Part of the problem here is that people who love it are affecting people who do not. If you want to put cameras to record inside your home, fine, but this is people recording their neighbors without consent. The sales pitch is finding Fido, but I doubt that is the end game here.

A Ring camera pointed at a sidewalk or street is the clearest example of legally allowed filming in public I could imagine.

>legally allowed

People aren't arguing about what the law states.

"Recording their neighbors without their consent" implies that consent was ever expected or required. You're walking down a public street and have no expectation of privacy in the US, and correspondingly 0 legal or even "ethical" recourse.

First, in the U.S., privacy laws vary by state, so the blanket statement about 'the US' is incorrect.

Second, laws are made by people. The fact that many of us do not want to be recorded 24/7 is why it is worth discussing.

The 1st amendment protects your right to film in public, so my statement is correct.

The limitations only come from edge cases, like stalking, interfering with active law enforcement, or recording conversations in all-party consent states; none of which would apply to a security camera recording a public view.

A camera pointing at the sidewalk is fairly innocuous.

A camera pointing at the sidewalk that live streams everything it sees to several megacorps and law enforcement agencies is troubling. A million cameras doing this is a surveillance state. That's bad!

Legal? Yes. Dangerous to the populous? Also yes. Something can be legal and also be very very bad. You get that, right? Your argument comes across as "well, I'm within my rights to shout the N-word in a public place!!" Sure, and you're also an asshole. Not for having a camera, but for sending the footage to a bunch of creeps and thinking that's a fine thing to do.

Genuinely asking how is that realistically dangerous to the populace?

Set aside a slippery slope argument, because we’re just talking about security cameras in public areas: do you really think you have a right to privacy on a sidewalk?

If someone recognizes a criminal on a sidewalk from a wanted poster, or a missing child from a milk carton, is that surveillance state? Are they an asshole for calling the tip line, instead of keeping quiet?

"I guarantee the vast majority of people LOVE this new feature." And you base this guarantee on?

Bullshit to you sir. I have a ring and have cancelled my subscription because of their scummy behavior

Thank you for that. But please consider taking down the camera, too; it's just as much of a problem without a subscription, because you are the service being sold, not just the customer. Get one that stores and processes video entirely locally instead.

Can they still see through my camera if I have removed the location from my account?

I would expect so, yes; I certainly wouldn't bet against it. I can think of any number of ways for a network-connected camera to figure out approximately where it is, and even if it doesn't know approximately where it is, it can still provide video and that video could go through any amount of server-side analysis.