In most cases, when police want to search your neighborhood, they need a warrant and a reason to believe something’s amiss. Now, “reasonable suspicion” is going the way of dial-up. Fifty police departments across the United States are partnering with Amazon to collect footage from people who use Ring, the company’s internet-connected doorbell. Some are offering discounted or free Ring doorbells in exchange for a pledge to register the devices with law enforcement and submit all requested footage. Amazon has also filed patents to expand its Ring line beyond doorbells and into cameras mounted on motor vehicles; inside baby monitors and wearable “smart glasses”; even atop security drones that circle your home and call the police if they detect a disturbance.
In a statement to The Atlantic, a spokesperson for Amazon Ring said the company doesn’t endorse the giveaways that require users to hand over footage, and noted that most of the 50 partners offering discounted or free Ring devices allow residents to choose whether or not they want to hand over footage. “Privacy and security and consent are extremely important to us, and every decision we make as a company centers around these three pillars,” the statement read.
Ring says it’s “actively working with” the departments that mandate access to ensure they instead ask for consent. But even the ask can be intimidating. Earlier this month, CNET quoted a New Jersey police captain admitting to sending officers to people’s doorsteps when they don’t respond to footage requests. No warrant required.
It’s a workaround for standard procedure, just as privacy advocates worry Ring’s program is, in effect, an expansion of surveillance without oversight: a new gray zone that evades regulation, even as local governments across the country are limiting police surveillance as part of a national heel turn on invasive tech.
[Read: The police officer “Nextdoor”]
“People only think one step ahead of themselves. They aren’t thinking down the line,” said Brian Hofer, Chair of the City of Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission, which advises the city on the procurement and use of surveillance technology. “Securing your home is defensive. [Installing] cameras pointing at your neighbors’ houses and license-plate readers tracking their vehicles is a whole different ballgame.”
Different for two reasons. First, Ring is part of a surveillance ecosystem far more sophisticated than a single officer reviewing footage. According to CNET, police in Indiana matched Ring footage of nearby cars against a license-plate reader system to track drivers. Ring also comes with Amazon’s Neighbors app, which lets users edit and share video to whatever social-media platform they’d like. Earlier this month, BuzzFeed News reported that Amazon used Ring footage in Facebook ads for the product. People caught by Ring effectively forfeit their rights not to have their face shared online with the presumption they’ve committed a crime, despite never being convicted or charged with anything.
And second, private behavior on apps like Nextdoor and Facebook isn’t subject to government oversight. Oakland, San Francisco, and Seattle have passed laws targeted at advanced police technology, such as license-plate readers, body cameras, and facial-recognition software, but regulating private citizens is trickier. Homeowners have every right to set up cameras on their own homes, every right to share and comment on footage online, and every right even to more advanced surveillance technology.
“People have tried to outlaw [private party] license-plate readers and they’ve lost every time because it’s actually a First Amendment activity,” Hofer said. “I have the right to go out and collect info and repackage it if I want, and sell it to customers if I want. On the other hand, when you see clearly in front of your face the horror stories coming out of Nextdoor, it’s clear there has to be some sort of oversight. I don’t know what that silver bullet is.”
“My personal preference is to win a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign rather than try to mandate or restrict private behavior through legislation,” Hofer continued. “We start getting into some tricky constitutional areas if we try to regulate private behavior.”
[Read: The convenience-surveillance tradeoff]
There’s a tension inherent to any fight about Ring, or products like it: How can you regulate police use of camera footage without controlling the private citizens who generate that footage? Every digital interaction, from liking a photo, to sending an email, to filing taxes online comes with a privacy concern.
Suspicion is currency. Selling consumers a 24/7 surveillance apparatus of their own making shrinks police oversight, expands the network of cameras blanketing America’s cities, and makes money for Amazon—but for users, it feels empowering.
Privacy advocates want police oversight, not a nanny state where people are chastised and restricted for everything they may want to do with their own devices in their own homes. But they also fear a fully unrestricted digital neighborhood watch: citizens spying on each other, with Silicon Valley’s help.
“I’m concerned about police departments starting to imagine the public-safety infrastructure and hinging it on the whims of a company like Amazon,” said Dave Maass, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s senior investigative researcher. Maass wonders what happens when police or citizens rely on technology for social stability—and then companies, definitionally driven by profit motive, abruptly change course. Amazon has the right to change its terms and services as it likes, pushing updates and making changes. (Earlier this year, Google Nest owners found out their security cameras came equipped with a microphone. The devices were inactive until Google pushed an update, allowing them to be activated.)
“Are they coming in and just trying to disrupt and get quick market dominance?” Maass asks. “And then 10 years from now there’s all sorts of unforeseen [consequences] because we didn’t think through these issues when we adopted these technologies?”
One way to affect the “hearts and minds” outreach that Hofer mentioned might be thinking through those consequences. Sharing a video clip to one person means sharing it to millions. Empowering yourself through surveillance means profit share for tech companies. Agreeing to hand over video footage means sharpening police eyes, not just your own.
from Technology | The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2IDJyTM