Just some hasty research:
https://www.crresearch.com/blog/2019-package-theft-statistic...
https://www.security.org/resources/stolen-packages-survey/
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/01/10/package-theft-how-amazon...
> With one single package potentially containing hundreds of dollars worth of goods, package thieves, or “porch pirates,” see an Amazon box as a ripe opportunity to steal. More than one-third (36%) have been a victim of package theft. Of those, 44% have had a package stolen at least twice. Most package theft victims (83%) said they contacted the seller or Amazon immediately after finding out their package had been stolen, while only 13% called the police right away. Overall, very few (11%) said the porch pirate was caught, but thankfully, 73% of package theft victims said they eventually received a refund.
This seems to substantiate that package theft is at the very least a common problem for the people they polled. Whether Ring engineered a national surveillance network on purpose sounds like something that needs to be proven. Just talking about outcomes without examining what (legitimate) problem they're trying to solve does not help inform the public.
The way I end up reading the situation is that some people want to aid the police to find package thieves but they don't want to aid police in finding people suspected of crimes during protests.
Personally, I'll take this debate a step further: I don't think it should be legal to film anyone without their consent because that practice will always be abused by bad actors. Whether you're antagonizing people by recording them in public or you're surveiling a protest. My idea would be to craft laws saying you can't capture any video for anything off of your property. You could also encourage users to relocate their cameras to positions that only capture the front door vicinity.
Which would mean no more dashcams. Dashcams are very useful in assigning blame in accidents and helping to determine their causes (not only in cases of human negligence, but even accidents due to mechanical failures/design flaws/etc)
And dashcams do pick up pedestrians on the sidewalk, etc.
No more Google Streetview either, which a lot of people (myself included) find very useful – it lets me familiarise myself with how a place looks before I visit it
If I take my children to the park to play, would I be allowed to take a video of their play to send to my wife? What if a stranger is visible in the distance in the background of the video?
It would do nothing about the immense quantity of CCTV footage of privately owned public places such as shopping malls. And it might even encourage moving public property into private ownership – if the local government aren't allowed to perform CCTV surveillance of a street, but if it were privately owned its private owner could, then transferring public streets into private ownership might be promoted as enhancing public safety/security. Transfers of public streets into private ownership have already happened – in 1999, the Salt Lake City government sold a portion of Main Street to the LDS Church, which has since used its ownership of that section of street to remove protestors from it [0]. But your proposed law might make such moves more popular
[0] http://www.thisweekinmormons.com/2017/02/remember-controvers...
My main concerns are the US becoming a surveillance state (probably first and foremost - not to say we haven't already arrived or are well on our way) and secondarily the way average citizens are allowed to violate each other's privacy. Some can argue that when you are in public you assume zero privacy, but in a world where a local incident that be dealt with at a local level occurs, is recorded, and then goes viral multinationally or where bad actors want to be lazy we start to face issues where this simple understanding of privacy breaks down and has intersections like this one.
Maybe if we could (somehow) create some kind of cultural norm against that?
Maybe the real solution to the problem you raise is cultural rather than legal?
Maybe sometimes journalists and editors need to stop and say "no, we're not running this story, we are going to ignore it, some random nobody doing some offensive thing in some small town that nobody has ever heard of – that isn't news"
A lot of these social media viral things get greatly amplified by the traditional media. Indeed, sometimes the two seem to act in a mutually reinforcing loop – traditional media coverage produces more social media which in turn encourages more coverage from the traditional media
Derek Chauvin would appreciate that.
That said, the tone of your comment is entirely unconstructive.
The video relevant to Chauvin was recorded by a bystander.
I would argue a key root solution here is to for police to prioritize addressing property crime, rather than for private citizens to attempt to address the civic policing concerns on their own - which is what these cameras are doing, at their core.
Nowadays (even pre-pandemic) I work from home full-time so there is usually someone here. But actually I used to get stuff delivered to the office even when my wife was at home full-time. There is always the chance she would go out, whereas there was someone down in logistics 8am-6pm.
Leave it on the porch; if one gets stolen every few years, that's still wildly more convenient than rescheduling most deliveries.
Depends on your neighborhood. Some neighborhoods have a 1 in 2 chance. The footage showed that the culprit tailed the USPS delivery person on foot and waited about 15 minutes.
That's a terrible idea. That would make video taping police brutality illegal. Or what if you watched a bank robbery take place and wanted to record the getaway vehicle? Under your ideal law, any hero who catches the criminal would also be a criminal.
Given the documented failure rate of eyewitnesses to be accurate (worse than AI face recognition), we should also ban relaying something you've seen. That way we can make a just society.
Well that depends highly on what's considered a crime in a protest, who determines that, and whether or not the person in question agrees with the protest.
I have no problem at all catching porch pirates. I have big, big ethical concerns with surveillance footage being used to track public organizers who haven't committed any crimes.
I think these sticky situations are always going to be a problem as long as the Police insist on operating in opposition to the people they claim to want to protect. Police do not feel like they are part of my community, they feel like an upper class of citizen who are permitted to, well, police the community by any means necessary up to and including violence, with basically no oversight.
That's not someone to look to for help. That's someone to fear.
If a technology is developed allowing me to extract video from my hippocampus, will you require me to walk around my life with my eyes closed?
Seems reasonable.
This is not explained in ToS?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/28/doorbel...
By tapping into “a perceived need for more self-surveillance and by playing on consumer fears about crime and security,” he added, Ring has found “a clever workaround for the development of a wholly new surveillance network, without the kind of scrutiny that would happen if it was coming from the police or government.”