People sign a privacy agreement that allows their car to become a surveillance tool. Then they park it in front of your house. We hope they don't use the sensoric wealth these cars offer (gps, wifi, bluetooth, rain detector, lidar, radar, microphones, camera's) to track us, you know because they're trustworthy corporations and they wouldn't stoop that low. Still, let's keep an eye on them to make sure.
@mplammers I wonder what the fix is. Theoretically you could have a guest garage that works like a faraday cage, but the cost of that would be hard to justify for what little difference it would make. You could gate your driveway and ask guests to park their surveillance boxes away from the house.
@mplammers To worsen matters, zoning laws often ban front fences from being higher than ~2ft. or ~1 meter, so you can't block the neighbor's surveillance of your house.
@resist1984 In the end it's going to be about what kind of surveillance we find acceptable in the public space. Cars are an example, but soon your neighbor's fridge will see you coming home from work as well. It's about what kind of data we allow people to gather and punishing them if they hold on to data they shouldn't, ultimately banning them from the market. But politicians seem to treat our data as a bargaining chip on every level.
@mplammers some parts of western Europe are sensible enough to ban surveillance cams that capture more than one's own property. Cams must be positioned and angled to just capture their own front door and they need to ask for extra permission to install a 360 degree cam. I don't think any US city is smart enough to have that kind of law.
@mplammers One option might be to park a tall box truck in front of your house just to block Amazon Ring and also so that guests can't park their surveillance cars as close to your house.
@resist1984 Brilliant. Silly me trying to think outside of the box.
@mplammers I think it's worth a try to work to convince the city council of US cities to adopt privacy laws, but it's an uphill battle b/c Amazon employs lg. numbers of ppl in many states. So the gov. is afraid to piss off #Amazon and drive away jobs.
@mplammers If you consider that neighbors are now installing #Amazon #Ring all over the place, this is a much bigger threat. The neighbor across the street might be giving Amazon 24/7 surveillance of your house, with facial rec. & license plate reading, so Amazon can log who comes and goes from your house.