Comment by SoftTalker
14 days ago
If you have cameras the police can get a subpoena to force you to provide what you have saved. If you don’t have cameras, you can’t give what you don’t have.
14 days ago
If you have cameras the police can get a subpoena to force you to provide what you have saved. If you don’t have cameras, you can’t give what you don’t have.
Yes, but they have to subpoena you. That means process, that means getting a judge to sign it, and it means you can limit scope (i.e., if the incident under investigation occurred outside your home, you're not going to need to provide any footage from inside).
While the OP doesn't emphasize this detail, it says this is a tool that will allow police to request access from the camera owners. Police can, of course, also request footage from the owners of non-cloud cameras, so the legal basis of disclosure -- consent -- can exist in either case, cloud or non-cloud camera.
The two are very different.
If you are subpoenaed then you're obligated to respond, and the same is true for Ring. But that's not what we're talking about here. This is law enforcement requesting access, and Ring doesn't require a formal subpoena or warrant. They can decide to comply to nothing more than "someone from a .gov email asked nicely".
It's written out in their terms of service:
> you also acknowledge and agree that Ring may access, use, preserve and/or disclose your Content to law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or third parties, if legally required to do so or if we have a good faith belief that such access, use, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to: > > (a) comply with applicable law, regulation, legal process or reasonable preservation request; (b) enforce these Terms, including investigation of any potential violation thereof; (c) detect, prevent or otherwise address security, fraud or technical issues; or (d) protect the rights, property or safety of Ring, its users, a third party, or the public as required or permitted by law.
So Ring is quite happy to hand over your footage to anyone so long as Ring believes it's "reasonably necessary" to protect the rights or property of anyone.
This isn't about Ring complying with a legal request. This is about Ring undermining the fourth amendment entirely by saying "we'll give law enforcement whatever they want".
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You don’t have to keep your recordings for a long time. It’d be pretty easy to set up a system that only keeps records for a few days.
Good luck unencrypting my drives.
With a subopena you would be the one unencrypting your disk. Being in comptent of the court usually means imprisonment or daily fine until you comply with the court order.