In my neighborhood, a police chase ended in three teenagers pancaking their car into a house at 60 mph. They perished. All the houses had ring cams. Somehow astonishingly none of those cams were ever used against the police. Curious. ACAB every day. Also fuck Amazon.
What would you expect the cameras to have seen to implicate the police in a crime?
Yes, it was 3 AM. They went out of their way to say that oit wasn’t their fault because it was not a high speed chase. Despite the police vehicle pursuing at the same speed but one tenth of a mile behind until about a quarter mile away. The kids plow into the house and the cop turns off the lights at that point and drove right past it. Stating they didnt see it. It was under a street light. The camera would have proven they slowed down to look at it. The cops didn’t do anything or report it. It wasnt until people walked by and happened to see the car at 6:30 am and called 911 did anyone show up. Fuck police.
Same thing happened at my work place. Some kid was drunk, being chased by cops, and crashed his car into the building next to my work. Car crashed, flipped, and caught on fire, he burned alive. They claim he had gotten away from them and they saw nothing. It was reported by people driving past as in your case, but there were holes in police story and evidence of the contrary. My boss had disconnected the front cameras a bit prior and hadn’t gotten around to reconnecting them, unfortunately, so we’ll never know :(
Unfortunately, most of that (lying, chasing, not reporting a crash) isn’t actually illegal (for pigs). Police have a stupid amount of leeway from the law.
Really, it should be illegal at the state level in every state to chase people. I’ve lived in a city where the PD had that: police could not chase; they’d just find them later.
I can agree upon the police having leeway, or in other words, being accountable to no one. My city has an ordinance against high speed police pursuit. At the state level, there is a high degree of police liability built into jurisprecedent for high speed chases. That said, police are not accountable to laws. In other words, fuck the police.
Without consent is one thing*. Most police investigations are not consensual. Without warrant is quite another thing.
I expect my providers to respect my rights up to the maximum guaranteed by law. I certainly don’t expect anyone at any company to risk jail by defying court orders. But I sure as shit don’t expect them to roll over and lick boot at the first opportunity they get
*) this is why end to end encryption is so important
FOSS software on hardware you own or nothing when it comes to these kinds of things.
I’m not getting an astro, I watched Runaway (1984) I know what they can do:
In the future police warrants for phone tapping will be obsolete, since Alexa is already there listening to your every word.
That’s the business version. They’re moving full steam ahead on the home unit.
“What if robots could fuck and Wall-E and Eva had a child?” - Some Amazon engineer.
I really don’t understand smart home stuff. Seems like such a waste of money to me for a negligible convenience gain.
I like having smart things for automating certain aspects of the home. It also adds convenience for certain lifestyles. I can control my
thermometerthermostat while I’m out of the house, for example, or check in on my pets on the cameras.This is not advocating for things like what Amazon is doing, to be clear.
Checking on the pets seems like a good use. Why do you need to change your thermometer when you’re outside the house, though?
The simplest examples I can think of would be:
- you meant to before you left but forgot
- weather conditions changed so your house temperature needs changed
- you want the house to be warm or cool when you get home, similar to the main benefit of remotely starting a car
I know many dumb thermostats support scheduling, which might preempt the last one, but if - again - you forgot to set that up or you didn’t know when you were going to be home, it would be a boon to have a way to address that.
Also, most of the smart thermostats I’ve seen have temperature threshold alarms. If a fire starts, you would get a notification and hopefully be able to do something about it. Or if the climate control system fails while you’re out, you can respond as appropriate.
I agree that there is no biological imperative for smart home equipment, but I have appreciated mine many times; and I mostly self host, so in theory I’m not giving away data. To me, the only downside is the cost, which comparatively isn’t really all that bad in many cases.
