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Comment by manuelabeledo | Hacker News Reader

Texas is a one-party consent state, meaning that you can store any sort of recording you have been involved in, without seeking consent from the other parties involved.

Texas police departments have also been trying to partner with camera manufacturers like Ring or Google, to access their customer records [0].

I must be missing something here, then. Either that, or this is just another political stunt directed against "big tech", while it ignores the bigger picture.

[0] https://www.dallasjustice.com/ring-cameras-and-police-survei...

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> Texas is a one-party consent state, meaning that you can store any sort of recording you have been involved in, without seeking consent from the other parties involved.

Seems unlikely to apply.

1. "one-party consent" applies only to "wiretap" laws i.e. audio recording. It looks like a lot of this case is about photo and video data.

2. "one-part consent" refers to people in conversation. That definitely doesn't apply to Google here.

I think an important part of this is the 'reasonable expectation of privacy', too.

From what I understand, recording video or audio outside in the public where there's no reasonable expectation of privacy is a-okay.

This may put the ring cameras in an interesting position. They're attached to your home, yes, but they're looking at the public street.

Is there any reason I can't put a Ring camera in the bathroom and sue someone's ass off later, though? Do they actually advertise them as being accessible by police, so the user reasonably expects their security camera footage to not be private? (I really don't know, I've only seen commercials which seem to imply it's just home camera/voice com you can use with your phone)

100% a political stunt. The guy bringing these suits is a political hack. Even if he’s right that this could lead to abuse, I’m certain it’s a self-interested thing. This could be my biases showing themselves, but I’ve got good reason for my biases against the government. I’m also against big tech, though, so I’m torn on how to feel about Google getting sued.

Yes, you're thinking of recordings. This suit is brought under the Texas Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act (Tex. Bus. & Com. Code § 503.001 et seq.) [0]. At issue is the alleged unauthorized collection of face and fingerprint biometric data.

https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/BC/htm/BC.503.htm

Thing is, outside purely legal statuses, I don't see why collection of "faces" done by a company on my behalf, is less dangerous than the police tapping in my account to retrieve pictures of alleged criminals.

In other words, I highly doubt that anyone wanting to enter my home would object to Google scanning their face, but I cannot say the same about the police collecting information on them.

Not only are you missing nothing, you may have identified one of the dimensions of why this lawsuit is coming from Texas specifically.

It may be the stick in a carrot-and-stick negotiation for sharing that camera data with Texas LEO. A lawsuit like this can be dropped by the prosecution any old time, and there's no particular requirement that all reasons the suit was dropped be publicly stipulated.

Isn't this a no-party consent situation?

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