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Comment by antonvs | Hacker News Reader

You absolutely can complain about Flock and other such cameras over Ring.

Ring cameras are privately owned, installed on private property, by the choice of the property owner. Data sharing is under the customer's control unless a judicial warrant is involved.

Flock cameras are a completely different situation. They're installed on public property, data sharing controls are an utter shitshow, and they give police the ability to do unconstitutional dragnet-style fishing for crime and even pre-crime, i.e. "suspicious patterns of behavior".

Equating the two is a complete misunderstanding of what's happening, but companies like Flock rely on that kind of ignorance to push their product.

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Its insincere to act like the control of data through ring doorbells and similar products are in anyway customer controlled. Even if we ignore when the agreed protocols have been actively ignored ( i.e., employees being able to access unauthorized: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51048406), the amount of control over the data the customer has is very little but most are simply unaware of this. Uninformed consent is not a thing.

Also pertinent imo: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49191005

Surveillance infrastructure is surveillance infrastructure, who is supposed to "own" it is irrelevant. Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.

Flock gives law enforcement privileged access to footage outside of their jurisdiction with actual features that support mass surveillance, like tracking cars across state lines. Ring footage requires a court order, warrant, or subpoena outside of customer consent and access per legal process is generally limited to a small subset of footage. That's a big difference. Only one of these two supports commercial dragnet.

That is not true for Ring.

Can you provide examples of Ring giving carte blanche access to government agencies, local or federal, without legal process? Do you have any examples of Ring being used to track an individual across vast distances? Or of anything you could consider mass surveillance?

You are moving the goal posts. No single Flock camera can do that, either. Instead, what they offer is a network of cameras they can access remotely and they can use with facial recognition. And yes, this can be used to track people over long distances or across states.

There are precedents with Ring being very cozy with police departments, e.g.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/police-can-get-y...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/amazon-ring-stop...

And many more over the years (all the way until February of this year, when they cancelled a deal with Flock). Amazon is not a company to trust.

You're missing the forest for the trees. These two systems do not allow for even remotely the same levels of abuse.

It's not possible to use Ring for mass surveillance with as little effort as Flock supports.

> No single Flock camera can do that

What does that matter? Flock allows government agencies to enter a license plate number and find all instances of that vehicle across all participating customers. This is not technically possible with Ring.

> this can be used to track people

Prove it. Find one example. I can find hundreds of examples for Flock.

Both articles you linked to prove my point - access to footage was accessed by government agencies with consent from users, in which case a warrant was not needed. Read more than the misleading headlines and you would have figured that out for yourself, god forbid you let facts get in away of your bias. There were an small number of incidents in which Ring used an emergency situation to share 11 instances of footage without a warrant, which isn't even worth talking about since they've since closed that hole.

> Amazon is not a company to trust.

This has nothing to do with trusting Amazon and everything to do with false equivalence.

> Ring footage requires a court order, warrant, or subpoena outside of customer consent and access per legal process is generally limited to a small subset of footage

Weren’t there regular scandals about local law enforcement regularly accessing Ring footage without the owner’s agreement or knowledge? Ring absolutely is a surveillance tool that can be used without oversight. See here for example: https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/corporate/amazon-ri...

> without the owner’s agreement or knowledge

All access required user consent, other than a dozen very limited examples that were discovered in which Ring employees provided footage without user consent or a court order (which is negligible in the grand scheme of things). So no, Ring has not been abused by the police as much as Flock.

You're reducing a spectrum to a binary, with all the errors that always come along with that.

Flock is at one rather extreme end of that spectrum, at least in the context of a democratic country with some civil liberties. They literally seem to be breaking laws in order to achieve their goals. Ring occupies a point pretty far from that.

All of these issues can be addressed with government laws and regulations, and hopefully will be. But the laws needed to constrain what Ring is doing are nowhere near what will be needed to constrain Flock.

> Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.

This is trivially false. But if you live in the US and take its legal and regulatory environment as an unchangeable fact of life, I can see how you might think that.

> Surveillance infrastructure is surveillance infrastructure, who is supposed to "own" it is irrelevant. Unless consumers own the hardware, the service, and where the data is stored, they do not own any of it.

You and the poster you're replying to are making related but separate points which partially overlap yet are both valid within a certain scope. It can be simultaneously true that:

* The fact a consumer has to 'make a choice' to install a Ring camera does make the situation materially different and better than Flock in a civil rights and property rights sense.

* The fact that most consumers are unaware (or don't care) that the Ring (or similar device) click-through EULA can permit all manner of invasive outcomes which are bad and companies can easily ignore whatever the EULA permits with (probably) little consequence, resulting in even worse privacy outcomes.

Bottom line: Judged by net outcomes in practice, Ring-like cloud cameras can be every bit as bad for privacy as Flock cameras. Judged through the lens of 'balance of rights and privileges between state and individual', Flock is even worse then a camera installed by a citizen on private property.

> Data sharing is under the customer's control unless a judicial warrant is involved.

The police routinely has access to Ring footage. The people who installed them give that access. Occasionally Amazon did it too even without user consent.

I’m equating the 2 because those people contribute to the internalizing of the surveillance status. When people walk down the street they are filmed by dozens of cameras and they are starting to expect this everywhere. Flock is “another one”. Flock would have had an uphill battle in a society where private surveillance is unacceptable.

When it becomes totally normal for others to use their own private (not so private n the cloud) surveillance footage of public spaces against you, Flock stops raising people’s internal alarm bells.

Why do you think Flock is big exactly in the society that was told private surveillance of public space is perfectly fine and even expected?

> Ring cameras are privately owned, installed on private property, by the choice of the property owner.

... recording the street, meaning https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-on-the-u... applies in the UK:

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If your CCTV system captures images of people outside the boundary of your private domestic property – for example, from neighbours’ homes or gardens, shared spaces, or from public areas – then the GDPR and the DPA will apply to you. You will need to ensure your use of CCTV complies with these laws. If you do not comply with your data protection obligations you may be subject to appropriate regulatory action by the ICO, as well as potential legal action by affected individuals.

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However, as with anything in the UK, it's virtually impossible to enforce it on sh*thead neighbours recording you with their Chinese cloud enabled devices 24/7.

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