I suspect it means using ML to identify things in the camera. Like say cat, dog, man with clip board, man carrying box, etc.
I've love to get a hangout/signal/IM text identifying anything approaching my door without having to look at a picture. Bonus if the face recognition is good enough to recognize family.
Our decision to use the Raspberry Pi 4 and not a proprietary development board was due to the ease in which AIKEA can be recycled into other projects and devices, should backers no longer need a home security device.
> There goes the argument "if you're not paying for the product then you are the product" because ring and associated services aren't cheap.
Not really. If you aren't paying for the product, then you certainly are the product. If you are paying for the product, then you may still be the product, but you also may not. It all boils down in that case to how trustworthy and greedy the vendor is.
I think the OP's point is that the latter is so common nowadays that it makes more sense to not give the benefit of the doubt and assume that paying for something gives you privacy and makes vendors less data-hungry, and I think that's probably becoming good advice.
You could buy a TV worth several thousand dollars and they'll still show you advertisements. Also in Samsung's case they'll take screenshots of what you're watching to find out what you like. There's always money in the advertising revenue stream.
Are you talking about smart TVs? Because ads only show up on real TVs if you tell them to. It's the cable you plugged into it or the ads at the beginning of the movie you just paid money for. It's not the TV. The TV is dumb as hell. It only shows you what you tell it to show you.
I remember buying a PS4 and still had to opt-out of data collection and then change like 20 settings on their bullshit social network I don't even want to use.
Windows 10 is paid and yet it has ads and insane data collection.
This all is a side effect of the paranoia built by the corporation's. Why would you even want to look at the door when you are 1000's of miles away from your home. I understand pet and baby monitors but this information being on the web for anyone is just bonkers.
We are in an age where Technology is advancing at a pace where we don't understand what we need to do with IoT devices.
My grandma used a similar product to send video of a break in attempt to relatives so they could pass it on to the police while she was in another city.
But I get your point. A lot of this IoT stuff is mostly pointless and serves only to make people feel like they are living in the future.
Aside from the obvious use of monitoring my door while I'm away, it's also useful to knowing when a package is delivered unexpectedly when I'm away from home so I can ask a friend or family member to pick it up so it's not sitting on my front porch for a week or two.
Are you a darknet dropshipper? (Nothing wrong with that, just can't imagine what carrier doesn't give you a tracking number that you can get alerts on delivery/check status of.)
All those Chinese products with free shipping were like that. They'd show up one day randomly. Also, I buy most of my stuff online so there's always something in flight. Books, toothpaste, whatever.
I use 17track for that. It's an app that I drop all my AliExpress/Amazon/eBay tracking codes in and I will get a push notification that the package has been delivered. Don't need a camera monitoring my neighbours front door for that.
I'm guessing you don't buy stuff off of AliExpress much? Sometimes the shipping window is like 1 month or bigger, you just never know when it will finally reach your house.
Family sometimes send me packages unannounced, not all shippers (especially international) give real-time tracking numbers, not everyone in our household keeps perfect track of their inbound shipments, and sometimes delivery agents just make a mistake - one time I came home from work to a big screen TV on my porch. It was supposed to go to neighbor, but that's something I wouldn't want on my porch for a week - even if I don't care if it's stolen, it's like a big "No one is home here!" sign.
We order a lot online. I can't even count how many times we get notified of a delivery via the app, but it is nowhere. A day or three later is when it actually shows up on our door. When we've complained, we've been told to wait a day or three. Sometimes the notification comes in a day late too. So a door camera helps us know when to look out for a delivery for realzies. Oh, and if a neighbor drops by while we are out, we can chat real quick over the door camera.
I bought a cheap ring doorbell for our vacation house and indeed, it's a piece of junk. The picture quality is atrocious lol.
However, it and the other cameras I have (including an actually decent one in the entryway) almost eliminated the random door-to-door solicitors and people leaving flyers all over my front door!
It's also really funny because people hate cameras. I've seen someone cover their face before pushing the doorbell button and then walk away because they felt too afraid to be seen on camera.
OTOH, the ring app is really, really terrible. Woof! If you install it and leave it on defaults, it'll notify you about anything your neighbors post. And boy the things they post lol. Kid riding their bike by? SUSPICIOUS! EVERYONE KEEP AN EYE OUT! Random dog?
