People are buying these things out of fear anyways. I thought they'd be happy big brother is watching.
Once Amazon started rolling out other stuff and it was clear they were setting up a private panopticon, I trashed it and went with Blink, adding five wireless cameras as well. Blink isn't much better, but they're not as broadly compatible and don't have as many bells and whistles yet - but they're getting there.
The next step is to roll my own stuff. I expect I'll have that done by the end of the year.
I'll also note that none of my Blink cameras are pointing outward from my home. The closest to that is that I have one mounted on the front corner eave, but I made sure to point it so that it's looking at where I park my vehicles, and turned off motion detection for the small area of the street that it can see.
What I don't understand is that most of the ones I've seen others install are mounted under the eaves of the house, pointing outward. What's the purpose of that? They're not going to capture anyone actually trying to mess with your property. Most of mine are mounted in trees (front yard) or on posts that I installed for that purpose (back yard).
But I definitely would not want to live in that world. And I think that's true for most people. It's kind of interesting too because there's some really nasty arguments one can make about this like, 'What, you'd rather see children kidnapped and even killed than consenting to surveillance that won't even be looked at unless you're under suspicion?'
But it's quite disingenuous, because with any freedom there is always a cost, and that cost is often extreme. 40,000+ people die per year because of our freedom to drive, yet few would ever use that as an argument to prohibit driving.
that is a fantastic argument to force reduced driving and shows up in virtually all discussions about car safety and public transit.
I think it's the opposite. I think people would prefer the peace of mind of living in a high trust society. People like predictability and being able to trust people. I also think people would enjoy that laws that people pass are actually applied and we can efficiently apply the will of the people to the country.
>with any freedom there is always a cost
Laws ultimately would be what restrict your freedom, not the enforcement of them. I don't think freedom should rely on poor enforcement of laws.
Your perceptions of other peoples' views are also off. Even with the current scope of government surveillance, 66% of Americans say that the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits. [1] And laws would not be what limit freedoms. Government and authority is not some abstract holistic entity. It's made up of people, like you and I. Would you feel comfortable with me being able to surveil every moment of your life? The difference between me and the person who would end up doing so is not this great gulf you might imagine.
For instance Snowden revealed that NSA officers would regularly collect and trade sexually explicit media obtained from surveillance. [2] They'd also use their position to spy on their love interests to the point it gained it's own little sardonic moniker 'LOVEINT'. The people that would be looking through those cameras are just people. And the government leadership overseeing these groups would include those prone to go off to an island to screw minors, or more upstanding fellows like Eric Swalwell, cheating on his wife with a Chinese spy while serving on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that oversees the entire US intelligence apparatus, and would oversee this sort of surveillance.
We're all just people, warts and all.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/11/15/key-takea...
[2] - https://time.com/3010649/nsa-sexually-explicit-photographs-s...
I live on a bucolic cul-de-sac in a house that I've lived in since the mid 1970s. Most of the neighbors are the same. I never in my life expected a random person to drive down the street, drag a lady out of his trunk, chase her around the cul-de-sac, and stab her to death in front of my house. I never expected to find the body in the woods 40' from my side door. This is when I also learned that nobody comes to clean up after a crime like that and that if I didn't want pools of blood in front of my house and a 50' streak of it crossing the circle or the splatters all over the mailboxes that I was going to have to go out there and clean it up myself. I was in PTSD therapy for a while after that. I'm glad the Ring camera caught some of the activity.
After an event like that, it's easy to lose a sense of security in your home. How are you supposed to sleep the night after that happens, when the perpetrator remains at large? You can't lock your doors hard enough or do anything at all to feel secure. That lack of sense of security does not go away in a day or a week or a month. It goes away when you can find "normal" again. It helped us to find normal by installing other cameras around the house.
I don't want Ring or Arlo or anybody to be automatically sharing my camera footage with anybody. Even with the murder event, it was my choice to go through the footage and share it with the authorities. I don't support authoritarian "law enforcement" activities, I don't want anybody tapping into my camera feed to find lost pets or for any other reason. They shouldn't be allowed to do it. Like many other services we all use, we're more of the product than the customer, as our data is harvested and used for other purposes.
Personal security is different than targeted advertising. Most people won't know they need or want a camera until after they have experienced something that makes them feel less secure in their home. I just hope they have the wits to read the Terms and understand what they're opting into before automatically accepting all of the opt-in-by-default data sharing.
Even in the most dystopian sci-fi future where a hostile and totalitarian government watches everything everybody does, they would still use the information to investigate boring everyday crimes.
The (non rethoric) question is, are people willing to pay the increasing price of non-crime related surveillance as we see diminished security margins.
Your doorbell photo of a car was really the only evidence to convict someone of murder?
I'm glad I live somewhere that needs more proof that.
The owners I know consider it a convenience device.
Personally not a compelling enough reason to buy the camera in the first place, but those non crime notifications end up being the most common once it's up.
They are toys
