Schools Are Using 'Aggression Detecting' Mics That Are Set Off By Coughing, Slamming Locker Doors To Head Off The Next School Shooting

from the pour-more-money-into-the-stuff-that-isn't-working dept

Schools are spending more and more money on safety. Or, at least, that's what they're saying they're spending the money on. But simply adding more layers of surveillance -- on campus and off -- isn't really doing much to make schools safer.

Preventing violence at schools is a noble goal, but many of the solutions are just repackaged law enforcement products that treat campuses as high-crime areas. The latest developments being pitched to schools aren't innovative. They're just another way to help administrators view students as persons of interest in crimes yet to be determined.

This might not be as problematic if the tools worked well. But they simply don't. ProPublica took some repurposed ShotSpotter-esque tech for a spin, only to find out it doesn't work as advertised. The idea is the microphones will pick up aggressive… um… noises and head off the next school shooter. Great in theory. In practice?

Ariella Russcol specializes in drama at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Queens, New York, and the senior’s performance on this April afternoon didn’t disappoint. While the library is normally the quietest room in the school, her ear-piercing screams sounded more like a horror movie than study hall. But they weren’t enough to set off a small microphone in the ceiling that was supposed to detect aggression.

A few days later, at the Staples Pathways Academy in Westport, Connecticut, junior Sami D’Anna inadvertently triggered the same device with a less spooky sound — a coughing fit from a lingering chest cold. As she hacked and rasped, a message popped up on its web interface: “StressedVoice detected.”

“There we go,” D’Anna said with amusement, looking at the screen. “There’s my coughs.”

Good to know a student's coughing fit may find them staring down the business end of whatever weapon the school resource officer chooses to "reasonably" deploy in the face of certain danger. AggressionSpotter doesn't seem to be up to the task of providing school staff with a heads up. The company behind the tech -- Louroe Electronics -- pitches this to law enforcement and school administrators as being the tool they need to head off "antagonistic individuals" before it escalates into something that injures or kills students.

The problem is every product tested by ProPublica can't actually do what it says on the tin. When lives are on the line, aggression detectors are being set off by famous people with grating voices.

Our research found that [Sound Intelligence's aggression detector] tends to equate aggression with rough, strained noises in a relatively high pitch, like D’Anna’s coughing. A 1994 YouTube clip of abrasive-sounding comedian Gilbert Gottfried (“Is it hot in here or am I crazy?”) set off the detector, which analyzes sound but doesn’t take words or meaning into account.

So much for the future. This is the AI used by Louroe, which can be set off by Gilbert Gottfried bits while ignoring students screaming.

Louroe's attempt to win back some points by touting its privacy protections falls flat as well. The company claims the software only captures aggressive "sound patterns." What the company calls "sound patterns" is actually students speaking. And those recordings can be stored indefinitely by administrators, allowing them to replay conversations overhead by Louroe's mics.

The company behind the software at least seems a bit more pragmatic. Sound Intelligence CEO Derek van der Vorst acknowledged the fact that the tech will generate lots of false positives and probably won't prevent a "crazy loony" from shooting up a school. Still, he insists better safe than sorry, even when it seems "sorry" is the more likely outcome.

As is to be expected, this growth industry began as cop tech. Sound Intelligence's first deployments were by European law enforcement agencies.

It tested an early model in a Dutch “pub district,” according to a 2007 study co-authored by a company researcher. Microphones were placed in 11 locations in inner-city Groningen, and the detector’s findings were compared with police reports of aggressive behavior. The results were “so impressive,” the study reported, that the device was considered “indispensable” by several Dutch police departments, the Dutch railway company and two prisons.

If you're looking for analogies, Sound Intelligence has provided one for you. The difference between schools and prisons is the bell at the end of the day. Schools are loading up with surveillance tech to keep an eye on troublesome inmates, using toys battle-tested on literal prisoners.

Settings can be tweaked and a lot of early adopters are finding the presets to be useless. ProPublica reports schools have had the gunshot detector triggered by slammed locker doors and loud birthday wishes.

Deployment in other venues has been just as error-prone, making one wonder how low Dutch law enforcement sets the bar for "indispensable."