For those that want to avoid such sillyness, Reolink sells relatively cheap cameras. Rated for out doors, power over ethernet, $50-$60 per camera, and includes a microphone.
They can easily be connected to zone minder, or any software that can take a rtsp:// URL. Even handles motion detection for specific areas of camera, so you can include the driveway but exclude the sidewalk. You can have it email or upload videos... without access to any reolink related cloud.
So you could easily put them in production with zero network access and let something you control notify you with images or video clips for any activity.
There's numerous cheap products, but the reolink seems to be one of the better ones that play well with others and doesn't require any WAN network access.
Ubiquiti and Axis also have some very nice products, but generally are more expensive.
Having thrown countless hours into zoneminder I had to give up. It's just too buggy. Does anyone have any other alternatives they've got to work? Open Source or otherwise
I saw a commercial software solution a number of months ago that used some kind of machine learning or AI to reduce false positives on motion detection but now I can't find it. Are you familiar with any software that does this?
I tried zoneminder in earnest and was severely disappointed. I've been running Ubiquity Video in a container on my local server, which is pretty great as a simple NVR, but _only_ works with their cameras, which won't work for me.
Blue Iris seems to be the overall favorite, and it's pretty inexpensive considering the fact that it seems to be so well regarded. I don't have Windows on my network, and I was strongly considering running BI on KVM, but I don't think my old server is beefy enough to reliably run windows with video software. I was also looking into building a box for it, but it turns out buying a used Optiplex on Ebay was cheaper and should be more than enough for tracking a few cameras.
I'll be setting it up this weekend, so I don't have much of my own experience to share, yet.
That's probably going to be difficult mostly because of heat dissipation issues. You'd probably have to make the case out of metal to act as a big sink for both the Rpi itself and the converter heat outputs.
Another option is from Amcrest and is built as a doorbell. I got it because it doesn’t require a cloud connection to function and plugs in easily to Home Assistant. Easy install with existing wiring and uses WiFi for data.
Note: one disappointment was that the app automatically reached out to an Amcrest server by default (I assume) on the assumption that everyone wants access to their home doorbell cam from outside the network ... I could not find a setting in the app so just took care of it the usual way—blocked it with the firewall. Regardless, it still works in this config.
Ever since I blocked the outgoing connection via firewall, the app now says my camera is offline. That being said, the camera feed is still working in Home Assistant, which is all I wanted. If you were using HA and wanted more functionality (audio, etc), it does appear to be available.
I've been using Wyze to keep tabs on a new pet while I'm not at home. It is very convenient, but I was pretty worried about privacy, even before that came out.
> They can also run off of a wall wart or solar panel
Which is still a nonstarter for me, since none of the locations I would want to put a camera have an electrical jack handy, and many of them don't get enough sunlight to make a solar panel a viable option.
Yes, Arlo also makes good battery operated cameras. They are higher quality than Blink cameras, with higher resolution. On the other hand, Blink cameras have better battery life.
The camera still has to run for that to work, unless you're also going to power a separate motion sensor and/or a small computer to handle automating the recording; all of this just decreases how long the battery lasts.
> The camera still has to run for that to work, unless you're also going to power a separate motion sensor and/or a small computer to handle automating the recording
Security cameras will have motion sensors built in. Recording would be elsewhere, the camera would just need to stream video for some configurable time if the motion sensor detects an event.
(This is all functionality built into Ring cameras, so for anyone looking for an alternative to them it doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me.)
Nor did I. But I bought a PoE switch for my garage and installed one near my Front door, two pointing at my driveway, and one pointing at my fence door. PoE is just cat 5 cable, it's considered "low voltage" so you can just run it where you need to. It's much easier than trying to running normal power, which you'd need to do for a wifi connected camera (unless you want to regularly replace batteries).
It's a nice clean mount, I just use the template, drill a 1/2" or so hole for the PoE cable, and then 3 screws to finish the mount. It looks nice and clean, works great, never runs out of power, and is never impacted by the random Wifi issues.
Sure it's a pain to run cat5 everywhere, but I haven't found a better solution, none of my camera locations had power.
I like the Ubiquiti cameras because unifi handles the webrtc handshake so you can run your cameras local and see them from anywhere while keeping data on-prem.
It's a little annoying Protect doesn't have a software install but the legacy unifi video still work fine. I put in ~5 cameras over the last few weeks and been really happy with them.
