Data query around the Netherlands shows about a hundred are mapped so far as specifically doorbell cameras: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2dQw (the tag does not yet seem established in the USA). There are also many thousands of cameras mapped that are either not doorbell-mounted, or simply not tagged to such detail. This is a convenient map to see all of them: https://sunders.intri.cat/
It's more casual than surveying e.g. addresses that may be hard to see if the building is recessed, but you'd still want to capture it because someone will want to route there sooner or later. Not so for cameras that only capture own property
StreetComplete has a "things" overlay that makes it very quick to add these at the position of a front door
Then the leaflet drop guys are maybe three different people.
Then there is food delivery, which is rare (because we rarely order) bit still another group of people.
Oh and then there are the Jehovah's witnesses.
Would cameras like these emit any sort of IR light or anything that might be detected from a distance?
Object recognition would depend on them being very obvious from the outside - which Rings do appear to be (I've never seen one in person) but I imagine there will be less-obvious options soon enough, if there isn't already.
Joking, a little, but seriously: the culture in the US has rotted to such an insane degree. Not only are we not friends with our neighbors, I'm actually scared to talk to them!
https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=surveillance%3Aty...
For a "complete" search in the OpenStreetMap-data I suggest [Overpass Turbo](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_turbo).
In this specific case I'd take a little detour over taginfo (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Taginfo), e.g. search for `surveillance` (https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=surveillance) there. A little bit of clicking (Type > Values > ALPR) leads to https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/surveillance%3Atype=A... If you click on 'Overpass turbo' on the top right, you get to a pre-filled search on Overpass turbo. Scroll the map to the region you want to search (start small), and click 'Run' on the top left.
Voila.
However, even ALPR doesn't show any devices for me:
I'm glad citizens in the EU are more on top of this. I really wish we as USA citizens had access to the same database of GPS coordinates for each Blink, Ring, and Amazon Key device that police do. Does anyone know how/if something like that could be FOIA'd? This seems it would be particularly fruitful if FBI/DHS has a comprehensive dataset for the entire nation.
Though I do worry that they may not "have" the dataset, but rather just have "access" to it via a queryable Amazon/Palantir database/API.
The area I was in was like the Korean DMZ with regard to flock cameras. I had one at the only entrance to my neighborhood. A trip to the grocery store would put me in their database 12 times at last count.
I still have to worry about the standardized fleet of cameras at Home Depot and a few other retailers, but it's not nearly as bad out here. Location is a big part of the dystopia. It is not evenly distributed. Fighting back at the municipal and HOA level can make a massive difference. Some areas seem hopeless though. You're better off finding something that already mostly works and trying hard to keep it that way.
The general fear level of the local population seems to be the biggest factor in all of this. I went from a place where people would do the quadruple check car lock routine when walking into the grocery store, to a place where many leave their unlocked vehicles idling in the parking lot. I don't even think about locking my doors at home now. It almost feels silly to do it around here. It's amazing the difference that ~65 miles can make.
It's not even that. The real shitholes full o' crime have scant cameras because you don't need them for "real" investigations of "real" crime. You only need a traffic cameras to establish what you need for a murder investigation or whatever, pair the images with cell time stamps and presto.
Cameras are for making it cheap to enforce the long tail of petty deviance that doesn't actually matter. Karen calls up bitching that some guy did something, normally that would be discarded because it's not worth it. But with a camera system they can query it and maybe fine the guy from their desks. They're not using the system to go after someone for stealing from parked cars except perhaps to walk back in time and add charges to someone they already got (same reason they ask for serial numbers of electronics and the like when doing theft investigations they won't follow up on).
0: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cameras-doorbells/collec...
(Reolink, Unifi/Ubiquiti, and Frigate are all good solutions for anyone who is not interested in supporting the proliferation of a police-state)
Unifi had an issue at the end of 2023 where users could access consoles they didn't own through remote access: https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/15/ubiquiti_camera_priva...
If I (or more specifically my spouse) could work the mobile app without SSO I'd be thoroughly satisfied. As it stands I have some regrets.
After some digging around, I found homebridge [0] (with the homebridge-unifi-protect plugin by hjdhjd [1]) which fixed that for me by tying the UI Protect system into Apple's HomeKit ecosystem (which also leverages the homekit secure video that keeps alerts/motion/snapshots on iCloud). Now all our devices are able to have it popup alerts for motions, packages, etc.