The software has been less effective at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey. Daniel Coss, security chief for the hospital’s health system, said he’s phasing out the detector after a three-year, $22,000 pilot program. The devices — placed in public, “high risk” areas — had been set off by patients’ loud voices and cafeteria workers slamming cash registers closed. Once the detector was tweaked to be less sensitive, it ignored an agitated man who was screaming and pounding on a desk. The situation escalated until six security officers responded.

This is what educators are relying on to keep kids safe and, hopefully, head off the next mass shooting. The tech simply isn't up to it. While schools continue to beta test software and hardware using tax dollars, students are being inured to round-the-clock surveillance. The excuse is "safety," as it always is when surveillance programs ramp up. But there's no trade off to be made here, not when the tech can't pinpoint aggression and fails to recognize clear signals like screaming as signs of imminent danger.

I understand no school administrator wants to feel like they didn't try everything they could when the worst case scenario occurs, but using students as guinea pigs for unproven tech originally developed for prisons isn't the answer.

Filed Under: aggression detection, privacy, schools, surveillance
Companies: sound intelligence

Documents Show The NSA's Abuse Of Its Phone Records Collection Continued Right Up Until Its Decision To Pull The Plug

from the too-much-of-a-useless-thing dept

The NSA may have extremely belatedly decided to give up its bulk phone records collection, but that's only after years of dysfunction, abuse, and escalating uselessness. The problems with the NSA's collection of phone records dates back to at least 2004 -- a 14-year streak of violations that may only now be coming to an end because of the NSA's voluntary sunsetting.

For years, the NSA treated the phone records collection as essential to national security. Not much was said about it until Ed Snowden leaked a court order showing the NSA was sweeping up every record possessed by Verizon's business services wing. Then things got heated and the NSA was unable to justify its continued existence.

Once the program was modified, the NSA had even more trouble collecting records lawfully. It may have been limited to performing targeted searches, but it was still somehow able to over-collect. Whether this was due to the NSA's filtering of returned search results or errors on the telco side when providing records, the NSA hasn't definitively said. But it did destroy millions of records it never should have had in the first place, strongly suggesting the agency was still collecting in bulk, despite legislative changes.

The NSA may be winding the program down, but it's not going out without extending its violation streak, as John Bacon reports for USA Today.

The National Security Agency improperly collected phone call records of Americans last fall, months after a previous breach that compelled the agency to destroy millions of records from the contentious program, documents released Wednesday revealed.

The redacted documents, obtained by the ACLU in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, do not indicate how many records NSA improperly collected in the October breach, nor which telecommunications provider submitted the improper data.

The NSA is consistent, if nothing else. It continues to violate the rules governing its collections and the American public will be made aware of these abuses months after the fact. This latest revelation didn't come via the ODNI's Tumblr or during a Congressional hearing, but via a lawsuit over withheld documents.

The ACLU notes that this is just more evidence that the NSA can't be trusted with the incredible amount of power it's been given. This is from ACLU staff attorney Patrick Toomey:

The NSA’s collection of Americans’ call records is too sweeping, the compliance problems too many and evidence of the program’s value all but nonexistent.

This is all known now. But every trickle of information about this program has come from FOIA lawsuits and document leaks. None of this has come directly from the NSA or its oversight. This means both entities have been fronting an abusive, useless program for most of two decades and are only now abandoning it because apparently the rigors of compliance outweigh the value of the intel.

Finally, it should be noted the NSA is only ditching the phone records program. It will continue to sweep up other "business records" in bulk. Given its history with this program, it's guaranteed its other collections under this authority are just as abused, and possibly just as worthless.

Filed Under: abuse, business records, mass surveillance, metadata, nsa, phone records, privacy, section 215, surveillance

Another Report Shows The GDPR Benefited Google And Facebook, And Hurt Everyone Else

from the it's-not-like-we-didn't-warn-you dept

We warned folks that these big attempts to "regulate" the internet as a way to "punish" Google and Facebook would only help those companies. Last fall, about six months into the GDPR, we noted that there appeared to be one big winner from the law: Google. And now, the Wall Street Journal notes that it's increasingly looking like Facebook and Google have grown thanks to the GDPR, while the competition has been wiped out.

