# Ring shares doorbell footage with flock now
# Louis Rossmann — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyjSl2aqUq0

Hey everybody, how's it going? Hope you
have a lovely day. Welcome to today's
episode of Right to Repair. I'm your
host Louis Rossmann, and today I want to
follow up on a video that I did about 3
years ago about the Ring Doorbell. This
is not one of my best videos, but I'm
just going to discuss the topic before
we move on to what is going on today.
So, to give you some context here,
Senator Ed Markey sent a letter from the
United States Senate to Ring Doorbell or
to the CEO of Amazon Andy Jassy, but
essentially Ring Doorbell, saying he
wanted to express concerns about Ring's
ongoing surveillance practices and
engagement with law enforcement. While I
acknowledge and appreciate the steps
that Ring has taken in response to my
previous letters to your company, I
remain troubled by your company's
invasive data collection and problematic
with police departments. Now, the
question that I focused on in the video
I did was question seven. Ring has
stated it will not share customer
information with law enforcement absent
consent, a warrant, or an exigent or
emergency circumstance. Please explain
in detail Ring's specific internal
policies regarding what constitutes an
exigent or emergency circumstance, and
B, how many times has Ring shared a
user's recordings with law enforcement
because of an exigent or emergency
circumstance? Now, keep in mind here,
he's not asking how many times have you
shared with law enforcement with a
warrant or a court order
or even with the consent of the person
who owned the Ring Doorbell, how many
times have you just essentially allowed
them to go in there and just take those
recordings from the user's camera and
use them as they please. And Amazon's
answer to that was that they've done
that 11 times. And do keep in mind, this
is with this is from a letter that was
written, I believe, yeah, 3 years ago,
over 3 years ago at this point. Now, the
reason that this is concerning to me is
because they're not actually asking
permission from the homeowner when they
do this. They're not asking for
permission from a judge, and while you
don't have any sort of expectation of
privacy when you're walking around the
in the public street, our legal
framework for privacy and for the Fourth
Amendment dates back to pre-computer,
pre-security cameras, pre-car,
pre-train,
horse. If you wanted to stalk somebody
back then, like, you had to get on the
best that you could do was get on your
horse. And our legal framework has not
necessarily come up to date to deal with
this reality. Now, Flock is a series of
cameras that I've been talking about a
lot on this channel. They're AI
surveillance cameras that have a system
where if you want to track a vehicle,
where it's going, essentially you're
combining the worst of ChatGPT with the
worst of having a security camera
everywhere, and you can use this to
track people everywhere that they go. If
you have a Flock camera that's on the
side of I-10, and you have a town like
the one I went to last time, Vidor,
Texas, where in order to leave the town
or get into the town, you're essentially
going on I-10, you've created a
circumstance where you, spam call.
You've created a circumstance where you
can track the coming and going of
virtually any resident, and it would be
fairly simple to track and figure out
exactly where they have gone. There are
people that have managed to get access
to these systems that have emailed me on
the promise of confidentiality that have
been able to do some pretty psychotic
levels of tracking with it, and I'm very
happy that these are white hat
individuals, not black hat individuals,
because again, like, and I
also genuinely do hope that the black
hat individuals are not the ones getting
access to this. But, to get to the
point, Ring is now expanding their
requests to additional community safety
partners. And who is the additional
community safety partner? Flock. Ring's
mission is all about making
neighborhoods safer. Earlier this year,
we told you about Community Request, a
feature that enables customers to
respond to requests for help from local
public safety agencies in the United
States. Local public safety agencies
rely on various tools to manage evidence
and conduct investigations. At Ring, we
are committed to expanding access to
Community Request through certified
tools used by these agencies. Today,
we're excited to announce the expansion
of Community Request to local public
safety agencies using Flock Safety Nova
platform or Flock OS. We plan on
implementing integrations with other
established providers in the future. We
are committed in our mission of making
neighborhoods safer, and we believe an
important aspect of that is empowering
our communities to play a role in local
public safety. The expansion of
Community Request will empower more
communities to do what they've always
wanted to do, help you. Flock Nova and
Flock OS are secure platforms designed
to assist public safety agencies in
their evidence collection and
investigative work. When local public
safety agencies using one of these
systems submit a Community Request,
they'll follow the same established
guardrails. They must include the
specific location and timeframe of the
incident, a unique investigation code,
and details about who is being
investigated. Now, okay, let's talk a
little bit about those. So, in Houston,
when they were doing probes of the Flock
system, they found that these
guardrails, these standards, all of this
stuff, here's what they were actually
inserting when they were using it. They
were using this AI-powered surveillance
system like a search engine. A lot of
searches also showed gibberish like
ASDF. That's the sequence of letters in
the center row of your computer
keyboard. Or just said that they were
there for random checks. We even found a
search that just said donut or that
didn't say anything at all. So,
now, when we talk about these types of
AI-powered surveillance cameras,
people will say, "Well, Louis, you use
Frigate in front of your house, right? I
mean, doesn't Frigate use AI?" And it's
like, "Bitch, that ain't the same. Don't
um actually me, you pedantic I
have a camera system that is it's called
the CCTV system, closed circuit
television, closed. Meaning, nobody else
gets access to it. That system is
essentially in my house, and that's it.
It points in my koi pond, my driveway,
the side of my house, the back of my
house, my front door, and that's it. I
get to see if somebody came by and tried
to take something from my house or break
in. I'm the only one with access to it.