FWIW: I just upgraded to UniFi Protect (with the CloudKey Gen2). Although it's annoying I don't get to run the software on my own server anymore, I've found the Protect app for iOS is much more polished and is much more responsive than the older UniFi Video app.
Good to hear. I led the UniFi Protect effort at Ubiquiti. Responsiveness and fast time-to-video were our top UX priorities for the system. The WebRTC direct-connect and bypassing cloud servers were big factors in delivering that responsiveness. The added security and lack of monthly fees was another major bonus.
While I have you here, please consider the option to install the software on-prem.
I was this || close to not going unifi because it wasn't clear what the longtime support for unifi video was. I'm still not super-happy with that aspect as it's not clear if the hardware is tied to protect or not.
Slightly OT, but I'm curious to understand the use-case for indoor/outdoor home-security cameras. Yes, it sounds pretty awesome to "catch" someone, or trigger a motion alarm, but does it work in practice? Like, is it hooked to the police or to a security firm, or what? Because someone with a face mask is unidentifiable anyway, and even if you can identify some feature, a burglar can leave with whatever valuables, or cause damage... So it's not preventing the crime, but might marginally aid in after-the-fact investigation? so is it worth it?
I'm probably not a good example, I live in a small apartment, don't have any valuables besides passports and loose change. I just don't see much of a point for having cameras. Instead I focus on deterring casual burglars by using semi-intelligent timer-based lights plus a simple radio tuned to a station with lots of talking when we're away from home. Perhaps a security cam has a deterring aspect, but not sure of the legality of it in Germany where I live, and I guess a dummy camera would achieve a similar effect as a real one?
Well my motivation started when I found an uncoiled coat hanger on top of my car. So I bought two cameras (both with IR illumination) and pointed them to the two sides of my car. Even a casual observer will notice the two cameras (with 2 rings of glowing red lights) pointed at them when they enter my driveway. I figure it's a $120 worth of prevention... hopefully.
The cameras can read the license numbers of cars going up and down my dead end street, and have a NTP synced time stamp on them. So I have reported license plate numbers to the police a few times when various neighborhood issues have come up.
But no, I don't think it will magically arrest someone breaking into my house. But they are still pretty useful. Did someone leave a package on my front door? Is my kids friend's parent here for pickup/drop off? Did the garbage truck get here yet? WTF is that loud truck noise out front? Is that knock at the door someone with a clip board? Or someone trying to get me to believe in their god?
One thing it does help, is that at least in my area it's common for a thief to knock to see if anyone is home, then break down that door or force a rear door to enter the house is nobody answers. So being able to see and even respond to the knocker might well prevent a breakin, even if you aren't physically there.
Chances are low to identify someone (for the time being, but increased video quality and facial recog. vs. a simple driver's license/ID database may change that soon). Obviously like you said, nothing you can do with a face mask.
But at least if you know something is happening in real-time, motion triggers being the most important, there is at least some chance to intervene or call the police depending on the circumstances. Even if you can't stop them, speed is key, and if they are on foot they could be caught in the area afterwards with vague id such as clothing only. Capturing a license plate is probably optimal though, if they aren't on foot. Cameras are very good these days - HD and higher 30/60fps video - not the pixelated/blocky/useless recordings of 10 years ago.
Also good to know ahead of time if there is anyone snooping around looking for easy targets (as small-time burglars do). Some systems do also have monitoring services.
Otherwise yeah, cameras are at best a deterrent and source of evidence, nothing more as a passive device. Best security system I've ever had was a German Shepherd. Fully autonomous deterrent + active response if necessary :)
The cameras are also a great deterrent just for being there. After installing some on our vacation house, our gardener told us there's almost never junk flyers anymore.
I would love to see some financial documents leaked from these companies.
Let's say Apple pre installs Google+ on all its phones. Then I want to know how much apple got paid for this, i.e. how many cents is a users privacy worth to them. And how much money did Google make by using this data, i.e. how much was the data really worth.
Because until we have such data, companies can always hide behind phrases such as "... share with partners ... to provide relevant services" and all that nonsense.
Does that really matter? Let’s say they get a hundred dollars per service, does that make it better or worse, or maybe it doesn’t change anything?
Having said that, I’ve always wondered the same for TV ads. Let’s say I wanted the option to pay extra to never see ads, how much would that be? Why doesn’t the market give me that option?