It's not perfect, but this way I'm able to get alerts without tying in to Unifi's SSO system. I also still like to open the UI Protect app when I'm not on the local network to sometimes archive videos, view cameras, mess with one of the new UI PTZ cameras, so I have backup access options, including Tailscale. Tailscale doesn't give me the alerts I want, but lets me access the app as if I were still at home. I also have it tied in with HomeAssistant and recently began playing around with go2rtc.
I'm a super-newb when it comes to all this but 2022 is when I began getting fed up with all these privacy nightmares and began to teach myself selfhosting, docker, etc so I can mitigate all this. Unfortunately, I'm the only one who knows how to tinker and keep all this updated. However, I do have documentation for my wife how to access everything and start fresh to make it easier on her by using UI's SSO way so it "just works" as they say in the Macintosh World, when I'm no longer around.
[0] https://homebridge.io/ [1] https://github.com/hjdhjd/homebridge-unifi-protect#readme
I wonder if it's because the G6 is (afaict) launching in Q4? I guess we'll just have to hold tight for now.
100% recommended alternative.
I was always suspicious of Ring and never understood the people using it.
I swapped out to the Logitech doorbell which I like better anyway
They're also illegal because you're not allowed to film public spaces without a good reason (it's up to the judge and case law to decide, e.g. if there has been arson in the area recently then it's reasonable to monitor your car that's parked at the kerb, for example). Nobody has yet gotten in trouble to my knowledge
Gotta love hypocrisy
In America we have this concept that a police must have a real reason to pull over your car. Except they can just setup an arbitrary checkpoint and pull every driver over and this is magically different and acceptable to do, no violations of rights at all.
They had some kind of deal with Amazon surely because it came with some amount of time free.
I buy their mice. They've been good mice and I'm increasingly unhappy with Logitech.
Occasionally I buy some cables. I think that's it.
If it was free, I could almost understand. Nothing is free, and if it cost the customer nothing, then the customer is the product. However, people paid for Ring gear and as a thanks have their privacy violated with no notice, no info and no choice.
There were women being stalked by ring employees. It was that bad. Teslas had (has?) a similar problem.
https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...
You can make this point stronger: Amazon is a police surveillance company (with Ring), just not primarily.
“Search party lets you use your outdoor Ring cameras to help neighbors in your area”
Note: doesn’t mention pets yet. Then:
“Starting with lost pets, Search party will…”
What comes after lost pets? Very open ended
endangered animal conservation groups looking for rare birds
This f shameless pretention of doing something noble - barely helpful above normal practices btw. - while manipulating clueless users into turning on mass-surveillance is revolting and disgusting. And ordinary employees figured this out, phrased, created content, implemmented, pubished, and are maintaining this dirty practice. Many times with (very misplaced) pride. Shame on all of them actively participating in this coward scheme!
Are there any wireless (running power to these locations is not an option) doorbell cams that record to local storage instead of the cloud? I refuse to pay a subscription for these things.
Ideally they would record to my server instead of onboard SD card so that the footage can't just walk away if someone grabs the camera.
IMO it properly reflects that what looks like an active affirmative choice by the user is actually not.
People are buying these things out of fear anyways. I thought they'd be happy big brother is watching.
The second best time is today.
Unfortunately the public love this stuff, and are quite happy to have CCTV pointing at your house. Privacy never existed 300 years ago, it doesn't today. Accept your feudal masters and make peace with it, because they won years ago.
Have people never read/watched a sci-fi book/film before?
Because when I reverse engineered my Tuya-based camera-equipped pet feeder, I've discovered that there was an encryption on the video stream, but they only encrypted I-frames and left P-frames unencrypted. Amazon is not Tuya, but IoT is IoT.
My point is, there are myriad of ways IoT vendor can boast "encryption" and "security" on the marketing materials, while the actual implementation could be flawed beyond redemption.
The bottom line with technology is that you either host and control it yourself or you're at the whims of the vendor's business strategy.
That's just being a realistic technology user in 2025.
I don't think this is a solution, personally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQxQpzNSNZU&pp=0gcJCfwJAYcqI...
Flock (deliberately, IMHO) has no verification on whether said agencies are allowed by law or regulation or whatever to have that access, it's just a free-for-all.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45382434 (discussion from 2025-09-26)
If the authorities come knocking with a warrant, or frankly, even a nicely-worded sensible request, sure, have at it. But ain't nobody accessing the footage unnoticed and without my approval.
