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A Smart Doorbell Company Is Working With Cops To Report 'Suspicious' People, Activities (vice.com) 273

Posted by BeauHD from the ripe-for-abuse dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Smart doorbell company Ring is making it easier for customers to call the cops on "suspicious" people and activities. The startup, which Amazon acquired for reportedly "more than" $1 billion this year, uses security cameras to let people monitor their entryways. Now, it's launching its Neighbors app -- a platform for reporting crime that, so far, police in Fort Lauderdale and Orlando, and the Ventura Sheriff's Department, have access to. "Over the next days and weeks, law enforcement across the U.S. will be joining Neighbors," a Ring spokesperson told me over email.

The app, while presented as a crime-fighting aid, could also be a new place for paranoid people to profile fellow citizens, as similar platforms in the past have turned out to be. According to the company's statement in a press release for Neighbors today: "In addition to receiving push notifications about potential security issues, app users can see recent crime and safety posts uploaded by their neighbors, the Ring team and local law enforcement via an interactive map. If a neighbor notices suspicious activity in their area, they can post their own text, photo or video and alert the community to proactively prevent crime."
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A Smart Doorbell Company Is Working With Cops To Report 'Suspicious' People, Activities More

A Smart Doorbell Company Is Working With Cops To Report 'Suspicious' People, Activities

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  • Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @09:16AM (#56580218) Homepage Journal
    My local police force has something similar already. You get SMS when there are "issues" in your neighborhood. A website also allows you to view recent crime in the area. You don't need to be paranoid to be vigilant.

  • A lot of my neighbors have doorbell cameras and will post suspicious stuff to community Facebook groups, occasionally to law enforcement. Lets just hope there are limits put in place. They're security cameras, not public tracking devices.

    • Re:A good idea, in Florida? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Martin Blank ( 154261 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @09:30AM (#56580298) Homepage Journal

      It would be difficult for police to set up a network to do this throughout neighborhoods (cost, potential constitutional issues), but it's perfectly legal for a group of private civilians to collect images of the public, tag it almost however they want (as long as it's opinion-based), and upload it wherever they're allowed. They can label as suspicious a minority in an overwhelmingly white neighborhood, a teen in a beater car, or a child without his or her parents as long as they're stating an opinion about it being suspicious, completely ignoring (or oblivious) that the person recently moved in, the teen lives there and just bought their first car with their own money, or the kid is ten and playing just a couple of doors down from home. Having police respond to these wastes resources and contributes to the further deterioration of neighborhood relations.

      Crafting laws to cover this without blocking legitimate reports would be difficult, if not impossible. This can only change through social pressure. If a group like this forms in your neighborhood, it could be helpful to join even if you don't want to if only to talk some sense into those who read too much into perfectly innocent activities.

    • If they're "cloud" cameras as opposed to recording to a local hard drive, they're exactly that: public tracking/surveillance devices. Anyone who buys and uses one is either ignorant or evil (not caring about others' privacy is evil).

  • Neighborhood Watch (Score:5, Interesting)

    by amiga3D ( 567632 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @09:20AM (#56580238)

    My daughter's neighborhood had several cars broken into. The neighborhood watch has a facebook group that alerted members. They all polled their surveillance cameras and each found the same van casing their houses throughout the area. They emailed all the pictures to the local Sheriff's department and they caught the van in another area the next night. Cameras are everywhere now and if neighbors unite they have an amazing amount of coverage.

    • My daughter's neighborhood had several cars broken into...They all polled their surveillance cameras and each found the same van casing their houses throughout the area.

      The objection isn't to this sort of thing. Crimes had taken place in the neighborhood, and individuals worked together to submit useful evidence to the police to assist in convicting the criminal(s). This is excellent teamwork, and there is relatively little objection to this sort of scenario.

      What's being suggested here, is that Ring is giving police direct access to citizen-owned cameras. Herein lies the problem: my neighbors paying for me to be surveiled, with no crime and no cause, to a police department

  • Are the stereotypical old ladies of the future going to monitor their Neighbors app instead of a police scanner?

    Joking aside, I wonder if this will do more to create false perceptions of danger than it will to keep people genuinely informed.

    • Some women checking out of an AirBNB in California ended up getting a huge police response and detained for a few hours because a neighbor saw them loading their luggage into a car and assumed they were robbing the place.

      This shit already happens without a "Neighbors app" and is bound to get worse with one.

      • You forgot to mention they were BLACK women checking out of an unlicensed AirBNB, so obviously highly suspicious.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Desler ( 1608317 )

          Or the three black teens shopping at Nordstrom Rack who clearly had to be shoplifters.

        • I purposefully didn't mention it because I didn't want this to turn into a political argument. But it's true; had they been white nothing likely would have happened.

          Either way, apps like these will just allow for more such casual racism to happen. I don't see it being a good thing in the near-to-medium term.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Desler ( 1608317 )

      Of course it will. Pearl-clutching, old, white hags are gonna start calling the cops on any black person they see through their doorbell camera. Walking while black will be the new crime of the day.

