Amazon's Ring Police Portal For Mass Surveillance
I use the Ring security system at home and own a couple of the cameras. The security &quot;history&quot; feature is dirt simple but very cool -- I can trivially see when I use different doors in my house.<p>The Ring smartphone app also shows me the Neighbors view for my area, which is very similar to this product being advertised here (a feed of locations, comments, and videos posted by smart device owners and others). I think probably every software company of a certain size builds a law enforcement portal, very standard feature.<p>My favorite part about the Ring Neighbors section of the app is that it provides clear evidence of widespread lawbreaking by people who have voluntarily disclosed their identities.<p>Specifically, Ring&#x27;s cameras automatically record audio and cannot be configured to disable the audio recording. (I e-mailed their founder a while back and he said &quot;soon&quot; they&#x27;ll ship a way to disable this.)<p>In my jurisdiction, audio recording without the consent of all people who are recorded is illegal. Disclosing an illegally made audio recording is another, separate crime. The law in my jurisdiction is extremely clear: if you do not have the consent of all parties and you disclose the recording; the maximum jail term is two years. Merely putting up a sign that says &quot;there is a camera recording the street near my house and if you walk in front of it I&#x27;ll be audio recording you&quot; does not count as obtaining consent -- everyone actually has to acknowledge that they knew they were being audio recorded.<p>Now, police are free to choose not to arrest people for committing this crime. And prosecutors are free to choose not to prosecute people who break the law in this way.<p>This crime is actually prosecuted, albeit rarely (I think). But … sometimes the crime is prosecuted because people complain that they were wiretapped. One of the reasons we want to set up security cameras is there&#x27;s someone we&#x27;re afraid of who has threatened to harass us in the past and we want to know they aren&#x27;t coming around. <i>If</i> they came by our house, saw that we had Ring cameras, and talked in front of them, they could actually complain to local police that we are wiretapping them, and this would at the last cause us a major headache. So while we own some Ring cameras, <i>we are afraid to use them</i>.<p>Meanwhile, by using the Ring cameras in their standard configuration, and by sharing videos with the Neighbors feature, people are often explicitly committing a crime. And by signing up for Ring accounts and in many cases paying Ring money, people are making it easy to tie their identities to the crime.<p>This Neighbors law enforcement portal gives police a simple, handy map of all the people in my area who are breaking the law in a major way. They aren&#x27;t using it yet. If they ever decide to step up enforcement of this law, they will have a handy pool of targets.