My problem is that the area around my front door where the doorbell is installed is solid timber, so it's not just a simple ethernet drop. I'm honestly not even sure how the builders ran the existing wire to that location. Maybe my only option is to add a second backup camera in a location where an ethernet install is easier.
I'm sure the cops who trashed Afroman's place would have loved that ability.
Worst part was just running ethernet to the spots where the cameras needed to go (only crawlspace access) but nice not having to charge batteries and even nicer knowing i'm not sending video to netgear anymore.
If I had of had a webcam on my front door a few weeks ago I would have been able to identify the thieves that broke into my car and stole a bunch of stuff whilst I was asleep.
Since then I have "cammed" up, but I use my own hard wired network and connected to a Pi5 with a Hailo8 chip running frigate.
No third party apps, just the fun of more stuff on the network. I do run a Cloudflare tunnel on the PI so that I can connect to Frigate from anywhere when I get alerts.
But basically, it's me and only me accessing the content of those cameras. However I do plan to configure Frigate to upload the alerts and detections into S3 with a three month lifecycle.
I assume some of the concern around this is that folks don't want to live in a panopticon. If that's your objection, I can't really help with that. On the other hand, if your objection is that you don't want a backdoor built into your video doorbell (even one that you must opt into), I'm happy to report that there are good non-Ring options.
I switched to a Reolink video doorbell, and it has decent support for local-only operation. It has the ability to save footage to a local micro SD card, and if you're worried about someone stealing the entire doorbell and losing your footage, it also supports RTSP (a common IP camera protocol). You can even have it upload footage to a FTP server on a schedule. It also supports PoE if you're lucky enough to have ethernet at your doorbell, or don't mind doing the drop yourself.
Set up does require an app, but you don't need to use the app after that. Push notifs also require egress, but, iiuc, this is mostly because of how push notifications work. Push does NOT require a paid subscription.
I personally just use the app, but it's nice knowing that if Reolink tried to pull a fast one, I could just block egress on my VLAN and use it locally.
If you'd rather just go completely app-less, I imagine a dumb doorbell paired with an IP camera and a local ZoneMinder [1] install would provide most of the benefits of something like Ring. Of course, the tradeoff is you now have a second job being sys admin of your homelab. Pick your poison, I guess.
If someone is in my house tapped into the network, cameras are the least of my problems.
Cameras? NVRs? A sea of IoT light bulbs, switches, and sensors that all variously speak Zigbee or Matter or Thread or Wifi or Z-Wave or Bluetooth or some clown connection or whatever? Almost all of it works fine with HA. It's very flexible.
If anything, it may be too flexible. It can be rough getting started with it.
(I use it in "Home Assistant OS" form in a VM on a light-weight x86 box that only cost me $50, wherein: Performance is quite lovely, and updates haven't hosed anything up [yet] that required me to go poking at it to keep it going. It's also right at home on bare-metal x86, or an ARM SBC like a Raspberry Pi, or in containers, or [...]. Did I mention that it's flexible?)
Not sure how YC sees this.
They're "investors, not bosses" - https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/
Being an investor is not an excuse. It makes you amoral, too.
"I didn't build the bomb, I just funded the company that built it."
In case you haven't noticed, the surveillance state is 100% YC adjacent.
WiFi routers can’t tell you where people are in the house. The routers don’t even know their own location within the house.
All of those papers you see on the topic have extensive additional information being put into their models. The routers don’t magically know the layout of your house.
At most, a WiFi device could infer movement in a house if the RSSI of devices is fluctuating where it is normally stable.
But also, don't builders have to submit plans of homes to the local government when building them for approval?
You’re not going from a floor plan to a precise location model. Just think about how different the WiFi environment would be if someone put their router next to their steel computer case versus someone setting it on a nice MDF cabinet with no wires nearby. Completely different RF environment and pathing.
And if you don't have those, a lot of buildings have common patterns. Its very much in the realm of possibility to train a model using exterior and interior information so that you could have AI generate a floor plan using only exterior data.
Combine that with a small drone that could fly around a building and take different wifi signal readings to triangulate access point positions.
Once you have all that don't you have everything you need to detect movement in the building based on signal disruptions?
Yes, seems like a bit of work but it absolutely seems like the type of effort some governments would put effort into.