    • Re:Changing times (Score:4, Insightful)

      by kilfarsnar ( 561956 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @09:52AM (#56580470)

      Are the stereotypical old ladies of the future going to monitor their Neighbors app instead of a police scanner? Joking aside, I wonder if this will do more to create false perceptions of danger than it will to keep people genuinely informed.

      Have you ever read the police log of a small town? People are afraid of their own shadows. Your average person is not qualified to assess what is a threat and what isn't.

      • Nah, in my small town it's just PD picking up people with 'altered mental status', a few trash can maulings by bears and the occasional sea lion snoring. We save shadow jumping for the City Assembly meeting.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      I was on a couple of 'neighborhood' websites for my area and ended up leaving in disgust at how they handled 'safety'. People kept taking pictures of random teenagers and posting 'warnings' about how 'a black youth was going door to door asking to mow lawns' or 'black youths were playing in the street' or 'black man asked white teenager for directions back to the highway and drove off when I ran out of my house screaming at him'. Even though we live in a VERY safe area, the forums were filled with hysteri
      • It would be fun to troll the shit out of them. Make them feel awful. Pretend to be the black teen they're talking about, say your family just died in a fiery car crash, you were mowing lawns to raise money to give them a proper funeral, and you got harassed by the cops. Maybe start a GoFundMe and donate all proceeds to the NAACP and ACLU.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by swb ( 14022 )

          Hardship stories already don't work. I've had two people come to my door with sob stories about a stalled car, trying to get to work, need $20 for gas, new to town, taking my kid to the hospital, etc etc.

          I fell for it once 25 years ago when the dude walked into my video store looking for $2 bus fare. When he came in with the same fucking story two weeks later (he must tell it so often he forgets his audience) I knew I had been scammed and threw his ass out.

          I told the last two they had 60 seconds to get ou

  • I hope paranoia social network is equally paranoid about their networks security, because the paranoid are always such fun to hack.

  • It's unfortunate that Ring gets all the press, as Skybell is such a better product.

    Wider working temperature range (rather important for us in the deep Northeast), and no charge for cloud access to a week's worth of videos. We've been loving ours... integrated just fine into SmartThings.

    It's like Norton/McAfee.... the lesser product in the class gets all the name recognition, while better alternatives go around relatively unknown.

  • I, for one, welcome our new fully-automated robotic curtain-twitching overlords.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @09:41AM (#56580376)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • ...Caucasians

      And wealthy blacks, too. Oh, not that many of them?? Fine; it still doesn't have a fucking thing to do with skin color, shitstain.

    • It's paranoia when they're really victimizing you? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by swb ( 14022 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @10:45AM (#56580908)

      I've lived in large single family home residential neighborhood in a city (looks suburban, but is in the city) for 19 years and over the past 5+ years, the amount of nuisance theft has skyrocketed. Just on my *block* it's not unusual to hear about a car being rifled, strange "door to door" sales people with no materials/identification/logos. We had a rash of car entries using keyless entry repeaters and a couple of sneak burglaries (snatching purses from kitchen tables). Over a week last November, the entire larger neighborhood was hit by package thieves, including my house. 3 different people had footage of the car involved.

      I had a long conversation with my council member about what can be done and was told that we should just report it and then do insurance or whatever. I asked why we couldn't get more police patrols and was told our area was "too low crime" (the numbers say we're the lowest crime area in the city) and there wasn't sufficient resources.

      So what the fuck? Just put up with it? That's the answer? Or just change my thinking, it *must* be my racial bias?

      Or this is somehow really ad-hoc redistributive economic justice, and I'm just too racist to notice?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

        I had a long conversation with my council member about what can be done and was told that we should just report it and then do insurance or whatever. I asked why we couldn't get more police patrols and was told our area was "too low crime" (the numbers say we're the lowest crime area in the city) and there wasn't sufficient resources.

        So what the fuck? Just put up with it? That's the answer? Or just change my thinking, it *must* be my racial bias?

        Or this is somehow really ad-hoc redistributive economic justice, and I'm just too racist to notice?

        So how about you, or someone in your neighborhood, run for city council and push for increased police patrols?

        • Re:It's paranoia when they're really victimizing y (Score:5, Interesting)

          by swb ( 14022 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @12:13PM (#56581614)

          A losing effort.

          The city has had at least two controversial shootings in recent years and activists are wholly opposed to anything involving "more police". One shooting involved an African American male who fought white officers and tried to take their gun and was shot and killed. The OTHER shooting happened about 1.5 miles from where I lived and involved an African American (first Somali immigrant police officer) officer who shot an unarmed white woman who had actually initiated the police call.

          So it's a total political clusterfuck with the cops in this town. In last year's mayoral election, a major candidate actually suggested disarming the cops. Another major candidate rose to prominence in the precinct occupation/protest which went on for a month or two (in addition to disrupting things like the Park Board meetings, screaming racism and preventing the meeting from taking place). We use ranked choice voting and both candidates polled top 4, so there's that kind of crazy here.

          The latter shooting (white woman shot by Somali cop) has everyone spinning in circles. The African American activists and white liberals don't know whether to be outraged or not because while they're trained to be outraged at police shootings, the racial role reversal here has them flummoxed. The pro-police "conservatives" who usually give the cops the benefit of the doubt are annoyed, but are equally flummoxed because a black cop shot a white woman.

