The "SaaS-ification" of security cameras should also worry us. Ring — not its customers — controls the videos taken with their cameras, creating a video surveillance network that the police can access without needing a warrant. They've partnered with 400 police forces to give them access to that data [1]. Although they claim to let customers deny police requests for footage, their terms of service allow them to hand video over to police if they deem the request "reasonable".
And it's not just Ring customers that are affected, it's anyone in the general vicinity. If your house is in the field of view of a neighbor's Ring camera, you're being surveilled too.
Things like Ring are really worrying because it's Amazon. Fear is the motivator in security camera sales. With Ring you've got a parent company whose CEO owns a national news organization(Washington Post) and a large media company(Amazon). Amazon is so aggressively pursuing being in every part of your life that the fear motivator is going to be really easy to manipulate.
> Although they claim to let customers deny police requests for footage, their terms of service allow them to hand video over to police if they deem the request "reasonable".
Defining what is a "reasonable government request" is a valid question, but it's really just not that high of a bar to get a records subpoena/search warrant for video like this. Courts sign off on those routinely, so I don't think you can really expect Ring or any company that holds your records to deny police requests for very long.
The system they have seems pretty balanced. The police look at the ring website to see who has cameras (they could figure that out by walking the neighborhood), they ask for the footage (instead of knocking on the door), they get turned down (or not), they get a warrant, the footage is released. Ring is reducing the overhead of asking somewhat, but they're not enabling mass surveillance or building AI systems that track suspicious people across multiple ring devices.
Is there something I'm missing here? If you record video of your front yard, and the police want to see it, they have a right to, subject to the normal judicial review.
Yes. If Ring had even the barest shred of ethics, they would client-side encrypt the videos stored in their cloud. It would use no extra space. The user would have to explicitly approve the decryption and sharing of videos.
But they don't, because being able to access and datamine those videos is a huge money-maker for them.
Ring is terrible, but their engineers willing to implement this corporate surveillance state? They're the worst. They wield their software skills as a mercenary would a weapon against innocents. I seriously cannot even comprehend how they sleep at night and look at themselves in the mirror in the morning.
At least folks over at Apple are sane and are making sure that HomeKit surveillance videos are client-side encrypted.
> Is there something I'm missing here? If you record video of your front yard, and the police want to see it, they have a right to, subject to the normal judicial review.
The issue is that Ring's terms specifically allow them to circumvent "normal judicial review" if the request is "reasonable". From the same WaPo article:
> Ring users consent to the company giving recorded video to “law enforcement authorities, government officials and/or third parties” if the company believes it's necessary to comply with “legal process or reasonable government request,” its terms of service state.
I'm fine with the police having access to video after obtaining a warrant or subpoena, even if it's not a particularly high bar to clear. But that should still be the bar. We shouldn't expect Ring to refuse police requests even after being served, but we should expect them to hold out until that point — and unfortunately, we can't trust them to do that.
> Ring is reducing the overhead of asking somewhat, but they're not enabling mass surveillance or building AI systems that track suspicious people across multiple ring devices.
I'm not. Do I think it's likely that they are? No.
> How can we as citizens verify it?
The same way we verify that Google isn't producing broad-scale AI systems looking for specific subsets of people across the GMail data. Investigative reporting, whistle-blowers, regulation/lawmaking, and looking closely at the evidence presented when the government acts. This is why parallel construction is pernicious, as it prevents meaningful oversight of government malfeasance.
End-to-end encryption, and user ownership/encryption of data is also great, but it's not widely available, and many use cases don't work when the service provider can't see the data they're storing. Even when the data is encrypted, you can get a lot of valuable intelligence from metadata.
So, in other words, citizens can't verify anything. Instead, all we can do is hope that any abuse will eventually be noticed and reported by some random whistleblower somewhere.
That's hardly sufficient, and especially not with a company like Amazon.
> Ring is reducing the overhead of asking somewhat, but they're not enabling mass surveillance or building AI systems that track suspicious people across multiple ring devices.
It really looks to me like this is exactly what they're building.
My ring is basically useless for surveillance, at night especially. It can't see across the street and barely gets beyond my front stoop. This is even with the lights on and a street light nearby. Likewise for my Arlos, useless at night. During the day they are a bit better but the resolution isn't anything special and it'd be impossible to catch a license plate. Make, model and color but that's about it.
No, this is wrong. There is no law that explicitly prohibits filming the public realm (e.g. the pavement) or incidentally capturing your neighbour's property.
There is a code of practice: the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice (SCCoP). There are also requirements to follow under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA).
The consequences of not following the SCCoP, the GDPR, and the DPA may result in regulatory action being taken against you by the Information Commissioner's Office as well as private legal action by the affected individuals, but it is not per se against the law to film those areas.
And it's not just Ring customers that are affected, it's anyone in the general vicinity. If your house is in the field of view of a neighbor's Ring camera, you're being surveilled too.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/28/doorbel...