I wonder why Ring is being specifically called out for this practice. This combination of “trackers” are very common in the app ecosystem as they perform much the same analytics functions used on the web ecosystem (e.g. Branch offers ad
campaign attribution - did this user sign up from an ad campaign and which one so I can work out ad ROI). I’d hazard a guess that analysis of the apps on your phone (Android and iOS) would result in well over 50% of them using some combination of these services.
What’s more interesting is that it could be argued these fall under the intent of the EU cookie directive (even though in a lot of cases they don’t actually use cookies). The only app I have seen asking for cookie like consent is Airbnb (who use all of these same services and more)
I think several companies are routinely called out for nefarious privacy invasions. Ring is extra interesting because of the hypocrisy in claiming they're in the home security business, while actually gathering and selling information that can be be directly counter-productive in that effort (such as when a customer is likely to be home or not).
The thing is they aren’t actually selling that data. All the services mentioned are paid services that ring are paying to use. And ironically they sprang up to fill a need because Google and Apple made it almost impossible to do app install attribution to protect people’s privacy. So we now get more invasive tracking to work around that.
They aren’t trackers in that respect. Read up on the companies in question. They basically provide analytics to mobile apps so they can better understand their customers to allow them to improve the experience of the app.
It’s the equivalent of Google Analytics.
Now how those companies then use the data they collect as part of providing analytics is another question (and why lots of people prefer to block Google Analytics for example)
> This combination of “trackers” are very common in the app ecosystem
True. This is why I have to firewall off all apps so that they can't communicate out without my permission. This is also the primary reason why I'm leaving the smartphone ecosystem entirely.
The invasiveness of apps is intolerable to me, getting worse, and getting increasingly hard to mitigate.
Word! I never really installed much on my smartphone to begin with. If you ask me, a lot of services and app developers have this horrible sense of entitlement to all kinds of information about their users. It creeps me out.
This rampant surveillance economy will continue to fester until it bites some influential people where it really hurts. Until then nobody will be safe.
Are many Ring units sold outside of the US? I see them advertised as a way to combat this "porch pirate" thing. But to me, as someone living in the UK, the idea of a delivery person leaving a package on my doorstep for someone to steal is mad. If I'm not in I expect another delivery attempt or for the package to be taken to the secure local* depot where I can pick it up. If they decide to leave it outside my door and it gets stolen, I fully expect (and will get) another one delivered at no cost to me, other than the time penalty. Why is this even a thing? Is this a new thing that Amazon created with their delivery strategy and now you also get to buy the solution from them?!
And if it's just a security camera watching my property/car, then a dumb one sounds fine and cheaper. Not to mention it'll actually look like a security camera which is arguably more valuable as a deterrent.
Deliveries left unsecured on a doorstop is a common practice in the US, typically found in low-crime residential areas. It was by no means invented by Amazon -- it's been a thing for a long time.
I feel like Europeans often forget just how big the USA is. I live in a major metro. Just like in EU, it would be ludicrous to leave a package on someones doorstep.
But if you live in a rural area, things are completely different. Which from my understanding is the same as EU for the most part.
Its pretty common in non-rural areas in the US. I live in a suburban area and its normal. Some of my coworkers who live downtown have had issues with porch pirates, so I'm assuming they have porch drop off as well.
In the past 20 years, I've lived across the major metro areas of Seattle, Silicon Valley, and now Los Angeles. in all places, it's been common practice for delivery companies to leave packages outside unless the shipper has specified otherwise for a high-value or theft-prone item.
Over literally thousands of deliveries during that time, the number that have disappeared mysteriously is under 1%. In fact, more have not been delivered at all (i.e., fraud on the part of the delivery person) than have been stolen.
1% is pretty high theft rate. 1% means if you get a package every week, once in 2 years one will be stolen. Or it means in a city of 100,000 1000 people will have thefts of their packages.
A different way of looking at it is, with ~5 packages that were likely stolen out of 2,000 or so delivered, that's about a 1/4% loss rate, which is much lower than the typical retail store suffers from shoplifting.
So, it's pretty much priced into their margins already.
This is very common even in higher density suburbs. Unless an area is known to have a crime issue, it's standard practice in the U.S. to leave the package on the front steps. I've lived in the burbs for the vast majority of my life and have never had a package stolen. Despite common media portrayals, the U.S. is mostly a very nice place to live.
Indeed, pretty much for most Europe would be: not signed -> not delivered. Either they call before hand (if the delivery company has the phone number or they can fetch it), have another attempt to deliver, or leave the parcel in a self servicing pick up area, dropping a note in the mailbox with the code to open.