I regret even engaging with the floor plan debate.
It doesn’t matter if they have a floor plan. That’s not enough information to characterize the RF environment of a house and how it responds to people moving through it.
A floor plan won’t tell you the position of all the WiFi devices, obstructions, and how the environment responds to moving those around. It won’t even tell you where the router is with any precision or if it’s next to a big chunk of metal like a computer case that’s blocking half the house and causing reflections.
It’s a red herring.
That seems like all you'd need anyway, skip the rest of this. Small autonomous drones with simultaneous location and mapping capability will absolutely revolutionize warfare (and firefighting, but I digress) whenever they stop being sci-fi.
The floor plan of every home is not on file, especially older homes.
Police aren’t accessing your floor plan and then accessing your router and combining these into a perfect model that maps people’s locations. Where in this supposed plan are the police deducing the location of your WiFi router in the house and constructing a model of all materials and objects in the house that impact the model?
This just isn’t how those research papers work. It’s not something the police are going to combine with a file from the planning office and magically have a map of you in your house like in a movie.
What the public does not understand though is that THEIR complicity and facilitation is not only integral, it is even necessary in a "democracy" where a psychological "consent" must be manufactured, not dissimilar to basic grooming tactics. And no, it's no coincidence that all the western leadership and institutions are effectively all various types of groomers, i.e., psychological manipulators and abusers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416761
Signal processing is probably a general problem. This month we had news about transcribing speech from sound waves jiggling a regular computer mouse.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/mouse_microphone_secu...
Cons: use your imagination.
Highway patrol officers have a similar risk profile to construction workers. Mostly car accidents. Patrolmen in cities or towns get hurt in town or in altercations all of the time.
Court officers do not. Detectives largely do not. Police are more likely to get shot at, but way more likely to get hurt in a bunch of acute and long term ways. The nature of the stress that many police experience measurably shortens their lives.
The biggest issues with police with regard to officer and public safety are poor governance and macho culture. I live in New York so I’ll use them as an example. NY State Police are highway patrol focused - they wear grey and black uniforms and Stetson hats. NYPD Highway patrol units wear black leather jackets and cavalry breeches. It looks cool and has a certain elan — but officers would be safer in more functional dayglo attire.
In terms of governance, like many areas of American governance, checks and balances are weak. Example: Cozy relationships between various departments, prosecutors, and perhaps elected judges mean that many NY police avoid prosecution or and sanction for DWI.
Sure, but both construction worker and police officer are significantly more dangerous jobs than most of us here have sitting behind a desk.
Obviously it’s not a job where people are dying routinely, but suggesting death or serious injury are the only two risks of interacting with the public and responding to threatening or unstable situations is ignoring the reality. It’s a tough job. Much tougher than my time spent sitting at a desk.
Removing that one step just for community policing would completely change police interactions. Community policing is not the place to inject warrant enforcement, it too completely changes the dynamics.
Which is easier, Wifi 7 in all homes or gun restrictions ?
https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/167...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentation... https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/11/anduril-to-take-over-microso...
Sci-fi writers understood both what technology could create in the future (and what would be desirable), and also understood how people abuse power and the tools available to them to stay in power (or gain more).
In other words: they predicted the future, more than they inspired it. IMO, that also makes their writing that much more interesting.
AI/Surveillance are only gears in the machine.
And yet here we are complaining that our phones are over-listening to us and our cars no longer have knobs.
Now with the written word and how seemingly determinant people are in large numbers we are again super vulnerable.
Is it as secure as a cloud service? Depends on what you consider secure. I closely monitor access logs and use strong passwords, Amazon has billions to spend on encryption, apps, and datacenters but they also have thousands of employees that can access your data at any time for any reason.
I would love it if some commercial host-it-yourself product were released but that goes against the pay to play model that has been chosen for all modern tech.
They have 0 employees who can do that.
It’s right in the article
Ok, I’m stumped, what service is this?
If anyone is having trouble understanding the support load, start by traveling to your local assisted living home and explaining to everyone static vs. dynamic IP address assignment.
You can do it fairly easily by bouncing off a server you control... aaaand we're right back where we started.
This doesn't solve the primary problem of your neighbours turning your country into a surveillance state.
Sadly it is only going to get much worse before it gets better.
"History doesn't repeat itself but rhymes a lot" (or words to that effect). What is happening now in the US (and many other places) strongly echoes the events leading up to WW2.
