Comment by tantalor
3 years ago
> prevent someone from dying or from suffering serious physical harm
These are exigent circumstances, which allow police to enter your home without a warrant. Extending that access to include video cameras seems reasonable.
This is a "In Case of Emergency Break Glass" type of situation.
How do you define this though. If someone say talks about XYZ politician. And the current governor feels if said XYZ person takes his position that it’d cause you personal harm. Can the current governor access your camera?
If a police officer comes to your house without a warrant are they allowed to break in? If not they shouldn’t be given access to my camera feeds without my permission.
The move by google here just re-affirmed that I made the right choice to not buy their products.
> circumstances that would cause a reasonable person to believe that entry (or other relevant prompt action) was necessary to prevent physical harm to the officers or other persons, the destruction of relevant evidence, the escape of the suspect, or some other consequence improperly frustrating legitimate law enforcement efforts
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/exigent_circumstances
I am not a lawyer. But, there seems to be a pretty clear difference here. If you have time to ask google you have time to call a judge. If you don’t have time to call a judge, google doesn’t have time to vet your decision and is effectively just streaming your cameras to your law enforcement office.
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Yeah like police always follow the law.
> If a police officer comes to your house without a warrant are they allowed to break in?
Absolutely. If they hear gunshots or screams of “help! Help!” they will break the door down. I’m sure there are other triggers, too.
My problem with this is defining exigent circumstances as it relates to video or similar data. I can't easily think of a circumstance where the police are outside my house, encounter an exigent circumstance, but also have the time to request/obtain data from Google. And if the police are made aware of to something in advance, they have time to get a warrant.
Didn't you know? Future Crimes are now exigent circumstances!
If it's reasonable, then there shouldn't be a problem letting users turn it off.
If police attempt to enter your home under exigent circumstances, you know.
You can get a lawyer, go to court, and demand an accounting.
You don't have that control here. Your footage can just walk off, no clue. No accounting, no reporting, no post-hoc punishment for mis-use.
> go to court, and demand an accounting.
> You don't have that control here. Your footage can just walk off, no clue. No accounting, no reporting, no post-hoc punishment for mis-use.
The supreme court recently ruled that a woman beaten by police didn't have standing to sue. Good luck with breaking qualified immunity in a court of law in the coming years.
I literally can't find the case you are referencing. The only one coming back is a ruling on Marion's single-container 4th amendment statue which sounds unrelated.
Heh, exigent circumstances? If somebody is hurt or calling for help, by all means knock down a door or bust a window. But exigent circumstances for rifling through my documents? Get a fucking warrant!
> This is a "In Case of Emergency Break Glass" type of situation
The only difference being that when you pull the alarm for lols there are consequences -- for you. Members of law enforcement on the other hand do that on the regular and face zero consequences.
That said, Google doing this might ease the pressure to enable this across the board through legislation. So maybe a positive in the end; I wouldn't really expect any privacy with Nest anyways.
> This is a "In Case of Emergency Break Glass" type of situation.
The problem is there isn’t any broken glass here. No judge is stamping this, and I see no duty to warn the customer about what device and data was accessed, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to opt out ahead of time. This removes a lot of checks in the name of expediency.
Yes, the only sensible comment is downvoted to the bottom of the page. In U.S. jurisprudence "exigent circumstances" gives police all kinds of powers including warrantless searches of all kinds, up to and including electronic surveillance and phone taps.
The "process" to which you are "due" when it comes to these things is if the police try to use this information to prosecute you, they have to explain it in court, whereas if they obtain it through a search warrant, they have to explain themselves in advance. It's all "due process".
It's literally a checkbox a cop clicks when they request data with no vetting that it actually is an emergency or consequences if it is not.
Oh, have you seen the forms the cops fill out to do the data request? Or are you theorizing?
It isn't quite a check-box, but here's Ring's exigent circumstances form:
https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/article_attachments/360053...
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It's up to the police to show they have probable cause before they collect data. That's what warrants and judges are for. Anything collected without a warrant should be de-facto considered suspect. Why would you give agents of the government the benefit of the doubt here?
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It's literally right here: https://ler.amazon.com/us
You can see it. No theorizing. Click the big red "Submit Emergency Request" button.
A close family member works in law enforcement, I have seen the form. Though for facebook not google. They could have changed it or google's could be different but I have no particular reason to think it's materially different. It's up to the cop to decide what constitutes an emergency and there is no verification or consequences beyond that. It's literally a checkbox.