“GDPR has tended to hand power to the big platforms because they have the ability to collect and process the data,” says Mark Read, CEO of advertising giant WPP PLC. It has “entrenched the interests of the incumbent, and made it harder for smaller ad-tech companies, who ironically tend to be European.”

So, great work, EU. In your hatred for the big US internet companies, you handed them the market, while destroying the local European companies.

In 2018, both appeared to have outgrown the digital advertising market in the region, according to a comparison of company filings with regional estimates, suggesting they continued to gain share. Facebook’s revenue from ads shown in Europe rose 40% in 2018. Google’s revenue in Europe, the Middle East and Africa—the vast majority of which comes from advertising—rose 20% last year.

By comparison, Europe’s digital advertising market grew by only 14% over the same period, according to estimates from IAB Europe, an online-ad trade group.

As the article itself notes, for advertisers, the GDPR has driven them directly into the hands of the biggest internet players, because they know that those companies can handle the compliance costs, while no one else can:

L’Oréal SA’s chief digital officer, Lubomira Rochet, says the cosmetics company has decided to focus its ad spending on Google, Facebook and Amazon.com Inc. because “those guys have the capabilities to really treat the data in the way that it should be treated.”

Now, most people might find it laughable to claim that Facebook and Google are treating data "the way it should be treated," but from an advertiser's standpoint, you can totally see where they're coming from.

Of course, when we suggested this is how things would play out, people yelled at us that if this were true, why were those companies pushing back on the regulations, and the answer to that is pretty straightforward. The compliance costs are still massive, and it has been costly to deal with the GDPR. But, it's been costlier for the smaller players who can't take it. So we end up reducing competition, and making it that much more difficult for competitive entrants and upstarts to take on these giants. That doesn't seem like a good trade-off.

Filed Under: advertising, competition, dominance, eu, gdpr, privacy
Companies: facebook, google

Once Again: It's Not Clear The Internet Needs Creepy Targeted Ads

from the things-work-out dept

There seems to be a general argument, perhaps believed by folks at Google and Facebook in particular, that they need to suck up all this data about us to provide more and more targeted advertising. I'm still not at all convinced that's true. Earlier this year, I suggested that Google and Facebook might be better off if they just admitted that targeted advertising didn't work as well as people like to pretend it works. The fact is that it doesn't work all that well, and comes with massive costs in terms of everyone thinking that all these companies want to do is suck up more and more data. And the "advantage" over other forms of advertising (contextual, brand, etc.) are really not that great. Earlier this month we highlighted a study that showed that, for publishers, targeted advertising didn't show any real benefit, and that it was mainly being used to prop up the fees middlemen got, in being able to claim some magic sauce to better target ads.

Now, the NY Times has published an op-ed by DuckDuckGo CEO, Gabriel Weinberg making the exact same point: the internet doesn't need creepy advertising to have a workable business model. Indeed, what made Google a success in the first place was the fact that its non-creepy, non-privacy instrusive contextual advertising was so freaking profitable because it worked amazingly well:

There is no reason to fear that sites cannot still make money with advertising. That’s because there are already two kinds of highly profitable online ads: contextual ads, based on the content being shown on screen, and behavioral ads , based on personal data collected about the person viewing the ad. Behavioral ads work by tracking your online behavior and compiling a profile about you using your internet activities (and even your offline activities in some cases) to send you targeted ads.

Contextual advertising doesn’t need to know anything about you: Search for “car” and you get a car ad. Over the past decade, contextual ads have been displaced by behavioral ads, aided by the rise of real-time bidding technology that auctions off each ad on a site based on user profiling. These behavioral ads are the ones that leave a bad taste in your mouth. They follow you around from website to mobile app based on your private information and, intentionally or not, enable online discrimination, manipulation and the creation of filter bubbles.

I'd argue that Weinberg leaves out general brand advertising as well, which can work well. Part of the problem, though, is that behavioral and programmatic advertising gives the illusion of being "scientific" because you can show data (even if that data is meaningless or misleading). As soon as you can insist that you'll be able to show data, then people get wowed by it, and think that they've magically solved the "I know that half of my ad spending is wasted, I just don't know which half" problem. But the real problem is that even with all this behavioral targeting, most advertisers are still wasting way more than half their ad spend. It's just that they can show pretty charts and spreadsheets to pretend they have data to back up that they're doing the right thing.

