You shouldn't really need a lawyer. The megacorp will just hand over all the data, in which case you could too to avoid the legal fees. The benefit is like you said, less likely they go to you since they don't know you have anything, vs them seeing a map of all the Ring users.

That's what I'm saying, if they want footage on my hard drive they need to approach me and i need a lawyer, if they go after Ring then I don't need to incur costs and life stress of dealing with that bullshit.

That's all assuming the cops understand I'm not involved or committing crimes. As indicated in your sibling comment, that may not be the case and having my own representation would be needed.

It's shitty situations all around frankly.

You don't need a lawyer. Just hand over the data they ask for, and they will be happy. You can get a lawyer if you want to fight it. If you're paranoid about police impersonators, you can ask your local strip mall lawyer if the document is legit before handing over the data, and it will cost you less than $100.

I think even getting as far as you've concluded may require a lawyer. I wouldn't follow legal advice on HN saying don't get a lawyer.

Wtf are you talking about? If you want to give them footage, go for it. It’s yours.

Deciding whether or not to comply and how would depend on knowing what it means and the likely consequences of several actions. It would also probably depend on the specifics.

Dude, it’s not complicated. If they have a warrant, they get what warrant says. How does Ring’s lawyer help you?

Glad your world is very simple.

Point about Ring's lawyers (which we've seemingly gotten away from this deep into the thread) is you do not pay for them. You don't get to be involved in strategy either, which may not be in your interests. Getting the best thing for your interests may require paying a lot for a lawyer and a lot of stress.

Ring doesn't craft minimally-responsive answers to subpoenas and warrants either. No big tech company does. That would take money (having a staff lawyer and some help to handle those is expensive), and they don't really care that much about your data.

When you own it, you can fight back to your heart's content.

And by the way, you do pay for Ring's lawyers if you use their product.

> they don't really care that much about your data.

The most important point

If you're storing the data on site then they turn up with a warrant and take the hardware.

A subpoena for Ring is an order to produce data. A warrant for Joe's CCTV at 223 Acacia Avenue is permission to take the data.

So you're saying that, in the event of owning your own data and being asked for it, you would get a lawyer because you acknowledge that there could be unforeseen conseqeuences and aspects of the request that you might not understand. But you would simultaneously prefer to let a megacorp own your data so you don't have to think about any of that?

So you're happy to give away your data, but also insistent that you should pay someone to review the request for your data. Apologies if I'm misunderstanding your comments (very possible), but I think I at least understand why some folks are confused.

I did say both of these things. Because there are upshots and downsides to each. Both are true.

You can't escape the shittiness of this problem by running your own server. It's a bad situation either way.

The root of the problem as i read it is overly zealous law enforcement and a judge that is not acting as a proper check on their power. It's a political problem. It can't be escaped with purely technical solutions like who stores the data.

Point taken, but I don't see enough of an upshot to giving away your data from the very start — retaining zero control so you don't have to deal with requests that may or may not ever happen.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lawyer would want to view all the footage themselves, before making any decision like that. Hopefully, you aren't keeping 6 months worth, because lawyers typically charge by the hour.

I think there may be a significant advantage to running your own server: you can controll how long you want to keep the data. For example, you can keep data from cameras recording the street/yard for longer and delete footage from inside the house daily (or choose to not even record when you are at home).

That's what I did, and I don't feel even a little nervous about it. I did it because it was obviously in my best interest to help them investigate a crime that I was the victim in, and because I am 100% confident that the footage is otherwise innocuous.

But it all depends on the circumstances. As you say, the whole point of ownership is that I get to make that sort of decision.

>Just hand over the data they ask for, and they will be happy. You can get a lawyer if you want to fight it.

Given it's common sense to never talk to the police without a lawyer, you would want a lawyer for this situation so you know you're not unintentionally fucking yourself over.

Obligatory IANAL.

> [...] Given it's common sense to never talk to the police without a lawyer [...]

Don't generalize and don't conclude from your point-of-view to the whole world. There are enough places where you can talk to the police without even thinking about a lawyer (and never ever even require one, even in such situations). Not everyone's country is the USA (I assume).

