Flock gives law enforcement privileged access to footage outside of their jurisdiction with actual features that support mass surveillance, like tracking cars across state lines. Ring footage requires a court order, warrant, or subpoena outside of customer consent and access per legal process is generally limited to a small subset of footage. That's a big difference. Only one of these two supports commercial dragnet.

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kergonath a day ago | parent | next [-]

> Ring footage requires a court order, warrant, or subpoena outside of customer consent and access per legal process is generally limited to a small subset of footage

Weren’t there regular scandals about local law enforcement regularly accessing Ring footage without the owner’s agreement or knowledge? Ring absolutely is a surveillance tool that can be used without oversight. See here for example: https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/corporate/amazon-ri...

	▲	tomnipotent 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> without the owner’s agreement or knowledge All access required user consent, other than a dozen very limited examples that were discovered in which Ring employees provided footage without user consent or a court order (which is negligible in the grand scheme of things). So no, Ring has not been abused by the police as much as Flock.

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NetMageSCW a day ago | parent | prev [-]

That is not true for Ring.

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tomnipotent a day ago | parent [-]

Can you provide examples of Ring giving carte blanche access to government agencies, local or federal, without legal process? Do you have any examples of Ring being used to track an individual across vast distances? Or of anything you could consider mass surveillance?

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kergonath a day ago | parent [-]

You are moving the goal posts. No single Flock camera can do that, either. Instead, what they offer is a network of cameras they can access remotely and they can use with facial recognition. And yes, this can be used to track people over long distances or across states.

There are precedents with Ring being very cozy with police departments, e.g.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/police-can-get-y...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/amazon-ring-stop...

And many more over the years (all the way until February of this year, when they cancelled a deal with Flock). Amazon is not a company to trust.

	▲	tomnipotent 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You're missing the forest for the trees. These two systems do not allow for even remotely the same levels of abuse. It's not possible to use Ring for mass surveillance with as little effort as Flock supports. > No single Flock camera can do that What does that matter? Flock allows government agencies to enter a license plate number and find all instances of that vehicle across all participating customers. This is not technically possible with Ring. > this can be used to track people Prove it. Find one example. I can find hundreds of examples for Flock. Both articles you linked to prove my point - access to footage was accessed by government agencies with consent from users, in which case a warrant was not needed. Read more than the misleading headlines and you would have figured that out for yourself, god forbid you let facts get in away of your bias. There were an small number of incidents in which Ring used an emergency situation to share 11 instances of footage without a warrant, which isn't even worth talking about since they've since closed that hole. > Amazon is not a company to trust. This has nothing to do with trusting Amazon and everything to do with false equivalence.
	▲	a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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