It is not used to track people. The
footage is deleted after 1 day. That is
very different than having
thousands, tens of thousands of cameras
across the country that can be logged
into from a single location that you can
then use text-like prompts like you're
using ChatGPT. "Hey, ChatGPT, what was
the weather like on this day? Hey,
ChatGPT, where do people that look like
this tend to congregate? Hey, ChatGPT,
look at these 10,000 cameras and give me
the details on these individuals."
That's a different thing. And when
you're adding all these cameras into it,
it just gets creepy. And I really
Here's the thing with right to repair,
the biggest failure that I have is that
I didn't really get involved until it
was too late.
I didn't think of it as a thing until
2014 or 2015, truly. I mean, I
understood the issues, but I never
actually thought, "Huh, let me make a
video on this. Let me talk about it
publicly. Let me actually ask why things
are the way they are." And then by the
time I did,
it's too late.
I hate saying it, but we've gotten a lot
of right to repair bills passed.
Is it easier for you to fix MacBook
motherboards? Is it easier for you to
fix anything? I mean, people in the
automotive industry are talking about
how much harder it's getting all the
time. You have advertisements going up
saying that you're giving the keys away
to Russia and Iran and China if you let
people get access to basic tools to be
able to fix what they own. And a bunch
of different industries, it's getting
more difficult to do repairs because we
started speaking up far too late into
the process. And as a result of it,
while I'm glad that I've raised
awareness on these issues, while I'm
glad that there's a new generation of
engineers that say, "I don't want to
make products that are the type of
that Louis couldn't have fixed on his
channel back in the day when I was
watching his channel and became inspired
to become an engineer," I also realize
that like
I kind of started talking about it a
little too late. I did everything I
could, but I feel like I failed
everybody.
And the thing with this issue is
you can't really afford to fail here.
Cuz sur- at least with right to repair
stuff, there's the opportunity for
businesses, for new companies to come
out, for new paradigms to come out. And
when those new paradigms come out and
there's new companies come out, for them
to have different behavior.
But I don't see that here.
Once that type of surveillance system is
put up,
you're not getting it taken down. I
which is why I think it's important to
speak out against this
and push back against this as soon as
humanly possible. You're going to see
and you're going to notice that I'm
going to be traveling a lot in the near
future. I'm going to be showing up to
local city council meetings. I'm going
to be trying to organize people to show
up to those city council meetings as
often as possible, and I'm going to try
and organize people all around the
country to say, "Fuck this and get
this out of here." Because I
I'm
hoping that even though I've realized
this is an issue a little bit too late,
that it's not like right to repair where
it's too late to actually make genuine,
real progress and get things improved
for the better.
I am hoping that there is a chance of
pushing back against this in an
organized way. I have a Zulip channel,
I'll link to it down below. We have
hundreds of people working in that
channel, dozens of developers that are
actually working on a website. And what
the website is going to do is it's going
to allow you to put in a zip code and an
email if you want notifications, and it
will tell you if there's a city council
meeting in your area that you can go to.
It'll tell you when, and it'll give you
automatic alerts because most people
say, "I had no idea this crap is being
installed in my neighborhood. I had no
idea that we had 10 AI-powered
surveillance cameras that literally
track and log everywhere that I
go." And yeah, most people have no idea.
So, the first thing is creating
awareness for it. So, we have a lot of
developers working on that. I'm speaking
with a company called Curate Solutions
that has this really interesting
scraping tool that shows you what's
going on in over 12,000 municipal
governments all around the country. They
have an API access, which again is
I'm going to pay
We're talking in like the tens of
thousands of dollars for this that I'm
going to be paying out of pocket, but
again, I do not have time to start a
nonprofit for this. I do not have time
to try to raise money for this. Like, if
it's not done now, I'm going to have a
camera shoved up my ass everywhere I go
for the rest of my life, and that's
unacceptable.
I am going to be
using that because I want to not miss a
single one. The Zulip room is
going to be organized where there's a
room for every single local government.
So, if you want to speak about and get
notifications about what's going on in
your area, you can. If you want to speak
in the general chat, but you don't
really feel like getting notifications
for what's going on in New York City or
Custom, North Dakota, then you can turn
off notifications for those channels,
and I'm going to try and encourage as
many people as possible to push back
against this. Also,
we are doing a in-person meet up at 7:30
in Austin, Texas. If anybody wants to
come by, we do it every Friday, 7:30.
Anybody is welcome to come by to Lustre
Pearl East. I'll include a maps link
down below. I hope I remember to, cuz
I'm actually kind of running out of time
today with all the stuff I have to do,
especially with editing this video,
which I probably won't edit when I just
leave the rambling in anyway.
Anyway, that's it for today. And as
always, I hope you learned something. Do
me a favor, help me push back against
all this There's a chat thing down
below. If you're interested and you've
seen these cameras show up in your
state, email youtube@rossmanngroup.com.
Let's try and push back against it in an
organized way.
It's not too late to not be surveilled
everywhere that we go.
Like, again, if you go through my
channel's history for 13 years, you're
not going to pin me as an ACAB person or
somebody that's throwing Molotov
cocktails at the police or some psycho
blue hair person that just wants to like
create a like, you know, up
everything. Like, you're you're not
going to pin that on me that way.
I don't like the idea of the police
searching everywhere that I go without a
warrant and using like ASDF and
donut.
And I think that this is one of the most
bipartisan issues at this particular
point in time. I do not want my tax
dollars to go towards me being watched
everywhere that I go.
It's a very It's like a very bipartisan
thing that I've noticed.
Hopefully, you'll join me.
See you in the next one.
Bye now.