So they don't leave it on your doorstep, but they put the code in your box? That sounds even better for thieves! Get the code from the box, go to the self-service area, type in the code, and walk away without any suspicion, since that's what everyone else there does!
In UK, and most of Europe AFAIK, the "mailbox" is a hole that goes through to inside the house. The thief would probably have to break in to the house to get the code. Porch pirates are specifically avoiding breaking-and-entering.
Here in Australia if I'm not home and miss the attempted delivery of a package a card will be left in my mailbox. The card has a barcode on it and will tell me where to pick the package up from, typically it is from my local post office.
When I bring the card to post office they scan the barcode then send someone out back to fetch my package they ask me for some ID and check the name and address on the id with the name + address on the package. No fuss no drama. The idea of leaving package on doorstep seems bizarre.
I don't really understand it either. Just seems like a way to preserve costs. Only thing that would come to mind is that the US is less densely populated compared to Europe, making delivering them to neighbors/local depot a lot more time consuming
I don't know if the density part is really relevant. One the whole, they are comparable. Country to US it varies, and States (US) to other countries it varies even more [0]. I have lived in several very densely populated cities and they all still do porch drop off. I think this may just fall down to a cultural difference than anything else.
Personally I don't even want a smart TV with a camera or an Alexa in my house but a friend was just proudly telling me about his new Ring doorbell and I know one neighbour with one. (both in the UK).
The benefit of something like Ring is that criminals will know what they are and that somebody has very likely just been alerted to their presence.
I speak from experience when I say they tend not to care about traditional 'dumb' cameras as, generally, nobody is going to be watching them until after the act.
You solved it! Except the post office won't accept Fedex or UPS packages, and if you try to have a package delivered to one, UPS and Fedex will refuse the shipment.
You can redirect FedEx packages to any local Walgreens up to midnight before the delivery day. UPS has something similar with CVS. For me this is even more convenient than USPS due to more locations and longer hours. It works even for signature-required packages.
That's cool and something I didn't know about, but I'd still argue it does nothing to solve porch pirates in 90% of the country. CVS and Walgreens are non-existent in rural America outside of large towns/cities.
If only post offices were used they'd become a huge bottleneck in many cities due to queuing and also packages get delivered by many other private companies. So lockers (Amazon locker, DHL locker) or designated drop off locations that can be a regular store or kiosk also pick up the slack.
-send it to an amazon locker and pick it up on the way home.
If you have it sent to your house and you're not in, a lot of the time it gets dropped off at a neighbours house. I've taken in a few parcels when I've been working from home.
All of that. Additionally, Royal Mail stuff goes to the local sorting office which for most people is pretty close by. Services like "Click and Collect" let you deliver your parcels to local shops. Amazon don't want to support that because it's a cost they cannot control.
It is true that the local depot for other parcel service (DPD etc) can be quite far away, but those services usually offer a a number of repeat delivery attempts or an option to leave with a neighbour.
The number of working adults in a household is irrelevant to delivering parcels securely.
> send it to an amazon locker and pick it up on the way home.
That's not always a realistic option. I'd have to go pretty far out of my way to get to the nearest Amazon locker. And it only works if your packages are coming from Amazon.
In Sweden most packages are delivered to third party businesses that sign agreements with the delivery companies. Places like gas stations, convenience stores and grocery stores.
Nowadays there are companies that offer evening time home delivery so that you can always be there.
we have this here in the USA too. UPS has what's called "access points" where things can be delivered, or are dropped off if they can't get you. Some packages are signature required, so if no signing, it gets sent there. Convenience stores, etc.
It's just mostly people aren't used to doing that and are hard to change. People often just send packages to work or a friends house instead. With access points, they can and will return a package to sender beyond a certain time.
In the UK most building have a "porter" so most deliveries go straight to him/her, he/she signs and then drops off the packages INTO the flats (yes some keep keys of all flats). In the USA you have something similar, building manager(?).
Most delivery companies in my part of the US allow you to specify what will happen if you're not there when they attempt delivery. You usually have options like "try again later", "deliver to my neighbor", "let me pick it up", and "leave it on my doorstep".
Most people prefer to have it left on their doorstep because the other options are a bit of a hassle.
>If I'm not in I expect another delivery attempt or for the package to be taken to the secure local* depot where I can pick it up.
