The requests should be done in person in a way that naturally limits it to when it would be required rather than just curiosity or convenience.
But the requests themselves, the requesters, the durations, and the judges that signed off on them should be digitally available.
Efficiently investigating is pretty far down my list of priorities in this context. Accountably investigating, accurately investigating, and norm/right-respecting investigating are above above efficiency, though I'm glad if it can follow those.
Having to contact and converse with the owner who put up the doorbell cam contributes to this. Having oversight from a judge contributes more.
Are they looking for a particular person, or when a blue sedan that may look like yours drove by? Who knows — you should always exercise discretion.
This IMO needs to change, if they can legally lie to you they can lie in court. They do both.
In the trial context, good defense attorneys will be able to introduce contradictory evidence, or will challenge the credibility of a witness by finding facts that make them look bad -- even police officers. With police officers it's a bit harder, though, because the public largely believes (wrongly, I'm afraid) that police are more trustworthy than the general public.
I have heard this discussed in court as a reason to not find the officer guilty. Records get sealed of course and you cant discuss it.
It makes sense. In many cases, subjects of investigations are unaware of them.
You may never have a situation where you wouldn’t want to share camera footage with authorities. But many people do, for a variety of reasons, and creating a norm where your home is a node of some surveillance network has obvious negative potentials.
The whole ecosystem of fear around home surveillance, Nextdoor, etc is awful and companies like Amazon are exploiting it without regard to the impact that it will have.
... For example?
> Creating a norm where your home is a node of some surveillance network has obvious negative potentials
Would you mind explaining what those are? They're not "obvious" to me.
Given the training and conduct this cannot be surprising.
The number of stories where police act in bad faith is overwhelming.
So I get why people would be hesitant to collaborate -- your neighbor might get shot of you report a door left open.
Let's cut the bullshit: if the cops are looking for someone matching your exact description or time+place with minimal doubt, you are probably not doing the "lord's work" as folks from the Southern US would say.
There needs to be high barriers to request this sort of data.
There should be low barriers to auditing the use/misuse of it.
Ring is building a global surveillance network and using dark patterns to get homeowners to pay for it.
It's amazing how hard it is for people to grasp that I don't know who they are.
Would be great if there was a national database of law enforcement officers' name and badge numbers, that typing in both with a match would show any member of the public an official image of the officer's face. I'd love to be able to authenticate whether someone is a cop before letting them into my home: fake badges are cheap.
Similarly, would be cool to have a facial recognition database, so a citizen could take a picture of a cop's face to lookup name and badge number if they are a real cop, or report impersonation of an officer if they are not found.
I suspect not.
Look at the stats provided to LE: there were a grand total of zero refused requests. Instead, all the requests were either approved (small minority), or ignored (all the rest). The requests were sent by email. Perhaps the users simply didn't see the emails. Most likely, they went into the Spam folder. Or the users are so inundated with other junk and other email (that makes it past the Spam filter) that they just didn't notice them. Maybe the users don't even look at their email very often.
Has Ring done any research to see if their emails are getting into their users' Spam folders?
Seriously, email these days isn't the greatest communication tool any more, thanks to the spammers. GMail does a pretty decent job of filtering, but not everyone uses it. Look how many clueless people still use their ISP's crappy email service!
As for the IRS, you're right about that: all the spam/robocall/scam calls have basically ruined voice calling on phones. I almost never answer my phone any more unless it's someone already in my contact list, because it's usually someone I don't want to talk to (and if it's from my own area code, it's almost always a scammer).
Do you have any better alternatives?
> GMail does a pretty decent job of filtering, but not everyone uses it.
Yes, anyone not using Gmail is completely inundated with spam every second of every day, is a troglodyte, and how do they even survive? As the posted article shows, the best thing for everyone is to hand over all of our private information, communication, and GPS coordinates to the big tech oligopolies.
Edit: correct silly wording
> Has Ring done any research to see if their emails are getting into their users' Spam folders?
How would you do that without putting tracking pixels/images/scripts/anything inside of an email?
I wonder how much of this is just because who's going to believe some random email that "law enforcement" wants to see my security camera footage? We live in an age where the "IRS" calls every day to inform me that they're going to come arrest me, and I'm supposed to hand over surveillance footage to some random email?
About a year ago someone was murdered near my office. Our office is in a townhouse in a mostly residential neighborhood. Detectives came by in person to ask if we had any surveillance cameras that might have footage they can look at to see if it might have the killer on it. They didn't just send an email.