This is a point we've raised before. We've been talking to companies for a few years now, trying to convince them to advertise on Techdirt in a non-creepy way with no tracking. And what has happened, multiple times, is that a marketing person gets excited and talks about how "this is great" and how they know that they can get a lot of people interested in what they're offering if they were to support Techdirt just knowing that our audience would appreciate them being cool enough not to track them. And then it gets handed off to an ad team or a digital agency or an ad firm that they outsource this stuff to, and eventually someone has a spreadsheet. And doing a branding campaign without creepy tracking doesn't fit into a spreadsheet. So they pass. And waste a bunch of money on someone who will give them data, no matter how meaningless.

Weinberg is right that there's no reason it needs to be this way. It's just that some people have become so enamored with "data" that they don't bother to understand what actually works.

On top of that, he points out that focusing on creepy ads has lots of other costs as well -- including pissing off your users who are much more open to alternatives.

What about compliance costs? Companies are quickly realizing that good privacy practices are a boon for business. People increasingly want to reduce their digital footprint and so choose companies that help them do so. Companies with good privacy practices in their DNA do not face significant compliance costs.

Much of Weinberg's op-ed is in support of stronger privacy laws, and I'm less in agreement with him there. I'm not against all privacy rules -- but I do worry about the unintended consequences of many of the approaches proposed. Not on the revenue prospects for Google or Facebook. As noted above, they don't need to be so creepy. But, on how it might impact other aspects of the internet. We've already seen this with the GDPR and how it's being used to stifle speech and actually entrench the power of Google and Facebook. I honestly just wish that companies -- both the internet ones and the advertisers who buy the ads -- would just start to realize that sucking up all this data may have sounded like a good idea, but has actually been a complete failure, and start to move away from that model. It's not necessary.

Filed Under: brand advertising, contextual advertising, data, privacy, privacy laws, surveillance capitalism, targeted advertising
Companies: duckduckgo, facebook, google

If China Is A Glimpse Of Our Future Surveillance Nightmare, Maybe Hong Kong Shows How To Fight It

from the minimize-your-digital-footprint dept

Techdirt has been covering the roll-out of the extraordinarily comprehensive digital surveillance systems in China for many years. It's hardly news that the Chinese authorities continue to deploy the latest technologies in order to bolster their control. Many of the same approaches to surveillance are being tried in the special administrative region of Hong Kong. A British colony for 156 years, it was handed back to China in 1997 on the understanding that there would be "one country, two systems": Hong Kong would be part of China, but it would retain its very different economic and administrative systems for at least 50 years.

Well, that was the theory. In practice, Xi Jinping is clearly unwilling to wait that long, and has been asserting more and more control over Hong Kong and its people. In 2014, this provoked the youth-led "Umbrella Movement", which sought to fight interference by the Chinese authorities in Hong Kong's political system. More recently, there have been even bigger protests over a planned law that would allow extradition from Hong Kong to China. This time, though, there has been an important development. The protesters know they are increasingly under surveillance online and in the street -- and are actively taking counter-measures:

Protesters used only secure digital messaging apps such as Telegram and otherwise went completely analogue in their movements: buying single-ride subway tickets instead of prepaid stored-value cards, forgoing credit cards and mobile payments in favor of cash and taking no selfies or photos of the chaos.

They wore face masks to obscure themselves from CCTV, fearing facial-recognition software, and bought fresh pay-as-you-go SIM cards.

