Jason Bassler | @JasonBassler1
Big Brother just got an upgrade.
Starting December, Amazon’s Ring cameras will scan and recognize faces. Don’t want to be in their database? Too bad — walk past a Ring and your face can be stored, tagged, & analyzed without consent.
One step closer to total surveillance.
[Image: A Ring doorbell camera mounted on a brick wall. A digital overlay shows facial recognition scanning a person's face with grid lines. Text on the right reads “Amazon's Ring Adds Facial Recognition to Home Security” with additional text below.]
6:00 PM | Oct 4, 2025
Source: https://x.com/JasonBassler1/status/1974640686419857516
Americans are fucking weird, they piss and moan about speed and red light cameras, and claim they are unconstitutional. However, the Ring shit is good to go.
Ring cameras don’t toss a fine at you for walking past them too quickly.
Also, where are people complaining about red light cameras, so I can avoid taking my bike or car anywhere near there? It’s probably a vocal minority, but I’d prefer to know and cover my ass. Just in case.
they even have speed cameras now, any slightly above the speed limit of a street will imediately give a warning, and fine if it occurs multiple times. you can easily accidentally go over like 5 miles above in an empty street.
Hell if your car is old bitch like mine you may run into the problem of your speedometer being very minutely off. It’s nothing massive just a mile or two off, but my 01 Tacoma doesn’t have cruise control so I can’t be cautious that way so it can be problematic.
All of Ontario apparently
So just people can’t perceive longer term costs. Damn the government can decrease this backlash so much by just billing from their liability insurance directly instead of sending the fine to the person.
So what happens to images of your face when they’re stored? Who tf really knows. We do know these oligarchs will literally try to exploit and profit from literally anything and everything they get access to.
Some countries that aren’t treated like a state run corporation are actually letting citizens copyright their own faces for their protection.
probably to use your face in AI image generation of a person.
Uploaded to a database. Linked to your meta data full of wrong think. Face blown off by a AI built and operated kamakazi drone.
Sucks to be anyone that looks like you, but that is a price the 1% are willing to pay for complete control. Because what’s left after you own all the wealth and assets?
This feels like it should be illegal in the EU.
Swede here, our laws disallow private security cameras from filming public areas.
The law is so broad that it interfered with dashcams, disallowing them for years.
That’s really interesting. Is it specifically security cameras?
Can you generally take videos of people in public places? Photos?
Normal cameras and video cameras are fine, the key point is that the camera should not be fixed for continuous monitoring of public spaces.
Dashcams were a grey area, most are fixed mounted to a car with the capability to continously record so at first only cameras you manually place and trigger when about to drive were permitted, then the law was loosened further, and now I believe they are permitted.
Now here we have an interesting fact about the Swedish court system, you can present any evidence regardless of if it was collected through legal or illegal means, and the court will decide on if they will accept it or not.
The illegal part only comes into play in a separate case where you have to stand trial for whatever illegal act you did.
I found this page explaining that it’s not that it’s illegal (necessarily, keep reading), but that there is a GDPR exemption for private property and if you’re filming areas the public access then you need to comply with GDPR. The page says for dashcams you need to comply with GDPR as well.
This page says it’s generally not allowed to record, but if you read the Swedish version it has a flow chart (that I can’t read 😅).
What most interests me is that it keeps referring to the GDPR as the reason why you can’t record public areas (or your neighbours). I’m not in Europe and don’t know much about the GDPR but why is Sweden special with these rules, why aren’t all countries in the European Union limiting the use of security cameras on public areas?
I wish we had more protection in the UK. Technically the law allows filming public property as long as it is not the direct focus, eg you film your front door and catch some of the street. But it’s not policed at all. Living on a terraced main road I cant leave my house without being filmed by at least 5 different neighbour’s cameras from a range of different American or Chinese companies. One camera literally just points towards a window of my own home. It’s insane, I feel like they’re all just standing outside watching me.
Technically, I have the right to ask to see the footage they record and ask for adjustments to angles etc, but it’s left to individuals to do. I’d have to have an awkward individual conversation with a bunch of strangers (sad but true) about something I doubt they even consider an issue.
I’d love to see some legislation that would require some publically accessible way to review what’s in camera for doorbell cams, but I guess that would just be seen as helping criminals.
do public seccurity cameras exist though? In the US, we have cameras watching the movement of cars thru the road network via license plate. It’s dystopian
Yes they do exist, the areas are clearly signed when the cameras are used for surveilence, we also have traffic monitoring cameras to get info of how the traffic flows, they are publicly viewable and fairly low resolution so you can see the traffic flow but can’t really identify a specific license plate.
There are cameras that do do that though, they are put up to automatically bill you for the congestion charge.
We need an anti-camera movement in this country
Add it to the list of shit we desperately need yesterday
Bring back masking.
I need camera in my bedroom to give back for all the porn I watched.
I really don’t care what Amazon does with Ring’s facial recognition. The populace doesnt give a fuck and trust me, I tried to give a damn but its like going up against a tide of stupidity that keeps smashing. No one bats an eye with Costco/WalMart/Target facial recognition software, let alone caring enough how companies like Apple sell your data or manipulate your wants/needs down to the pervasive marketing tactics that are threading the line of psyops.
Idiocracy came a lot sooner than expected and there is no closing that Pandora’s box. I still try to refrain from and mask my digital footprint, but sadly with how how easily our data is passed around like a ladyboy aboard a navy ship, we’re doomed
target is a given, they probably had it for a decade+ to catch shoplifters who hit multiple stores.
I don’t know if it is the same brand, but my morning walks are cheered on by an increasing chorus/wave of “hello, you are currently being recorded”. Weird dystopian vibes.
