Mozilla letter to Amazon Ring: stop sharing information with police
foundation.mozilla.orgA really odd post. I am open to the argument but don’t think Mozilla makes it here. The only piece of evidence they cite for harm— hyperlinked to the phrase “facilitate racial profiling”— leads to a think piece by someone a little creeped out by posts on Nextdoor, which doesn’t mention Ring at all.
I get that people don’t love surveillance. But the evidence is not here that a homeowner or renter’s decision to install a cloud-connected security camera on private property makes them or their community less safe. Unless you make a slew of assumptions that go undefended here, namely: cops are natural aggressors, having these cameras will attract cops, and the harm which these aggressive cops are likely to cause when attracted is greater than the combined deterrent effect of the camera’s presence against other crime + their value for genuine investigative work on crimes which were not deterred. Again, I’m open to the argument, but you need to present really good evidence, not just virtue signal. Because I don’t like getting packages stolen off my porch, and Ring seems like a straightforward way to prevent that.
I do not feel that "Cops are natural aggressors" needs further litigation but agree on the rest. However, how do you find Ring cameras protect your packages from theft? Do package thieves notice the camera and avoid your house, or do you send the video to the police who find the person based on their appearance or vehicle? If the former, why does the camera need to even be functional? And if the latter, why is the "cloud" necessary compared to a Ubiquiti style camera, or if you prefer a cloud camera, one from a company other than Ring who has shown extreme eagnerness to use close relationships with law enforcement as a form of marketing?
I'm a bit confused by the question. Why should people buying home security products see a close relationship with law enforcement as a negative?
You have just repeated their question in the negative without answering it. Apparently everybody has an answer they find self-evident despite it being opposite. Also, there were other questions. (I'm aware you are not the OP.)
Hurting someone's privacy is in and of itself harm. Allowing law enforcement unrestricted access exacerbates this problem, however even without that I've already seen quite a few videos (made by ring cameras, or similar) posted, usually without any attempts at anonymization.
The access is hardly unrestricted.
Once a verified LEO organization partners with Ring, they can send a geographically and time limited request to Ring for footage.
"please send me all video footage from 123 possum street to 350 possum street from midnight to 3am yesterday"
Ring then identifies who has cameras that may be of interest and sends the owners a request to share footage, which the owners can ignore (deny), explicitly deny or choose to share video.
Keep in mind all Amazon/Ring are doing is making it a bit easier for users and the police to share this data.
I have Nest cameras and have shared footage with the police on numerous occasions.
Unless these camera companies deny me access to my footage, they can't do anything to prevent me from choosing to share it.
Cameras record facts. What if body cam makers stopped providing police body cams?
I can see not sharing the videos to the public, who are notorious for bad and racist judgement, but if the police are racist, that's a police problem, not an evidence problem.
> Cameras record facts.
What I do in the bathroom is factual, but just because something is factual doesn't mean the police have a right to see it.
> What if body cam makers stopped providing police body cams?
Are you proposing that Ring owners should be subject to the same standard of transparency as people that the government issues guns to?
> if the police are racist, that's a police problem, not an evidence problem.
Uh, it's a societal problem, that society (which includes Amazon) needs to address.
Ring cameras record in public, not your bathroom. What a straw man.
It's not a straw man, because I'm not accusing anyone of making a pro-giving-police-recordings-of-bathrooms argument. On the contrary, I'm assuming we all agree that giving police recordings of what we do in the bathroom would be invasive. This is the basis of a further argument.
Ironically, accusing me of making a straw man argument in this case, is a straw man argument. ;)
The issue is of course the extremely broad definition of 'public' in the US which includes virtually everything but your bathroom.
If someone calls the police on you because your paranoid or racist neighbour caught you on their doorbell camera and called the cops because he thought you looked like you 'didn't belong' in the neighbourhood that happened in public, but it's obviously extremely problematic and a recipe for self-imposed policing virtually everywhere.
And that's not actually a hypothetical but something that already happened. (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvyvzd/amazons-home-secur...)
It is a police problem, and the purpose of initiatives like this is to make clear that our government is failing us and we need to start using other methods to get the problem of racism in policing under control, including pressuring the private sector to deny them tools that they are seemingly incapable of not abusing when given access.
Cameras record evidence, not facts. That distinction is important to keep in mind.
It's cool to signal your virtue - until you are the victim of a crime! Then the police better get the video from cameras in the neighborhood.
It's worth pointing out that for many home security products, sharing information with the police is a feature--even a selling point.
There's no way that Ring is going to stop people from sharing videos.
But making it easy to push a button to submit video to police does enable casual racism.
"Oh, there's a suspicious person, I'll submit this video to the police. Click" That person has made a judgement based on looks alone. If it were harder to submit the video (download, attach to email, look up police email address, etc) then there'd be a lot less of that.
And for people who are serious about sharing video with the police, those extra steps aren't really an impediment.
In short, I think their hearts were in the right places, but the ramifications weren't fully thought out here.
citations needed did an incredible episode on the porch pirate narrative. Listen to Episode 97: Porch Pirate Panic and the Paranoid Racism of Snitch Apps by Citations Needed Podcast on #SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-97-porch-pira...
Why is Mozilla getting involved here at all? I would rather my browser manufacturer stay out of politics and activism. It is a customer’s choice to share footage with the police. Why wouldn’t we want to help police identify criminals more quickly?
The Mozilla Foundation is organized to be an internet activism company. They spun off their browser development efforts into a subsidiary (confusingly named the Mozilla Corporation) so that they could focus on activism.
I support this piecemeal protest, but ultimately we really just need to defund and abolish the police in the US as they are known today and replace them with a new and different organization dedicated to public safety, that is actually legally required to help people (the police are not), and that has huge consequences for integrity failures such as lying.
Yeah, because the second time everything will work as intended? Whatever you measure there are always going to be some loopholes causing unintended behaviour. Why would imposing those consequences on the current police system not give your desired outcome?
The "not legally required to help" thing sounds silly in the abstract, but most people interested in police reform are going to want to keep it. A police force that's required to help people is, by definition, a police force that can be sued for not policing aggressively enough.
Most of the issues with police today are not that they are enforcing the law too aggressively, it is that they are closing out call tickets too aggressively.
They are entirely different things: https://sneak.berlin/20200628/the-problem-with-police-in-ame...