Uploaded Ring footage reportedly provides location to the square inch, Ars Technica
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ring around the issues –
Neighbors data proves extra-revealing as Amazon police partnerships accelerate.
Kate Cox -Dec 12, (8:) pm UTC **************************
**************************************A Ring camera doorbell. (********************** Amazon’s aggressive push to grow its surveillance-camera company Ring is working, and adoption has skyrocketed in the past two years thanks to deals with hundreds of police departments. A new set of reports highlights the ways Amazon convinces police to join those partnerships — and the amount of data that users can inadvertently reveal.
In a location selected at random in Washington, DC, for example, Gizmodo was able to identify at least 1, 863 Unique Ring cameras that had uploaded video to Neighbors during the – day window. In their 9-square-mile sample of Los Angeles, they found at least 5, 50 Ring cameras; in Denver, 1, (**************************************************************. ************Gizmodo writes: Examining the network traffic of the Neighbors app produced unexpected data, including hidden geographic coordinates that are connected to each post — latitude and longitude with up to six decimal points of precision, accurate enough to pinpoint roughly a square inch of ground.Many of those coordinates were indeed right in front of someone’s house, a few feet away from the location of the camera. Some were near intersections; the farthest Gizmodo identified was about 405 feet. However, they note, backtracking to find the camera that captured footage is “trivial” in person, when armed with the video and the coordinates, and reporters basically drove or walked up to people houses to prove it.
In Washington, DC, for example, Gizmodo notes that at least (Active Ring cameras line the path between one public charter school for grades 6 – and the soccer field its students use. Gizmodo also found several dozen instances of DC residents using Neighbors to share videos of children. Some of the kids in question were reportedly doing such activities as riding bicycles and taking selfies. Not exactly striking threats to public safety — but in a densely urban environment such as the District of Columbia, perhaps the homeowners simply did not have lawns to tell the kids to get off of.
Security and surveillance experts voiced concerns to Gizmodo that such a web of cameras could easily track individuals going into or out of “sensitive buildings. ” So the reporters looked and did indeed find at least one health clinic that provides abortion services within “unnerving proximity” to some Ring cameras, as well as a legal office handling immigration and refugee cases. Having footage showing individuals going to those sorts of facilities uploaded to a platform like Neighbors and becoming widespread could actually put individuals’ lives in danger.As of December 6, Ring now boasts
Motherboard examined documents from more than 90 cities that have partnered with Amazon to sell Ring cameras. Police agree not to talk about the details
publicly when they sign the contracts. They also are expected essentially to perform marketing, by encouraging residents to participate in Neighbors or buy Ring products. Ring also gives each department a certain number of free “seed cameras” they can use to kickstart the initiative.
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