This is a step beyond that. Warrants are granted at the discretion of a judge, the bar is high, the scope is narrow and you (theoretically) have recourse if it’s abused. Here, the discretion is Google’s, the bar is nonexistent, the scope is unlimited and you have zero recourse if you think you’ve been wronged.

This wouldn’t be an issue if people trusted Google or the police. But they don’t, and it’s pretty easy to imagine ways in which this could be abused to harm people.

Let’s say you live in Texas and get abortion pills in the mail. If the police have a warrant to search your house for something unrelated, they (theoretically) can’t see the pills and decide to charge you with an unlawful abortion (unless they were “in plain view”, etc). But if Google gives police access to footage of your house extrajudicially, police can use anything they see as evidence against you. And make no mistake — things like that will happen as a result of this policy.

Google is smart enough to know that "snitching" on its users is bad for business.

Think "track a burglar as he moves through a neighborhood" not "snoop (illegally) on the contents of people's mail".

Just because you currently seem to have a "failure of imagination" does not mean that law enforcement, corrupt/facist/dystopian government officials or even unscrupulous employees within the tech sector itself will not absure their observational powers now or in the future.

Or maybe you just haven't been paying attention to the news for the last "n" decades.

We all deal with "sky is falling" person on our development teams, and it's pointless doomsaying then as it's pointless doomsaying now.

When the bad things happens, we can react. Until then, let's try to stay reasonable.

It’s not illegal, though. Google is (presumably) fully legally in the clear to just hand over footage to police. That means that, if Google decides to hand over your footage to the police, anything on tape can be used as evidence against you. And Nest offers indoor security cameras, so your entire house could be fair game.

> Google is smart enough to know that "snitching" on its users is bad for business.

Is it bad for business? That’s not clear. Your whole argument is that this is fine so long as you think the likelihood of abuse is low. My guess is that it actually won’t hurt Google’s business at all, even as we start to discover police misusing this.

“It only happens to a handful of people! And anyway, they were [doing drugs/stealing/etc], so they deserved it. It’ll never happen to me!”

My argument is not that it's fine as long as the likelihood for abuse is low, my argument is that it's fine as long as there hasn't been any actual abuse. When something does happen, we can respond to it.

Until then, it's not reasonable to go through a bunch of worst-case scenarios.

All I’ll say is that I’d prefer to stop the thing that will very clearly harm someone before that actually happens, not pretend we haven’t seen a million times before what happens when you give police more power.

It sounds arrogant, to me, to be so sure you know what the outcome will be of a given situation, considering all of the necessary ingredients for that outcome have existed for some time and what you claim is "inevitable" has still not happened.

In the vein of practicalities, both Google and the justice system (USA for me) are monstrously large bureaucracies known to make difficult-to-redress errors. Google's capricious account banning, police raiding incorrect addresses, eg. The decision to share with them more information than the law requires is one I'd prefer to make myself.

Or just plain out refusing to fix errors where they would be relatively easy to fix; compare Scalia's "it's fine to fry a provably innocent person as long as the procedures are followed" argument.

A numerate person would know how rare these things you're afraid of are, and not let those fears drive how they live. I (hopefully) follow that path, and I recommend you check it out!

I read what you wrote in the same way I suspect you would read someone who is afraid of space because meteors have killed people (as a rough example).

It just doesn't seem like the rates at which the things you're worried about are happening in a volume that would actually matter to a society.

https://louisville.edu/law/library/special-collections/the-l...

I'm not denying the right exists, I'm saying we give up our other rights all the time for the benefit of society, why is privacy any different?

Further, it's a spectrum. You're not putting a camera up for police to peruse at their leisure, it's only in specific situations.

I couldn't find evidence that mass surveillance is good a society.

Kinda-good, 1, so and so can just go check the camera that points at the central plaza fountain that anyone can access, and sees that his spouse has arrived and is waiting for him as agreed.

or Bad, 2, cameras all over that everyone has no idea who controls, watches, and/or is recording

“Convenience, less human hours wasted on boring stuff” is fine as an individual consumer mindset, but does not form sufficient criteria for evaluating complex social systems.