We need to normalize spray painting the lenses on these things, as well as painting “big brother” on doorways of those that own them. If you enable fascism, you should expect some minor vandalism.
You could start by sending them a letter that informs them of this occuring and how it impacts the world around them before you skip straight to vandalism. I’m sure a lot of people just never considered the extent of that data that is being shared so much as they figured only they would have access to the footage.
Ugh… Idiots ruin everything. How can people not understand this? Just so fucking ignorant
Sure, but then you’re a suspect.
Just go from the side and toss a Molotov at their door.
Ran into this one Halloween a few years ago. Fuckers had Halloween decorations out, seeming welcoming, and when my kid went up to the door they used their ring camera to make fun of him. Once society falls in the next year or two, that’s where I’m going first.
I’m losing my mind. Ring cameras everywhere, Flock cameras, ID/face verification, everything Google touches, airports, Tesla car cameras, every modern car actually, Meta glasses, Chat Control every year, the OSA, stores using facial recognition (and other tracking), social media billionaire shenanigans, Samsung installing Israeli spyware and putting ads on the fridges, fuck even the Windows 11+Chrome+iPhone combo I see in public. I could keep going. We could all keep going.
It’s too much. Idk anymore. This post broke me a little.
I am Italian and I have much fewer reasons to feel like you, but I still do and, although loving the friends I made there, I know I will never again set foot in the USA, since this comes from a culture of surveillance dating back more than a century.
I am actually offering temporary accomodation to any of my friends who may want to try his luck in the EU.
PREACH WTF SERIOUSLY
Great, my downstairs neighbor has one of these things that everyone has to walk by when going in or out of the main building. Why she needs one in an apartment building with a locked main door that you have to unlock yourself for guests is a mystery to me.
Simple - Because she doesn’t trust the strangers living in the building any more than the strangers on the outside. I don’t blame her one bit. In my lifetime, I’ve seen countless stories of women being raped and/or murdered by other tenants and the complex 's own security.
In the olden days, before electricity, I used to be friendly with a neighbor, and she became convinced that someone was sneaking into her apartment when she was at work, and stealing her underwear and prescription meds. She took a day off because she was under the weather, and one of the maintenance guys, who was always overly-friendly, unlocked her door, and walked right in.
It turned out that he’d been warned about this before, and he was fired. But if she, or other neighbors, had Ring cameras, they would have caught on to him immediately.
A camera inside her apartment would have the same results without invading the privacy of every other tenant in the building.
In that specific case, but most people want to identify people BEFORE they enter their promises. I’m not opening my door to any cops, for instance, unless they can slide a warrant under the door.
You are missing the point entirely. There are about a million reasonable reasons someone would want to have a doorbell camera, and they have every right to them. The owner of the camera isn’t violating your privacy, AMAZON is doing that by collecting the data from a privately-owned source who hasn’t given permission to hijack data from their device.
Don’t be mad at the tenant for protecting their safety, be mad at Amazon for exploiting that reasonable fear, encouraging people to get Ring cameras, and then stealing the data they collect.
Is it too much to ask for a doorbell camera to operate like a doorbell? We’ve had peepholes on doors that can be opened and checked when needed for years with no problem, why do we suddenly need constant surveillance of the public commons? This is also on the owner for buying into the scare tactics.
IMO it should be flat out illegal to have any permanent camera that monitors a public space. I don’t consent to have a stalker track when I enter and leave my home, I won’t consent to have a neighbor do the same.
Exactly. Why the fuck is it on at all times?
Pray this isn’t legal in the UK, under GDPR i don’t think so but I’m not sure
Guess US-companies don’t really care what’s legal and what’s not. They don’t fear the repercussions of doing illegal shit. They just pay their fine - or they don’t and nothing changes.
GDPR states that saving personal data without consent is illegal and on top you have the right to be deleted and forgotten. I am not even allowed to have a none recording camera sending the image from in front of my door because the space in front of my door is not my private property.
Pretty sure you can record and photograph people from public spaces without seeking consent here (UK) because there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy.
people assume you cant do it in Cali, BECAUSE they passed a wierd law, but it isnt entirely true that you can record in any form. i think public is an exception.
My parents have one of these. 💀
Guess I’ll be going into their place through the garage lmao
If they have more than one and you can’t avoid them all …. The press release says they will be able to trace your route on the property
Given any large database this is going to be a massive problem.
Did someone steal your package?
Do you want to know who did it?
Will you settle for knowing which of the 385 people in the country look like your villain? Some of them may even be close enough to be falsely accused!
Would the police do anything about it even if you had 100% irrefutable proof of who did it? Would you settle for Amazon displaying to those 385 people in your town that sort of look like the thief ads for tools that would make it easier to break into your home?
There are factual existing cases of someone being tried and losing months of their life due to facial recognition wherein the accused wasn’t in the same town as the crime. When the authorities are handled sufficiently gift wrapped cases here is bob bob did wrong here’s the video they often DO pursue them because 95% of such cases are a charging document arrest and plea bargain. In this phase we regularly ask people to choose between probation or a short sentence and being threatened with being punished with 20 years for defending themselves. Sometimes innocent people actually cop a please to avoid their life being destroyed.
Whilst in theory people may be entitled to a lawyer they may either not qualify because they aren’t poor enough or may not get actual representation without spending thousands of dollars people simply don’t have.
Creating a whole host of such cases could be a disaster.
This isn’t legal where I live. It’s not allowed to record public spaces
I was gonna say, I’m not sure this would hold up to legal scrutiny, not that that makes it ok in the first place.
Completely legal in the US.
The problem is Amazon has this. I don lt care if my neighbors do this. But random corporations should not be involved.