It's not the lack of localness that's the problem for me in the UK, it's more that most depots are only open 9-5 when people are at work. If you have anything resembling a long commute (particularly by public transport) then you can get really screwed over, especially if you can't drive for whatever reason you pretty much have to take half a day off to collect your package in many cases.
I'm in the US, and I have a UPS depot that I can walk to if I miss a delivery with signature required, and that depot is open from 10AM-9PM seven days a week. The absolute maddening part is that, instead of taking undelivered packages to the depot at the end of each day, they wait until the next business day!
I try to avoid using UPS when I can, since they are the most user hostile delivery service in my area. I have more of a chance of getting a package on time when they leave it on my porch unattended.
This is part of why FedEx has been doing deals with companies like Walgreens, where some locations are open 24x7. This is in addition to their FedEx Office (was Kinko's) locations, some of which are open 24x7.
Amazon has "Amazon Lockers" that are available in many places in the US, many of which are open extended hours, and some of which are open 24x7.
These are not the only options.
Even the USPS has Post Office Boxes, and many US Post Offices have external spaces where the PO Boxes are accessible 24x7.
> But to me, as someone living in the UK, the idea of a delivery person leaving a package on my doorstep for someone to steal is mad.
I think it's true that across most of the U.S. if it weren't safe to leave a package at one's house then people would be up in arms demanding that the police do their jobs. ISTR that the U.K. crime rate is about 2½ times that of the U.S.
This was such a terrible experience the 2 times in my life that I've been forced to do it, that I still remember both of them vividly almost 15 years later. You can be sure I'll never do that again regardless of the purchase or price. There is nothing for sale anywhere on this earth that would be worth it.
> If they decide to leave it outside my door and it gets stolen, I fully expect (and will get) another one delivered at no cost to me, other than the time penalty.
That's exactly what happened the one and only time I've had a package stolen from my porch. It was an external hard drive worth around $100. Amazon sent me a new one immediately. I even tried getting the serial number out of them (at the request of the police) and they were like "haha, no. Here's free one day shipping on your replacement, and we consider this matter closed."
That everyone does it is hardly a justification. And companies have no divine right to analytics, especially not when it concerns PII and paying customers.
Loads of Android apps do this. If you are running Android >=9 then you can block the trackers by changing your DNS settings to use one from https://nextdns.io/
I had a ring for one week. After about 24hrs of ridiculous setup, constant notifications when I left the house or anything happened inside the detection zone even shadows, and realizing I didn’t coming home to look into a camera that was constantly uploading to someone’s computer I’ll never be allowed to access - I put that POS back in the box and returned it.
Nice idea in theory, exploitive data mine in practice. I hate it.
Ring doesn't upload data unless you pay for a cloud storage account.
You could argue that the doorbell transmits the video/audio over the internet, but that transport is encrypted to the Ring app, and its deleted off of AWS after its viewed on the App.
If you really want privacy, you should also return your cellphone and go back to using a flip phone.
> and its deleted off of AWS after its viewed on the App
How do you know this? And how are you sure that information isn't shared before being deleted?
Also, it's not only about privacy (although I do think people should care a bit more about it than they do on average). Data stored and sold makes money that is dependent on you to produce, yet you get no compensation for it. Many people have a problem with that, including myself.
I mean, nobody REALLY knows, but if that's the standard you are going to use, then you pretty much have to assume that any company can and will spy on you, and apply the same critique to them.
Based on reports and news, Amazon has been perhaps the best out of the big companies when dealing with privacy, as they are fairly transparent on the data they collect for what use, and had not had any major cases of leaks despite them perhaps having the best data set of peoples behavior with shopping history which is the most relevant to advertisers.
Being that Ring uses AWS for back end, as can be verified through network traffic inspection, I personally don't see any red flags with them saying they delete the data.
>Data stored and sold makes money that is dependent on you to produce, yet you get no compensation for it.
This is HORRIBLY wrong. Gmail, youtube, reddit and most everything that is free on the web and on mobile is your compensation for your data. Yes, companies make profit, but they still spend that advertising revenue on hosting and maintaining that service, and recouping the initial investment they put into building the thing.
> I mean, nobody REALLY knows, but if that's the standard you are going to use, then you pretty much have to assume that any company can and will spy on you, and apply the same critique to them.
That is the standard I use and I do apply the same critique to every company.
