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by fixermark 2801 days ago
> Amazon/Ring/whoever doesn't need to be involved with what is a local/neighborhood issue

In what way? Who on Earth is going to set up and maintain those tools, pay for the hardware, provide service channels for the hardware, etc.?

Technological sophistication is by no means uniformly distributed.

1 comments

I don't take issue with them making the hardware and selling a product. I have an issue with them being so heavily involved with the police side of things.

There's a big difference between a feature that allows consumers to report a video and a feature that allows police to demand a video.

But they are both features that have to be implemented, and they'll be implemented sooner if done by the same org.

If we have no problem with the police having the tool at all, why would it be bad for Amazon to implement it?

(Unless the issue is you don't think the police should have the tool at all, in which case the question is "Who should? Can private citizens be trusted with this information aggregation? Can private citizens' designated / elected representatives? Or should we just make sharing of private video feeds for surveillance purposes illegal, uh... somehow?").

(Also, FWIW, "request to voluntarily divulge video" is not the same as "demand").