Ring Is Cashing In on the UFO Craze to Promote Its Surveillance Dystopia

ono@lemmy.ca to Technology@beehaw.org – 120 points –
Ring Is Cashing In on the UFO Craze to Promote Its Surveillance Dystopia
vice.com
24

Ah yes, a doorbell camera with an effective distance of 5 meters (about 16 freedom feet) is definitely gonna create proof of extraterrestrials visiting.

2 more...

Stupid people are profitable

Living in a big city really makes idiocracy feel like it is a plain depiction of the future.

My security camera has been picking up a lot of really weird creatures wandering around recently. They seem more playful and curious than dangerous, although some of them definitely seem quite destructive.

The government says these creatures are called "children", and they've known about their presence on this planet for some time. 👁️

If you happen to live in the states, you can just shoot them and go on with your day.

I hear that solution works for pretty much all strange and/or unidentified phenomena, including clouds and darkly coloured delivery drivers? Shooting things is truly the answer to so many of life's problems.

Apart from the warrantless video surveillance it is even more insidious than that. Read up on Amazon Sidewalk. Amazon is trying to grow its Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh network. The exact details of how it works are of course proprietary and black box. But what we do know is it can amount to a side network that isn't transparent to the actual owner of the device, nor can you manage or block any of the traffic at your router (its a discrete network). You can opt your devices out manually, which I would recommend doing if you actually use any Ring or Echo products.

Amazon Sidewalk

I just looked it up. How extremely creepy. My brother just put some ring cameras in his house. I'll show him how to disable this tomorrow. It's just evil that it's not opt-in.

Every day, I feel better about my decision to quit Prime and distance myself from this awful corporation.

These are the same guys being sued by the FTC for basically creating a massive surveillance network to price fix the internet? But how can their cameras be bad??? /s

That's crazy! The rules of the contest are so hard to enforce in favour of contestants, let alone the whole issue of pressuring people into installing cameras that automatically send footage to police and probably Amazon as well.

I really hope a team of VFX artists (who already has cameras installed anyway, so no additional cost for them) makes incredibly convincing footage and somehow makes it look like it was part of the raw camera capture.

Ring doesn't 'automatically send footage to police'.

Mind you, I have no idea how reliable the website politico.com is (this is the first time I heard of it), but OP's article linked to this article starting that Ring footage was sent to the police without consent

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/13/amazon-gave-ring-videos-to-police-without-owners-permission-00045513

Technically, "automatically" would mean it gets sent all the time, while "without consent" would mean it might've got sent on request, just without consent.

Fair enough. In both cases, it's without the camera "owner" consenting, and that's the main problem.

"Automatically" would be a perfectly reasonable word choice if a request from the police is granted without interaction. In all honesty even if a human has to send it, if the process doesn't allow them any kind of autonomy or authority to decline the request, that probably qualifies, too.

Hm, I guess you're right. That's an interesting reflection on the concept of "automation".

I think automated means "no human". I don't think automatic necessarily does, especially if humans don't have agency.

As Jarfil said, it's not automatically doing anything. The police can get a court order to get footage. It's only given in very limited circumstances, like if the owner goes missing, or the camera might have spotted a significant crime, and it's not just ring but basically anything. If you are suspected of a serious crime police can get your internet browsing history, they can bug your house, they can dig through your bins, and yes, can request the clips taken by your ring camera.

It's happened 11 times this year. That shows how rarely courts give these orders.

The idea that Ring is some evil thing that's doing anything different is just scaremongering.

I am concerned about the government seeing my gf, who's a model, visiting me from Canada in between shoots

Are there any doors around Loch Ness in need of a door bell? Could solve some questions!

lol they're not even willing to stake the million dollar prize they definitely won't have to pay with a lump sum payment. It's actually 50k x 20 years.

I reckon you could cheat that pretty easily