> Gmail, youtube, reddit and most everything that is free on the web and on mobile is your compensation for your data.
First off, I don't use all of those services. According to your logic, you and every other person who has data in their system and is not using a service is owed cold hard cash. Secondly, the value that I get out of using them is not commensurate with the profit they are making. These companies are making EXORBITANT amounts of money off of peoples data. It is in no way acceptable compensation. Third, I can't opt out of them using the data, even if I stop using a service or if I never used their service at all.
>That is the standard I use and I do apply the same critique to every company.
Then why are you on HN? They could be collecting your IP and data on you.
>First off, I don't use all of those services. According to your logic, you and every other person who has data in their system and is not using a service is owed cold hard cash.
The only data that exists for people that don't use services is 3p tracking data, which is from people visiting websites, that are supported by ads. So yes, if you view content on a website and a tracking cookie or pixel records you, that is you using the website, and the advertiser is paying the host for this which allows the host to continue hosing the website.
> These companies are making EXORBITANT amounts of money off of peoples data
Whoa, this is like almost a communism argument. Dictating how much money anyone should make is not a good road to go down on. There is nothing wrong with companies generating profit, they are capitalizing on supply versus demand.
> Based on reports and news, Amazon has been perhaps the best out of the big companies when dealing with privacy
They pitch their Ring doorbells as a surveillance network to police departments, provide law enforcement with an easy to use interface and map of their camera network, and allow police to go after people who choose not to share their recordings without a warrant.
With a warrant or subpeona, all police have to do is serve it to Amazon, and the company can hand over your recordings without ever letting you know.
> If you really want privacy, you should also return your cellphone and go back to using a flip phone.
Or how about an iPhone with minimal or no 3rd party apps?
Which is practically impossible unfortunately because in order operate in the modern world you need at least a few 3rd party messenger apps, your bank's app and maybe a few more. Theoretically, however, I can have a phone free from social platforms and 3rd party analytics platforms like MixPanel or AppsFlyer, with regard to whom I have absolute zero trust.
> Which is practically impossible unfortunately because in order operate in the modern world you need at least a few 3rd party messenger apps, your bank's app and maybe a few more.
I think that this may be true for convenient operation, but not for operating period. I have none of these apps on my phone and, in fact, don't regularly use my phone for anything but receiving calls and listening to audiobooks. (Oh, and alarms, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting; but not otherwise for interacting with the outside world.)
I've tried that. All things aside, in business if there's even one important person you deal with (your investor?) you will have to install at least one of the messengers they use. It's a question of the balance of power. And you'd likely end up having more than one VIP in your contact list anyway, unless you live a totally isolated life.
It does, but letting one known company gather it is better than letting 10 obscure ones, and I mean especially the analytics platforms I mentioned that most apps use today. We don't know exactly how they use the data, who would end up acquiring these companies, etc.
I have a home lab set up, where i have a second router that is behind a older laptop with ip forwarding set up so I can inspect the WAN traffic that devices send out.
If you ever take a brand new iPhone and connect it to wifi and inspect the traffic in this manner, you will see all the crap it sends to apple servers.
On the other hand, I also have a custom rooted android phone, with no google apps and minimal 3d party apps (use the mobile browser for most stuff). If you inspect it in the same manner as above, the only requests it makes when it turns on is to the ntp time server, which I could probably kill with a firewall if I cared enough, making it 100% silent until I use an app.
Sounds like you didn't configure it to what you wanted. You can turn off the motion detection and just listen for door bell presses instead. Mine runs off the battery instead of hooking to a power line so I had to disable most of the features so that the battery would last longer than a month.
If you are remotely concerned about handing data to a 3rd party then I would just not use this doorbell. You can probably find a "dumber" one or construct one yourself. I might end up doing it, too, tbh.
Well, despite the implication I’m just “didn’t do it right” I adjusted every possible feature in the app. The whole thing is garbage.
I won’t apologize for Ring being a bad product while this and every other related article supports that they take ownership and share your data without your approval.
Having the same issue with the motion detection. It’s so bad.. it’s been a few years since I used it, but I think the motion zones UI on my cheap Foscam security camera was way better. It blows my mind that they cost so much, the company has so much money, and it works so poorly.
Mine was a gift otherwise I’d have returned it too.
" Ring doorbell 'gives Facebook and Google user data"
I hope I really don't have to explain the implication in this statement of how the doorbell sits there, records/listens, and then sends out data to FB/Google.