If my interaction with the police is anything more than inconsequential small talk, I'm getting a lawyer. I would apply this common sense even to Japanese police, among the most respected of police forces in the world.

Obligatory IANAL.

I think, having done this a few times, the line should be "minor traffic ticket," not "small talk." You can get out of a ticket (or get it downgraded to a warning) by being nice to the officer, and that is a much better outcome than you can get by attempting to bring in a lawyer or behave as though you are going to fight legally.

Many of these kinds of warrants are closer to the "minor traffic ticket" side than anything else. The trouble is that you may want a lawyer to tell you that.

Isn't the reason you might want a lawyer in this case that you might not have to turn over the footage, and doing so when you don't have to could be used against you?

So wouldn't the alternative where they get the footage from someone else be just as bad as you turning it over without checking, and therefore something you should prevent if consulting a lawyer first is to your advantage?

>Isn't the reason you might want a lawyer in this case that you might not have to turn over the footage, and doing so when you don't have to could be used against you?

That's one of many reasons.

You're still not getting yourself out of the thing where turning over the footage to the government could be bad for you, so having it happen unconditionally without your consent could be bad for you.

Whether it's bad for you is irrelevant, if you're responding to a court order you absolutely want someone who has a thorough understanding of the law to guide you through it (unless you're thoroughly familiar yourself, but most people are not).

Even if we aren't talking about court orders, any interactions with the police beyond small talk should be guided by a lawyer for the same reason. Arrogance has no place when interacting with the law, the complexity of which is far beyond the understanding of common men.

You keep talking about the side of it where you have the opportunity to contest a court order.

The problem is the side of it where you abandon in advance your ability do to that by giving a third party custody of your data and then suffer whatever consequences a lawyer might have advised you to avoid when the third party hands your data over to the government.

I'm not sure how much clearer I can state this: You need a lawyer so you don't step on toes and fuck yourself over.

It doesn't matter if you're going to abide or contest court orders or whatever the hell else. I'm not talking about that.

You. Need. A. Lawyer.

Mere mortals cannot and will not understand the complexity and intricacy of law.

You. Need. A. Lawyer.

I think you might be missing the point of this comment: OP was saying that this is an additional expense involved in owning your own data. In reality, the people who would otherwise store your data aren't getting a lawyer for a warrant response, beyond validation that the warrant is legitimate. The "economy of scale" that 3rd party services have here is that they don't care if you go to prison.

Having a lawyer do the basics is really cheap. Having a lawyer fight the warrant or craft a minimally-revealing response is expensive. You don't have to break the bank if you end up getting served a warrant.

You ALWAYS need a lawyer, and don't hand over any recordings without a lawyer. Otherwise, you may be liable for crimes NOT covered by their initial request. Crimes you may not even think are crimes! Cops do this, to pressure more information out of you.

I still don't see why you think it's a negative to have your own data. If you think you need a lawyer for on-site data, they you should think you need one for off-site data as well. There's really no difference here. Where the data exists has no bearing on needing a lawyer. What the the data contains would be the primary driver of needing a lawyer, which applies equally regardless of it being on-site or off-site.

I strongly disagree. If they have to serve you a warrant for the data, you know they've requested it. This is rarely true if they can serve a warrant to a cloud provider for your data.

Since the likelihood is footage from your home is to investigate you or your family, knowledge of the data demand in itself is potentially invaluable, as you can begin forming a defense.

Also, not that anyone would do it, but 'oops, it caught on fire' is much more doable when it's all under your control and they don't even know what you have, rather than in some audited cloud providers backend.

Which has pros and cons.

You claim 24-hour deletion policy for liability reason.

Cannot chase what you don't have.

They can produce a warrant to turn over what is already there. They cant force one to continue proving that service. Thats a violation of the third amendment.

Of course there no case law on the third to determine if one has to continue to give quarter to surveillance equipment.

There's also the possibility that the same event that leaves me wanting the data leaves me without my on-prem recording, I would think.