As The Washington Post report explains, in addition to minimizing their digital footprints, the protesters also adopted a decentralized approach to organization. The hope is that without clear leaders, it will be harder to shut down the protests by carrying out just a few targeted arrests. The protests are continuing, so it's too early to say how well these measures have worked. Moreover, the level of surveillance in Hong Kong has not yet matched what is happening in Tibet or the huge Western region of China inhabited by the Uyghurs. Nonetheless, the conscious attempts to blunt the force of privacy-hostile digital technologies form an important testing ground for approaches that others may soon need to adopt as China-style total surveillance spreads around the world.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: china, hong kong, privacy, protests, surveillance

Can't Have Copyright Enforcement Without Destroying Privacy Protections

from the let's-face-facts dept

Last week, Tim Geigner wrote about the Spanish soccer league, La Liga, getting hit with a GDPR fine because its mobile software just happened to sneakily include a surreptitious surveillance feature, turning on users' microphones to try to capture who was watching/listening to unauthorized broadcasts of matches. I wanted to write a little more on this, inspired by a comment from Professor Annemarie Bridy, who pointed out that anti-piracy enforcement goes hand-in-hand with surveillance:

This is an important point that often gets overlooked. Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the original Pirate Party, has repeatedly explained why Pirate Parties often view copyright policy, encryption, and privacy as all parts of the same issue. Indeed, he's argued that copyright enforcement efforts, by definition, are anti-privacy efforts.

Enforcement of copyright is fundamentally, conceptually incompatible with privacy of correspondence. You can't have the sealed and private letter in existence at the same time as you enforce copyright, once communications have gone digital. This is the reason you see VPN companies and other privacy advocates fight copyright enforcement and copyright law: because society has to choose between privacy and copyright, and basic civil liberties are considered more important than one particular entertainment business model.

Of course, that's why it's so ridiculous that Hollywood and its various front groups are out front-and-center (and also, very much behind the scenes with their lobbyists whispering in policymakers' ears) bashing internet companies for not respecting users' privacy. You know, without a doubt, that if internet companies were truly pushing for stronger privacy and real end-to-end encryption for internet services that Hollywood and its friends would be first in line arguing that this would only be used for piracy and must be stopped.

Copyright and privacy can co-exist -- but aggressive copyright enforcement all too frequently relies on surveillance and invasive privacy-eradicating demands. At some point, people are going to need to decide if they really want privacy, it's going to mean that copyright enforcement will have to take a backseat.

Filed Under: copyright, enforcement, privacy, surveillance

Australian Home Affairs Minister Says Government Still Considering Spying On Its Own Citizens

from the be-part-of-the-open-book-experience dept

Nothing's too much to sacrifice for the greater good of Australia. Not even Australians.

A series of police raids on journalists has raised questions about how far the government will go to control what Australian citizens know about their government's activities. Three separate raids targeted leaks that revealed, among other things, possible war crimes committed by Australian soldiers and the government's plans to place its own citizens under surveillance by expanding the power allotted to the Australian Signals Directorate.

The unintentional side effect of government raids designed to discourage further reporting on government secrets is the government is now confirming one of the leaks it targeted.

Peter Dutton has confirmed that a plan to create new powers to spy on Australians – which sparked police raids at the centre of the press freedom row – is still on the table.

On Sunday the home affairs minister claimed it was “complete nonsense” that the government supported spying on Australians but, in the next breath, called for a “sensible discussion” about whether the Australian Signals Directorate should gain such powers, which he argued could help disrupt paedophile networks and stop cyber-attacks.

Ah, the old "we're not going to spy on you, unless..." National security takes a backseat to child porn purveyors in Dutton's directly contradictory statements, but it's still the same tired argument. Domestic surveillance makes it easier for the government to catch bad guys and efficiency should always take precedence over rights and liberties.

This followed other statements from Dutton, most of which followed the same pattern: deny the government wants to spy on Australians, followed by reasons why the government should be allowed to spy on Australians.

“We don’t support spying on Australians,” he said. “That was a complete nonsense."

“But where you’ve got a paedophile network that operates out of Manila that live-streams children being abused, there might be an ability for an Australian agency to try and shut that server down.

“If that same server was operating in Fitzroy, here in Melbourne, then there would be very limited capacity in certain circumstances where it was masked or it was rerouted and … we weren’t able to shut that paedophile network down."

Well, I guess if the ends justify the means… Like others angling for greater surveillance capabilities at the expense of the public's freedoms, Dutton claims Australians are only a "sensible discussion" away from accepting additional government intrusion.

That this "discussion" remains on the table despite Australians' opposition to it just shows how essential it is that Australian journalists remain free to publish leaked documents without fear of government reprisal. Dutton has tipped his hand, though, suggesting neither Australians nor the country's journalists will be as free in the future. He has refused to condemn the raids on journalists and is openly pitching a surveillance program whose unauthorized publication was greeted with a show of force.