Then is up for the citzens to let it happen or react.
I'm not really pro-government, but modern surveillance capitalism really pushes against this view. Put to their own devices, the public will generally (and apparently) flock towards mass surveillance all on their own, and I think one possible implication is that the government surveillance policies are more popular then some folks in HN circles would suspect.
OpenAI is receiving far more data with a far greater privacy impact than social networks. And all this is happening at a time when the US is transitioning from a somewhat functioning democracy to an autocratic and fascist system.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/chatgpt-pa...
"Ignorance is bliss"
2 things.
1. Few people understand most surveillance legislation, including journalists.
2. Most governments use thought terminating cliches involving child safety to force compliance on the middle set of people who dont like surveillance and understand a minimum amount of what the legislation does.
These points leave anti surveillance campaigners fighting an uphill battle. Most people, when they have these laws clearly articulated and arent in danger of being called a pedo for opposing them, oppose them.
When that trade is voluntary, its not really that controversial.
People give facebook tons of data, they dont care because it keeps them in touch with friends. People get upset when the utility of facebook decreases due to enshittification, or if they provide that data to somewhere spooky that they werent aware they were consenting to.
Some sort of jamming tech or scrambling tech. There’s no reason to lock everyone into a surveillance state when we should be fighting it. Fighting through legislation isn’t tenable anymore.
If you have a system where, as I understand it, the main point is to check who is standing in front of your door, and that system now is one automatic update away from dipping into your bank account... How long until the police departments figure out that donations to a specific company could be very profitable?
Even public information clearly describes how it is the "CIAs" one trick pony, whether it's orchestrating a "color revolution" for "democracy", instigating conflicts and war to feign innocent self-defense, implementing social engineering and Constitutional subversion, or implementing mass surveillance specifically. It's the same wife-beater and child rapist type pattern of grooming abuse that then feigns innocence and deflects blame to anything and anyone else.
Most people are really not all that different than any run of the mill battered wife (even if only in the making), psychologically. I get it a lot when I point out what a trap and an illegitimate, enemy entity that the EU is (not to pick on the EU, because it also applies to the US and many other places, but it's far more pronounced with the "EU-cultists")... You get the constant predictable defenses of the love-bombing "abusive boyfriend"/wife beater in the making responses. "you don't understand", "the EU really loves me", "you never want anything good for me", "he showers me with all kinds of benefits and slick marketing", "we are going to be happy forever".
It's sad, and as someone that has watched that cycle unfold even in my own family, it's really kind of demoralizing and somewhat depressing to know exactly where it's heading and being unable to counter the forces that have roots a long long time ago, forces of nature. So, the US and the EU will have to suffer that which is predictable and was preventable, no matter how much they wanted to see the world through rose colored glasses.
Maybe for humanity's sake, China can free the world of the scourge of this cycle and the psychopathic, narcissistic, maniacal group of people that causes it all... if they don't just kill all life on the planet because if they can't be in control then no one can be in control.
I'm usually against these types of "smart" devices, but only bought it because my house got burgled as a student (whilst I was asleep!), so I got pretty shaken up and got the cheapest thing I could find. Currently, I do have it connected to a local HA instance, but I'm pretty sure that relies on Ring's online services to access it, unless I'm mistaken.
Google for rtsp doorbell and you’ll find many discussion threads
Some people have the setting on where it starts announcing stuff any time it sees a person, which it does all the way to the sidewalk. So you go on a walk and get yelled at through a super shitty speaker several times.
And it’s about as dystopian as you can imagine with people posting recordings constantly on the neighborhood Facebook group and arguing.
I swapped to HomeKit secure video because of no additional subscription, included in the iCloud one I’m paying anyway. Allegedly end to end encrypted too.
That's concerning. Now we have to worry about spyware coming pre installed on houses. I wonder how much the developers got paid to install those?
The data shows people like video doorbell. If the developer has to install a dumb one, then they would benefit by installing video doorbells.
I would love to see legislation banning this kind of automated harassment.
Never done it, but on late night walks home I've imagined banging on the doors of the houses with these just to inform them I got the message.
Who knows how long that utility lasts with cheap video editing on the horizon.
It’s mostly just convenience though. Neighbor kid rings my doorbell and it tells me who is there. Tells me when I have a package. Helped me recover my cat that escaped. One time a huge buck came on my porch to eat some flowers that was pretty cool, bro had no business being that far from the woods lol. My kids can talk to their friends through it if they ring the bell when we’re not home.
