I’m surprised, given what appears to be sound legal advice in this thread, no one has made official complaints against RING and other video doorbells. Mine easily picks up not only conversations that occur on my porch, as some have pointed out, but also sounds in the street out front of my house as well. Over a million of those things were sold last year so that’s a lot of illegal surveillance going on.
Speaking of which, Ring is another one of those “Internet of Things” devices with terrible security. Apparently it’s trivially easy to get it to expose your wireless router’s SSID and password, which it stores in cleartext and will happily dish out to anyone capable of unscrewing the doorbell faceplate and pressing the reset button. The intruder can then use a phone or computer to log into your wireless network and break into any other connected devices that aren’t sufficiently locked down.
You didn’t happen to mention that this vulnerability was discovered two years ago, and that the manufacturer fixed the problem with a software update shortly after the blogger notified them privately, *before *the blog post even went up.
Sorry, I forgot to answer this.
We’ve been hearing an occasional “thump” as though something’s hitting the side of the house for quite some time. It’s not real loud, but enough to wake me up, and start the dogs barking. It doesn’t happen in the same place but always seems as though someone (or something) bumped vigorously into one of the walls. The most recent was louder and occurred near the back door. I never find anything outside, and I don’t think it’s pranking kids. I’m still trying to figure out what’s causing it. I’ve yet to capture anything on video, so it remains a mystery.
IASNAL, but I believe that (under many statutes) the intercepted conversation or communications have to be conveyed or communicated to another party. For example, you may be listening to the people on your front porch, but you don’t hear anything interesting and never say a word about it. OTOH, if you hear two missionaries talking about the hooker they double-teamed last night and you send a recording of it to their church…
I am not sure if you have to show any damages or otherwise demonstrate that you were injured to file a lawsuit. I would think so, even if it’s just that everyone in the neighborhood learns that you still sleep with a teddy bear.