zlacker

>>nickth+(OP)
Good, that is the way it should have been the whole time. The default view of government by businesses and people should be as an adversary. It is the duty of everybody to tell the government to stuff it when they aren't following the rules we have laid out for them.

>>tastyf+26
program that had allowed law enforcement to seek footage from users on a voluntary basis

This was a voluntary program though. Blocking the police from asking for help is unnecessarily adversarial. You are right about police collecting video from Ring without user involvement, but this was transparent and voluntary.

>>jibe+D8
Yeah, if someone commits a crime at my neighbor's house, I appreciate that there's an easy way to collect data from any cameras that might be used to catch them. This kind of thing is far more useful for good things than for bad.

It isn't like they were pulling videos without consent to send tickets for rolling stops. Although if they did, they could collect enough revenue to fix every road in the country. :lol

>>_ea1k+y9
I have a friend who’s abusive and manipulative partner setup ring cameras around the house. After they broke up, the bad ex then took videos of day to day life and sent them to the police as evidence of physical abuse.

A good lawyer got the case dropped pretty quick, but not before she spent a weekend in jail, got fired as a teacher, and spent thousands on legal fees. The police had “video evidence” and therefore refused to drop the case even when the ex retracted the claims, and required months of fighting the legal system.

Beyond that awful freak incident, there’s tons of cases of police planting evidence, police ignoring real evidence, and police using an individual’s voluntary will to help them catch one crime to implicate an innocent person in a petty crime unexpectedly. There’d have to be a pretty big crime for me to voluntarily show the police any video of myself.

>>vineya+Zb
Sorry, but what does this have to do with the topic? A manipulative ex manipulated police... is not new nor does it have anything to do with the question of voluntarily handing video evidence to police.

If we were to structure our lives around things that evil people misused good-intentioned processes for, then we would be continually paranoid and society would grind to a halt.

I am certainly in favor of limited police powers, but the conversation you are having is a different one from that.