What sort of stuff does it say?
Reality has become more stupid than even visionaries could have predicted.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/06/a16z-backed-toka-wants-to-...
This is a little misleading. Flock is primarily an ALPR that can identify make/model/color/identifying-feature of vehicles. It's not facial recognition. It doesn't itself have a racial component. The modal "proactive" Flock intervention (as opposed to investigative searches after crimes) is to flag a moving vehicle as stolen.
But in practice, the outcomes of deploying Flock are racialized, because the hot lists states keep of stolen vehicles aren't accurate enough for real-time enforcement, so recovered vehicles stay on the lists and false-positive. You're disproportionately likely to have a vehicle on a hot list if you live in a low-income neighborhood.
Even then: it's not clear how any of this is apposite to a Ring/Flock partnership. You can't use a Ring camera to do realtime ALPR flagging of cars. Presumably, this supports Flock's "single pane of glass" product; they just want police going to Flock for all their video needs. Police already canvass Ring and Nest cameras during investigations.
Wonder if that helps any.
https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...
KMS access is based on IAM policies.
If law enforcement wants access to your KMS keys, they'll compel IAM, not KMS, to give them access. If you ask KMS about it, they'll play dumb.
My ideal anti-theft device would be a mode where the car is unlocked but the alarm goes off if you try to open the door.
But let's say you're right: that means that laziness is enough to bring on the surveillance state.
Nobody is consenting to it out of fear.
When your fear the other the consent is internal.
Anybody can merely force someone else to do something. I can, you can. That's small fry stuff.
The real ticket is getting people to do the things you want with no force. Convincing them to act against their own interests. Now, thats much harder, and that's the type of thing the big dogs are looking at.
I struggle to reconcile.
Edit: added country
I hope people will join their local community groups.
I had to buy a surveillance camera recently, but I made sure mine doesn’t connect to the internet in any way.
I’ve decided that I’m not a high-profile target for covert operatives, but I am a target of opportunity for people who have access to my data once that data is outside of my control. The decisions I make based on that are decisions like, “No surveillance feed goes into cloud services operated by companies I don’t trust,” but “I don’t need to encrypt my NAS”.
This is us against the oligarchs, not us against each other. And something makes me worried that there is an impending recession/depression and that these surveillance devices will be use to quell any dissent. (I say this because of the insane rise in the price of gold)
I, for one, am canceling my Amazon Prime account and avoiding amazon as much as I can in this dystopia where it is the only place you can buy many goods anymore.
The whole flock thing is brilliant as the FBI is the sales force through their grant programs.
Elected in part by the useful idiots on HN and many other places. They were so ignorant of how government actually works they were happy to give it this power. They foresaw the jackboot being used to stomp petty criminals and fellow middle class types who don't "pay their fair share". But they had never cracked open a history book because if they had they would know that sort of stuff is never a top priority.
Are we sure that formalized populist regulation is the boogeyman? Like, really absolutely super duper double-checked certain?
These people don't care, they might put on a fake persona that pretends to care, but you outright don't care if you work at these places. You get a job somewhere else when you care.
What you hear from them isn't caring, it's just a way for them to pretend they are someone they aren't. The person they pretend to be would not be working there.
(Context, IBM helped the Nazis with recordkeeping.)
Since then we've forgotten how to enforce anti monopoly and media ownership rules. Similarly we've somehow completely turned campaign financing into an open competition for bribes.
Surely in 2025 a ragtag group of people with some revolvers, pistols, hunting rifles, and a small minority owning assault rifles, with limited ammo will be able to fight against the most well-funded armed force with tanks, IFVs, assault helicopters, aircrafts, missiles, rockets, and military infantry armed to the gills wearing NVGs.
People who think 2A will do anything in case your government actually turns violent on you are just trying to maintain the illusion of control.
"The Government" is not a entity with "wants" or "needs", it's a collection of people with their own motivations. Motivations that usually end up being about power or money, or a combination, because the people who end up in the government are capitalists.
> why it was the 2nd most important thing to those
I mean, not really? The 2nd amendment includes stuff that they didn't even think of originally when creating the constitution, so just because it was the second amendment that went through, doesn't mean it was "the 2nd most important thing", the most important things are the original articles in the constitution, so the amendments must start ranking at 8th place or something like that, 2nd amendment ends up being the 9th most important thing if we were to rank things like you did, but honestly.