Filed Under: australia, peter dutton, privacy, spying, surveillance

Securing The Nation With Insecure Databases: CBP Vendor Hacked, Exposing Thousands Of License Plate, Car Passenger Photos

from the guess-you-have-to-give-up-some-security-to-gain-some-security? dept

US Customs and Border Protection has suffered an inevitability in the data collection business. The breach was first reported by the Washington Post. It first appeared to affect the DHS's airport facial recognition system, but further details revealed it was actually a border crossing database that was compromised.

The breach involved photos of travelers and their vehicles, which shows the CPB is linking people to vehicles with this database, most likely to make it easier to tie the two together with the billions of records ICE has access to through Vigilant's ALPR database.

The breach involved a contractor not following the rules of its agreement with the CBP. According to the vendor agreement, all harvested data was supposed to remain on the government's servers. This breach targeted the vendor, which means the contractor had exfiltrated photos and plate images it was specifically forbidden from moving to its own servers.

According to reports from other news agencies, the breach likely involve Perceptics, a Tennessee-based manufacturer of stationary license plate readers. The Register first reported a breach there on May 23, after being contacted by a hacker possibly involved with the attack on the company's servers. The CBP claims it was not aware of this breach until May 31. But this piece of info from the Register's article seems to indicate Perceptics may be the vendor the agency has refused to name.

Perceptics recently announced, in a pact with Unisys Federal Systems, it had landed "a key contract by US Customs and Border Protection to replace existing LPR technology, and to install Perceptics next generation License Plate Readers (LPRs) at 43 US Border Patrol check point lanes in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California."

This is all but confirmed in the Washington Post's report, which contains another link to Perceptics the CBP has refused to officially confirm.

CBP would not say which subcontractor was involved. But a Microsoft Word document of CBP’s public statement, sent Monday to Washington Post reporters, included the name “Perceptics” in the title: “CBP Perceptics Public Statement.”

No personal info was included in the breach, which the CBP said affected about 100,000 travelers entering and exiting the US through a single point of entry. It also claims it hasn't seen any of the data surface on the light or dark web, so there's that, if that statement is actually true.

This news has prompted many reactions, including some very obvious ones: first and foremost, the easiest way to minimize the damage of inevitable data breaches is to not harvest so much damn data. Unfortunately, the DHS's plans only involve expansion of its existing collection programs, including a larger rollout of its airport biometric scanning and its new mandatory collection of social media info from incoming foreigners.

It's pretty tough to secure a nation when you can't secure a database. This breach may have been the result of a vendor breaking the rules, but the Office of Personnel Management breach proves the US government isn't immune from these attacks. The more you gather and store in one place, the more often you'll be targeted by enemies foreign and domestic.

Finally, the incident has angered a handful of Congressional reps.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) announced on Monday that his committee would hold hearings next month to examine the collection of biometric information by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes CBP.

Thompson also noted that he wants to ensure “we are not expanding the use of biometrics at the expense of the privacy of the American public.”

Homeland Security Committee ranking member Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), used the breach to criticize DHS’s handling of cybersecurity challenges, saying in a statement to The Hill that “the agency is ill-equipped to handle emerging cyberthreats.”

“The data breach resulted from a contractor acting improperly and against agency policy,” Rogers said. “We need to take steps to ensure this does not happen again.”

Ensuring contractors follow the rules isn't really a solution. It may reduce the number of attack vectors, but it doesn't address the underlying issue: we're collecting more data on people than ever before and breaches are not a matter of "if," but "when." Until Congress gets serious about scaling back these massive collections, these will remain popular targets with the potential to cause a tremendous amount of harm to the millions of people who pass through our borders and airports.

Filed Under: alpr, cbp, hacked, license plates, photos, privacy
Companies: perceptics

Amazon, Law Enforcement Joining Forces To Turn Your Front Door Into An Integral Part Of The Surveillance State

from the so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-frisks dept

Amazon wants you to be part of its dish network. Yes, it's a play on words (and not a good one!). This network springs from Amazon's Ring doorbell -- the doorbell with a camera inside and a cozy relationship with law enforcement! What are your neighbors and strangers up to? Give the dirt to law enforcement and trust their better judgment!