          The 100% democratic city government just wants it all to go away. The DA had to turn to the Grand Jury (after saying he would no longer use it after the previous shooting) to forcibly extract testimony as all the officers even tangentially involved in the Officer's career and training went blue wall of silence, making it take 8 months to get an indictment. The so-called legal experts are calling the odds of conviction 3-2 against due to the incredible lack of evidence (body cameras -- turned off, no witnesses, etc).

          So yeah, run for city council on a "we need more police patrols" platform? Uh, no.

          I'm not a fan of police state tactics by any means, but shit, what else can we turn to?

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

            The OTHER shooting happened about 1.5 miles from where I lived and involved an African American (first Somali immigrant police officer) officer who shot an unarmed white woman who had actually initiated the police call.

            Was that the one with the Aussie tourist who called to report an assault and the trigger-happy cop shot her as she walked up to the car? The sad thing is, your case is precisely what we need police for: to patrol areas to reduce crime. However the increased militarization of police and the hostile "us vs them" mentality that is being trained into police these days (hell, soldiers in Iraq had a more restrictive ROE regarding firing weapons than police do these days) means an increasing distrust of police,

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by swb ( 14022 )

              Yes, Justine Dimond shot by Officer Mohammed Noor.

              While I think that "warrior" training and militarization have encouraged cops to shoot people, I often wonder if cops shooting so many people is a byproduct of the reduction of blunt force by police.

              Cops used to all carry nightsticks, and many also carried saps or wore sap gloves and these were their first go-to weapons for dealing with uncooperative or physically violent people. But over time these weapons fell out of favor, and not necessarily for the wro

          • I know those which you speak of, and what people need to understand is that it is less of a racial problem and more of a militarization of the police. Cops are trained not to see people as citizens to serve and protect, but as the enemy.

            Is it a wonder than a sign materialized shortly after the killing of the white woman that read "Warning: Local Cops Easily Startled"?

    • Paranoid Caucasians living in isolated suburbs.

      You clearly have little exposure to Indians and Asians because if you did, you'd see a huge potential market there. In fact, I could see UMC blacks that I've known be even more open about who they're targeting with it.

    • but the obsession with night prowlers, evil lurking in the shadows, drug addicts, and the paranoid gun culture was pretty shocking. This was a city thats biggest crime was a McDonalds truck that had lost its brakes and slid backwards into an adjacent sandwich shop, yet everyone on the block was geared up like a K-Town shop owner in the LA riots. It made zero sense...however if you're selling a doorbell that profiles people, ive got just the customer.

      So, just to play devil's advocate, people who keep a sharp eye out for anything weird bafflingly (to you) have extremely low crime.

      • Oh man, I think there's a huge difference between the 'neighborhood watch' type folks keeping a 'sharp eye' out and those who are actively finding criminals lurking among them. The former is fantastic, you want more of that but the latter is based on ignorance and fear

        I'm brown skinned and moved into a rural place last year. Way out of the city and predominantly Caucasian and old. Think farmers and retirees. Neighborhood is affluent. The town is extremely small - if you're doing 80 km/h down the clo

    • Paranoid Caucasians living in isolated suburbs.

      How very racist of you.

      Do you not think that people of color might have reason to be concerned about property theft or break-ins? Do they not deserve some security also?

      I guess you'd rather they all be fucked over by a system that is afraid to send patrols where they are and rely on 911 calls that could take 30 minutes or more for a response...

      Is there any area that is truly without crime anymore? I truly think every homeowner (and apartment resident!) should

    • This works both ways.

      If you're black, having one of those on your porch could help you when you're being harassed by neighbors or by the police.

  • I have one of these cameras and so far it's recorded a couple knock-knock thieves, my BMW M3 getting stolen (yanked onto a flatbed and gone in under 60 seconds) and also captured the boyfriend of a girl I know making out with another girl while they were alone on my porch.

    It's also exposed my ring-using neighbors as a (virtually) huddled bunch of paranoid slut shaming racists who aren't aware of due process, or even innocent until proven guilty.

    It really is disgusting.

    I'm getting rid of my Ring, mostly beca

  • Seriously, ring continues to send the data to China. Not impressed.

  • Cops who were called to stop a robbery in progress had never heard of AirBnB and attempted to arrest 3 black women this week.

  • scare quotes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @11:15AM (#56581126) Journal
    I love the scare quotes around "suspicious", like that's just some crazy impossible concept.

  • Call it the Armed Response for Racist Cowards app...

    Or maybe Dial-a-Lynch?

  • ... of technology putting people out of work. In my day, we would have had George Zimmerman patrolling our neighborhood for suspicious activity. On the other hand, Ring doorbells don't shoot. Yet.

  • I live in a condo complex in which being of any race other than white triggers a call to the police department. A lot of people have very absurd ideas of what is dangerous when they are aged. how many times has a garbage collector been shot for stepping onto the property in every state? The problem is that "what they know" or common sense in their minds is total bull crap. I sometimes have more than one friends that are female living with me. You can not imagine the hatred and lies that spread through

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