If you have a Dropcam in your house, you may inadvertently be fortifying the panopticon.

Dropcam told Fusion that it's received law-enforcement requests for video captured by its $199 cameras. When the company gets a request for access to video stored in an online account—so far, all of the requests have been for saved footage, as opposed to live streams—it sends an email to the account order, "unless compelled by a court not to do so," says Ha Thai, a Nest spokesperson. (Nest bought Dropcam last year for $555 million.)

What's unclear is whether the company has actually been handing over footage. Thai told Fusion that Nest will turn over data only when compelled by a subpoena, search warrant, or similar legal procedure. The missing piece of the story is whether Dropcam and Nest have been receiving search warrants, or just requests that aren't backed up by the authority of the court.

We may get the answer at the next Google transparency report. The tech giant, which owns Nest and therefore Dropcam, releases a detailed listing of when law enforcement asks Google for data and when Google hands it over. In the first half of 2014, Google received 12,539 requests for data in the U.S. and handed over at least some information 84 percent of the time.

Source: Fusion

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