Good times await those who find themselves looking dark or suspicious (but also suspicious because they're dark) in front of a Ring doorbell. Have you ever wanted to be an internet celebrity, with or without your permission? Ring has you covered.

Amazon's home surveillance company Ring is using video captured by its doorbell cameras in Facebook advertisements that ask users to identify and call the cops on a woman whom local police say is a suspected thief.

In the video, the woman’s face is clearly visible and there is no obvious criminal activity taking place. The Facebook post shows her passing between two cars. She pulls the door handle of one of the cars, but it is locked.

The video freezes on a still of the woman’s face from two different angles: “If you recognize this woman, please contact the Mountain View Police Department … please share with your neighbors,” text superimposed on the video says. In a post alongside the video, Ring urges residents of Mountain View, California to contact the police department if they recognize her...

Hmmm. I guess that's not so much "inadvertent influencer" as it is "protagonist in a Philip K. Dick novel." A private company, "shooting" footage using consumer products, is pitching Ring to your friends and neighbors with (possibly) one of your friends and neighbors. FIRST ONE TO CALL THE COPS WINS.

"Our township is now entirely covered by cameras," said Captain Vincent Kerney, detective bureau commander of the Bloomfield Police Department. "Every area of town we have, there are some Ring cameras."

Or not. YOU DON'T EVEN NEED TO CALL THE COPS. Amazon is way ahead of you. Cameras on doorbells + suspicious persons = cops just showing up and asking/demanding the footage you've collected.

Some police departments do more than just ask. Police in Indiana, New Jersey, California and other states have offered discounts for Ring cameras, sometimes up to $125. In some cases, those discounts come from taxpayer money.

[...]

In April, the city of Hammond, Indiana, announced it had $37,500 in funds to subsidize Ring devices -- half of which came from Ring. The other $18,750 came from the city, said Steve Kellogg, Hammond police's public information officer.

The city had 500 cameras, and in about a week, they were all sold. The city government ran more discounted programs, Kellogg said, putting out more than 600 Ring cameras in the city.

"There will be more cameras on the streets," Kellogg said. "It's really a no-brainer."

Bribes subsidies are cool. But have you tried making people feel bad because they're helping bad guys get away? It works. And it's free.

When people in the Neighbors app aren't being responsive, police will take to the streets and start knocking on doors asking for footage in person. People are a lot more cooperative when an officer is at their doorsteps asking for Ring footage, he said. Civil advocates argue that people don't really have a choice.

"You change how you drive when you see a cop driving next to you. What if a cop shows up at your door and asks you for something?" [ACLU staff attorney Mohammad] Tajsar said. "Even if you're the biggest civil libertarian, you will feel compelled to turn that footage over."

Law enforcement requests are easy to reject in theory. In person, they're a bit more difficult. But this is the ecosystem Amazon is building. Most of us still associate Amazon with free shipping and VOD, but the company really wants a piece of the government action. Whatever it hasn't tied up in hosting and storage, it's looking to collect via surveillance tech. Amazon is selling as much facial recognition software as it can to law enforcement agencies -- despite recent controversies -- and now it's hoping its home products will attract more subsidized deployments. Local law enforcement provides the public with cheap or free doorbell cameras and swings by for the footage whenever needed. Who isn't going to feel obligated to hand this over to the cops when they come asking?

As the EFF's Dave Maass points out, if cops wanted to outfit a ton of homes with surveillance cameras they could access at any time, there would be some pushback. But frame it as a giveaway with an eye on home security, and people will gladly sign up to turn Everytown, USA into London.

Both Amazon and law enforcement make it clear no one is obligated to turn their front doors into tools of the surveillance state. Amazon's end user agreement does not require users hand over footage to officers. But put a few officers on a customer's doorstep and the calculus of consent changes. How many Americans are going to choose their own doorstep to die on in a civil liberties battle with cops over footage of suspicious people/vehicles possibly collected by the private company's camera they have aimed at the street?

Filed Under: cameras, doorbells, police, privacy, ring doorbell, surveillance
Companies: amazon