It's pretty easy to stash the recording device somewhere that it would take an intentional and time-consuming search to find it. No common criminal will engage in that sort of search. If you need to be worried about uncommonly competent and driven intruders, then your security needs are such that any simple surveillance system won't do. You have special needs that require special solutions.

You could say the same about your valuables but it turns out most of us aren't that creative.

Recording devices can be very small. My valuables take up much more space, and are correspondingly harder to find a good spot for.

At least in that case I'm the one deciding how long to keep the data. They can't get a warrant for data I don't have. I frankly don't understand why anyone would keep weeks of security camera footage around.

Maybe you realize something is missing 6 months later? Or you notice some damage on your property and want to see how it happened? That being said, it would be really hard to go through the footage and find what you are looking for.

Not really hard, if the damage is visible on the camera.

You go back a year and look. Damage there? If no then go back 6 months. If the damage is there then you know it's between 6 months and a year back. Rinse and repeat, binary search.

Having said that, I wouldn't store that much. A week would be all I'd want.

You are right, as soon as I posted the comment I thought of binary search. Funny how people frequenting HN think alike, maybe we have to get out more often out of our bubble.

The concern is less that the cops show up to your cloud provider with a signed warrant, but more so that they just hand it over when asked. There's also concerns about jurisdiction.

What if the video is encrypted such that it can only be watched by certain faces?

The risk is that some judge doesn't appreciate your ironclad solution and so orders you to watch all the footage so they can record it over your shoulder.

If it helps you, it exists, if not, it never existed in the first place. - "oh those, they aren't hooked up to anything after I bought the house, the previous owner took the computer."

It is not feasible in reality that requests to decrypt your personal data stored on-site through warrants. If my server is powered off, everything sits in several encrypted ZFS datasets. No one can prove that I am recording stuff at all. The camera could be there for deterrence only.

That's not how the legal system works. The other party would claim that you are, the courts would believe them, and it'd be on you to deal with it. "It's not feasible" won't wash - especially if you don't spend tens of thousands on your defense.

Well, of course it depends which legal system we are speaking, but where I live (Germany), there is a presumption of innocence until proof beyond a reasonable doubt establishes.

We theoretically have that in the United States, but occasionally the spirit or letter of that is not respected by authorities and juries.

This.

I don't believe in cloud servers for home automation or home security stuff, I also think encryption and local storage is great, but all these techno-nerds are under delusions that enough geeking out on technical solutions will somehow change how law enforcement or the courts treat them. If they want to pursue you for something, it won't deter them.

> In that case I would kind of rather they go to a megacorp vs. me needing to get a lawyer and figure out how to respond.

If a crime occurred outside your home, but your home security cameras caught it, the police will discover this when they talk to you about the incident to collect witness statements, if you choose to share it.

If a crime occurred inside your home, and your home security cameras caught it, the police will discover this when you report the crime and you offer to share the evidence that may help you receive a cure.

There is absolutely nothing that a megacorp helps with here.

All things being equal, you're right. I'd want to avoid the issue of wanting a lawyer and prefer the resources of a larger corporation making those decisions

But they're not equal.

The police can acquire a warrant and serve it to a select few megacorps for ALL of the footage at a specific location for a specific time range. That's setting aside some policies where there's active cooperation between the megacorp and the police. By hosting it myself, I avoid this sort of blanket privacy violation.

In my particular situation, I'd guesss it would entirely eliminate police acquiring a warrant for my footage unless I'm a criminal suspect or there was a crime committed in my front yard. Maybe I'd be a bit more forthcoming anyway if a crime happened on my property :P

Maybe your situation is different?

I kind of read this article as the cops being lazy and requesting literal everything, not because they'll use it but because it's easier than understanding the job they actually need to do.

In that case it'd probably be OK to hand over footage.

But the more sinister and intentional motive among law enforcement also exists. The whole thing is a crapshoot and every case is probably different. If you're lucky, a responsible cop is involved. If you're not, it can be really bad times.

> In that case I would kind of rather they go to a megacorp vs. me needing to get a lawyer and figure out how to respond.

In my view, there is no effective difference between having a commercial entity holding your data and having the police hold it.

Thats why your file system is encrypted with an HSM USB key.