Hands up who saw that coming years ago…

BTW, a whole lot of people still have Amazon Echo devices at home. You know that little Internet connected puck thing with an always on microphone that transmits what it hears to an Amazon data center for voice recognition, so people can do things like control their lights, control their music, order stuff just by voice. I'm sure Amazon, the same company behind the Ring cameras, would never abuse that for spying purposes.

According to Flock’s announcement, its Ring partnership allows local law enforcement members to use Flock software “to send a direct post in the Ring Neighbors app with details about the investigation and request voluntary assistance.” Requests must include “specific location and timeframe of the incident, a unique investigation code, and details about what is being investigated,” and users can look at the requests anonymously, Flock said.

“Any footage a Ring customer chooses to submit will be securely packaged by Flock and shared directly with the requesting local public safety agency through the FlockOS or Flock Nova platform,” the announcement reads.

In principle, allowing police to place requests for security camera data is not necessarily a bad thing. There can be legitimate use cases for such functionality. But this needs to be done without sketchy companies like Amazon or Flock being involved and broad legal safeguards for this process (e.g. requests can only be placed for serious crimes).

I lived in an apartment once a few years ago and my neighbor pointed one of these things right at my front door. I complained to the landlord but they said it was completely allowed. I was pissed because you could see well into my apartment when I opened my door and there was nothing I could do about it. I wasn't doing anything illegal, I just feel like it's completely reasonable to not want someone else pointing a camera right at your front door only a few feet away.

Here (Denmark) we can't even have them if they show just a bit of pavement or road or anything outside the grounds for the house.

I guess we are the 2 extremes in that regard. 😜

If you’re not doing anything wrong, why are you worried? /s

... and spray paint

This is my surprised face.

Orwell turns in his grave

Here I thought they were already an open book for the asking