I used to keep my Sentry mode on all the time. Then my car got broken into twice. The police didn’t bother to follow up despite having a video footage of what happened. Now I never turn it on. And now police wants to tow vehicles for the footage.
I was watching a youtube video about the "Kia Boys." A group of young men who made a lifestyle out of stealing Kia vehicles with flawed anti theft systems installed.
What interested me is that they make a habit of connecting their personal phone to the entertainment systems of vehicles they steal. They then use the large list of connected devices in their phone to brag about their stature as criminals.
Which is hilarious because it's not only evidence that connects them to a rash of vehicle thefts, but it also means every stolen vehicle retains evidence of who _precisely_ stole that vehicle.
The police don't seem to have a clue. The criminals surely don't.
wrong angle - most people aren't trying to cover their crime sprres, they know losing privacy is more likely to make you a victim. Could be robbery, but it could also be high hotel prices.
The article mentions that they tried towing a car because they were investigating someone who got shot and stabbed. While it'd be nice if police could investigate every type of crime, I don't see the contradiction between "police didn't follow up about your car being broken into despite footage" and "police towed a car to get footage about someone getting shot and stabbed"
> While it'd be nice if police could investigate every type of crime
That’s literally their job, which they get paid for. But anyway, my comment was more referring to the fact that if they had done their job, I’d be more open to keeping my Sentry mode on.
> > While it'd be nice if police could investigate every type of crime
> That’s literally their job, which they get paid for.
It's literally not.
Their job is to do a variety of things, including investigation, according to the priorities of the higher, within the financial constraints they are given and according to the priorities of the authority placed over them (which in many cases is the top leadership of the police department themselves, because lots of times they are given a broad degree of structural independence from the local government they are associated with.)
What you say may be what you'd like their job to be, but it is not literally what their job is.
> At the same time, the better they do their job the less of it there will be to do
Institutionally, the police have very little interest in there being less perception of a need for police, that would result in them getting less resource, less deference, and more oversight and accountability.
What this conversation is getting at is the police being (percieved to be) selective about what they do and don't care about is gradually corrosive to co-operation.
This is a lengthy quote, but it's relevant and from one of my favorite authors:
> Ah... Keep the peace. That was the thing. People often failed to understand what that meant. You'd go to some life-threatening disturbance like a couple of neighbours scrapping in the street over who owned the hedge between their properties, and they'd both be bursting with aggrieved self-righteousness, both yelling, their wives would either be having a private scrap on the side or would have adjourned to a kitchen for a shared pot of tea and a chat, and they all expected you to sort it out. And they could never understand that it wasn't your job.
> Sorting it out was a job for a good surveyor and a couple of lawyers, maybe. Your job was to quell the impulse to bang their stupid fat heads together, to ignore the affronted speeches of dodgy self-justification, to get them to stop shouting and to get them off the street. Once that had been achieved, your job was over. You weren't some walking god, dispensing finely tuned natural justice. Your job was simply to bring back peace.
> Of course, if your few strict words didn't work and Mr Smith subsequently clambered over the disputed hedge and stabbed Mr Jones to death with a pair of gardening shears, then you had a different job, sorting out the notorious Hedge Argument Murder. But at least it was one you were trained to do. People expected all kinds of things from coppers, but there was one thing that sooner or later they all wanted: make this not be happening.
It saved me a lot more. I was parked on my street and a garbage truck sideswiped the front driver side corner. The truck driver said it wasn't his fault and the car was parked too far from the curb but the videos showed what really happened.
Can you elaborate why? As in, you got hit by an insured driver and so your insurance was able to bill them, whereas you didn't have collision coverage of your own?
> whereas you didn't have collision coverage of your own?
That's the majority of people who don't have a lien on their title. Liability insurance covers what you do, it doesn't cover what someone does to you. So having evidence of who caused the accident is important when everyone just has liability coverage.
In California, though, I really do recommend you have the "Uninsured and Underinsured Counterparty" option on your insurance. It's usually far cheaper than the alternatives and it just covers you with no effort on your part.
Is it legal to film anywhere? In Sweden filming in public places with fixed equipment (a car counts apparently) is illegal. But on the other hand any evidence is admitted in court, even material obtained while breaking a law. So there has been a few cases where police have caught the person vandalizing the car and also needed to consider whether to fine the owner.
In the US, it is legal to film anywhere public (out on the street, in a government building, etc). You can even film inside of private establishments (restaurants, stores) until you have been asked to stop.
This is part of the protection of free speech and press. You cannot use the footage gathered for commercial purposes without permission of people you filmed. Journalism for pay, and art for pay are not considered commercial purposes.
It is in Sweden too. And everywhere I know of in democratic countries. But here it applies so long as I’m there doing the filming myself.
The law here isn’t about filming but regulation of surveillance, and is only about installing equipment that films public spaces without permit. For example: a ring doorbell can film my driveway and porch but not the street.
The thing about the Tesla is that it counts the same as mounting a camera on a house filming a public street corner, and not as a person filming the same street corner with their smartphone.
I don’t see the connection to freedom of speech since the act of recording anything is unrelated to if and how you can use that recording (which would be when it becomes speech).
The us doesn’t differentiate between creating media with a handheld camera or creating media by permanently mounting an unattended 360 surveillance cam in the middle of a busy street. It is all seen as protected speech. You don’t have to see or agree with the connection, that distinction is for the US courts, and they have interpreted it VERY broadly.
The other difference is that in the states, you largely don’t have a right to privacy in public or anywhere visible from public.
*asked to stop by the owner. you are within your rights to film or photograph other restaurant patrons even if those being filmed don’t like it. it is up to the owner of the property.
I don't turn it on simply because it drains an absurd amount of battery. I don't even understand why it does so. Is it old tech? My Blink cameras have 2 AA Lithium batteries that take motion-activated video all day on a busy side-walk for at least a couple of months. Yet one shopping trip drains like 2% battery in Sentry mode, wtf? That's a lot.
The blink camera has a PIR sensor that wakes it up so it starts recording video. It doesn’t record video the whole time and running the PIR is not energy intensive.
The Tesla has to run the cameras and run computer vision algorithms to determine if something is happening.
Sentry consumes around 200W on Intel Atom and camera based detection enabled. I'd say it's a total overkill. It even heats up the display pretty good when it's relatively chilly outside.
Even so, you shouldn't be waking all 24 cores, the GPU, etc. just to record video. Let the cameras DMA into their buffers and wake up a single core when the buffers hit a high water line. The core only needs to be awake long enough to queue up the writes to storage and then it can go back to sleep.
