creating a fake outrage when people are just exercising their constitutional rights to record video and exchange information. The entire notion that voluntary disclosure of information will lead to a dystopia is not just the slippery slope fallacy but also ACTUAL fear mongering in action.

And yes it is proper to suspect door to door salesman. Many are criminals casing homes and pretending they are someone else with an alibi. Having them on the radar is appropriate.

I don't know how to say this any nicer than this: I'm sorry you live in such fear. It isn’t normal and you should figure out why and work to fix it.

I live in one of the most densely populated areas of the country. I've been here for a decade. Not only have I never seen so much as mere property crime (and it is "mere"), I don't have any reason to fear it. T the contrary--I have a greater reason to fear the unregulated panopticon the fearful wish to impose upon me.

Your attitude makes society worse and you should rethink it.

You are accusing me of living in fear and yet you’re painting a picture of a “panopticon” that is itself fear based and hypothetical, whereas my fear has real crimes and statistics behind it. We retain police forces because deterring crime and catching criminals is important. Making the job of the police easier helps society get better, not worse.

Your position seems to be that we should be ok with criminals being free and out at large, potentially victimizing others too. Have you ever been the victim of a crime? Like an assault or burglary? If someone gets raped do you tell them “it isn’t normal to be fearful and you should work on fixing that?” This seems like textbook victim-shaming to me. Helping solve crime is not the same as a dystopia.

See, the thing is--I'm reasonable. If you want to run your own security system, stored locally, and provide that data to and only to the police when and only when a crime occurs? Fine. We can deal with that as a society and as communities. But the thing is, even that is horseshit. It's not "helping solve crime". Even with a photo ID, the police in most jurisdictions are not going to go out of their way to do anything about property crime. (Nor, really, should they, unless somebody's actually harmed.)

Privately managed, secure, local and unshared recordings are fine. Ring and other scumshit "security" peddlers? It's a gimmick for data-slurping corporate-interest assholes to get additional on-the-ground data about people for whom there was no attempt to acquire permission, let alone any moral right to do it. That's why these things exist. Don't fall for the fucking okeydoke.

You don't need a Ring, you can set up your own IP cams and there is plenty of software out there. While I don't think it is necessary for everyone I've caught tons of stuff on video, including neighbors snooping in my back yard, cops walking around the property, neighborhood cats using the yard as a toilet, the county inspector doing a tax inspection, and more than one person walking up to the camera, seeing it, and then turning around. This was in an average neighborhood in northern California so YMMV if you live in a different area.

Yes, I have full ONVIF camera coverage of my property with local storage and s3 as a backup. If something happens including theft of my NAS i am covered. I don’t want to be afraid. I do the best I can. I accept 20/20 hindsight.

This sounds very much like "if you've done nothing wrong, what do you have to hide?"

True

What problem if I (anyone) can know where are you now at any point of time, even you newer allow that

Or any law enforcement agency can arrest you even if you do nothing and software just wrongly identify your face on crime scene

And god forbid if you have not white skin color

What does skin color have to with this? That seems like reckless alarmism. Humans are in the loop to validate facial recognition matches. It’s a first pass filter.

Ever seen africian or latino men on a grainy camera? It kinda does matter.

Ring cameras aren’t grainy. These are new, 1080p cameras, many with night vision capability. And again, if a human is in the loop then you are talking about a problem that is orthogonal to cameras - would a police officer jump to conclusions based on a poor, grainy match on non-IoT cameras or on photographs? Maybe on rare occasion, but the vast majority of the time, they wouldn’t.

https://academic.oup.com/policing/advance-article/doi/10.109...

https://idatassist.com/can-really-trust-algorithm-predicting...

https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...

Yup, that alarmism about reality we live

Some DS just not really know or understand how to clean datasets

So some models suddenly use skin color as main predictor of some bad thing

And I assume that you ok with total surveillance.

Hmmm

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