[iso1631]

The regulation needs to get ahead of the product, otherwise you'd be criminalising existing behaviour and that doesn't work

People normalised installing spy doorbells, so every doorstep is centrally available to large organisations who want to do harm (government, amazon, meta, whoever)

[alkonaut]

It's inconvenient to make people criminals over night with new regulation, but it's by no means impossible to do so.

I can't install a Ring doorbell if it takes a picture of the street outside my house. That was preexisting regulation (about surveillance cameras requiring permits for public spaces). Of course, people who now install Ring doorbells DO often record the street. But that's more a matter of enforcing the law.

[jclulow]

You can absolutely start regulating behaviour after the fact. Australia famously bought a bunch of guns back from people who had previously legally bought and owned them, and melted them down. There's no reason you couldn't offer people money in exchange for the surrender of their previously legally purchased surveillance racket goods. You can also frankly just regulate the central service/company out of existence in the case of, say, Ring.

[iso1631]

OK you can do a lot of things. It becomes far harder to implement it after it becomes normal

It's easier to ban ring from selling devices in 2010 when nobody had them, then to take them away from millions who feel their personal benefits of not having to get off the couch to see who's at the door outweighs the societal harm.

That's before the arguments about societal benefits (coperganda does well at this). You change the argument from a hypothetical "this could help stop crime" to a concrete example "in this case we found out who robbed little old granny thanks to our surveillance network".