This isn't a capitalist or any other "ist" problem. It is a problem with society and social norms.
The cameras are there because people want them to be. The cameras get used because it is not politically toxic to do so. The use continues because the people objecting to the current abuse don't object on a principal level, they love the jackboot. They'd just rather see it used to levy ruinous fines upon middle class scofflaws (got I hate that word and the people who use it unironically) than whisk brown people off the street. Sure, different people would screech if the powers that be pivoted in that direction but at no point does the screeching add up to change because only the people who hate a specific abuse screech at any one time.
yes, some people genuinely do, and some people don’t.
some people have absolutely no understanding of what surveillance tech is doing and where it is going.
in terms of the “ist” problem you refer to, at the end of the day, the real answer is to deny anyone that amount of power. whether it’s corporations, religions, governments, or billionaires. none of these should have enough power to sway the world to terrifying places. none of them, including govs, billionaires, or corporations.
somehow we need to achieve separation of money and state with as much vigor as we used to separate church and state.
we should be incentivizing the power from all of those groups to be dispersed as much as possible.
So why wouldn’t any accept capitalism and ignore its flaws?
IBM did a ton of business with the Nazis.
It's the exact same problem HN has been talking about for years except now a group of wannabe commandos who stake out in the parking lots of Mexican restaurants now have a tool where they can just type in their stereotypes and have the AI find them.
It's just the brown people who are put in detention centers, isn't it?
Why does in your mind a "brown person" that is a foreign national who broke the law in and of America by entering and/or remaining in the USA, have more rights to have a job, make money, and even receive public assistance in America than a non-"brown person" that is a legitimate citizen of the USA?
What is worse, is that you don't even understand that your support of this kind of lawlessness is only for the purpose of allowing the rich to plunder the working and lower middle class, the real victims that through your words and actions hate with a passion.
Sure, burglars also benefit from burglarizing, but that does not make it any better than foreign nationals benefitting while the rich also use them like some crime boss in control of a burglary ring. How do you think, e.g., the home builders who make ~30% gross profit on homes that are poorly built due to "immigrant labor" report triple digit billion dollar returns?
You people baffle me that you cannot connect two dots as you at the same time lament that wages are too low, as you support floods of wage decreasing supply flooding "immigration".
No one is targeting "brown people" they just happen to be the majority of brown people the ruling class loves importing to profit from at the expense of the indigenous people, just like when the British and Hispanics did it through slavery. You are no different than the slavery rationalizers of the 17th-19th century. Today the ruling class just figured out how to manipulate you into supporting importation of brown people to undermine the indigenous people, and you don't have the intellect or integrity to understand you are being manipulated.
I am stricken with fear over the control and manipulation by the Chinese state. A dominance over people without respect or regard, a self certainty and pomp that denies life & possibility.
But what the West is letting happen here, the limitless post-state open-for-anyone surveillance Flock & others are offering has seemingly even less bounds, less respect, less purpose, less direction. These people, this enterprise is clearly the worst possible thing we could do, the most awful accrual & misuse of the world against its people's. To spy on everyone & to without regard sell that days to everyone is a crime against all.
Flock is truly the #HostisHumaniGeneris. Woe & (all too expectable) disappointment to see Amazon giving up all their data to fascist pro ICE losers who, were we a descent society, we would run out of the world.
Cops need a warrant to track your phone, check which tower it connected to or tail your car for extended period of time.
Cops do not need a warrant to use Flock system. They have an app where they can simply put your license plate and they will get a path showing every move of your car as tracked by the flock cameras, and there are a looot of them (e.g. near San Jose: https://deflock.me/map#map=16/37.335318/-121.881316). And thats without the integration of ring.
This essentially allows them to GPS tag anyone, with no warrant, while "following the laws". So no, it's not all the same.
They definitely need to follow the law when they get it from the Telco, but Cops can use their CSS/IMSI catcher all they want, theres almost no way to tell. But they can not then go to court and say "Yeah—we listened to their phone call and searched the car."
With this its no problem. No Hailstorm to buy for the entire force and there isn't any federal oversight on this sort of thing as near as I can tell. If you think police don't do crimes I've got a bridge to sell you.
That part you can't do. Unless the battery is removed, phone can be turned back on remotely.