Versus saying that a smartphone app collects tracking analytics, like pretty much every other major app out there.
If hypothetically this analogy was even close to accurate, it would be entirely different because the remote is usually an order of magnitude less expensive than the TV.
Is there an opt-out? Or, more importantly, was there an explicit opt-in?
Data from crashes on my device is still my data, not Google's. Google can pop up an alert telling me things went pear-shaped, and then ask to send it back to the devs for analysis.
This may be an excessively optimistic read. A person has to know a reasonable amount about software systems and common development practices to decide crash reporting isn't worth writing about.
The bar to deciding that Google is getting user's data somehow and this is newsworthy is lower, and requires no grasp of underlying details. Technology journalists are often journalists first, and technologists second if at all. I don't blame them, it's the nature of the job.
Worth noting that "crash reporting" is very much worth reporting on and paying attention to, as transmitting a lot of sensitive data in crash reports could be beneficial to fixing bugs (but obviously not beneficial to the indiviual's rights).
This sort of pedantic hand-wringing is tiring. Google sells many things, one of which is advertising. Firebase Crashlytics may be free, but it's made available by Google in the hopes that developers pay for Firebase's full suite of paid offerings—it's not to populate additional user data to their ad or search algorithms.
Highlighting Ring makes sense as it represents a new dimension in terms of data collection and data risk. Highlighting Google and Facebook makes sense as they are the major data collectors who take great liberties in using the data to help undermining democracy and manipulate individuals through hyper targeted advertisements.
iOS crash reporting and analytics are built in, but requires explicit user opt-in. It's not a requirement that an iOS app use Crashlytics or similar to get this sort of data, so saying "every single app will use such service" is not exactly truthful. And, besides, saying that "everyone does it" is not an excuse for the behavior.
This is a company already trusted with extremely sensitive information and who have suffered a stream of stories suggesting they may not be fulfilling that trust in the way a reasonable customer might expect, all the while while charging users enough of a price that the service isn't obviously ad/data sale supported.
The bar should be a lot higher for them, it's not some free tic-tac-toe app.
The crash data is needed for debugging. It's debatable if it's your data, it's the developer's misbehaving code. An app can be architected so more of the code runs on the server than on the client, if an action you took on the client causes a crash on ny server I'm not going to ask you for permission to look at my crash logs.
Not by me. I'm not going to debug the app; I'm just going to kill it and restart it. If the developer of the app wants my data to help his debugging, he needs to ask.
> if an action you took on the client causes a crash on my server I'm not going to ask you for permission to look at my crash logs.
Of course not, but your crash logs aren't coming from my phone. If you want to look at data from my phone, you need to ask.
The difference is that Amazon isn’t an advertising company and has little incentive going through user data on their systems. In addition, the data isn’t in a standardised format so they would have to spend considerable efforts parsing the data first.
Facebook and Google on the other hand make their money from stalking people and developers are giving them data in a nice standardised format.
Is there a difference here between "an advertising company" and "does a lot of advertising"?
Amazon is very much the latter and that would seem to provide plenty of incentive to do dig through data / recognize the value / use it as they wish.
I'm sure they do plenty of analytics on data from their own platforms and that considerable effort could easily be extended to include any other data that they have access to.
Amazon is working their way towards vertical integration across as many industries as possible. Since effective advertising is critical for some of those integration steps, Amazon is 100% incentivized to hoard and process user data.
AWS is the only thing that keeps Amazon alive; if they lose their clients’ trust they will go down the drain in no time so there’s no way they’ll risk it.
i have no doubt that if you have a ballooning SaaS business hosted on AWS there is a capture team lead investigating what your tool does and whether or not it is worth amazon creating a team to re-implement in order to crush you.
they definitely do this for physical goods so i'm not naive enough to think they aren't talented enough to do it digitally.
How would they be "sacrificing it"? Where are people going to move to? AWS is the industry standard for public clouds, Azure's feature set is worse, and GCP is basically an also-ran.
> Facebook and Google on the other hand make their money from stalking people and developers are giving them data in a nice standardised format.
Do we know that the privacy policy/terms of service for these services allow Google/Facebook to use the data in the way that the BBC article seems worried about?
And before you say that "it doesn't matter what the ToS says", it does very much matter, breaking a ToS would paint a very big target no these companies, there are tons of lawyers out there that would love to catch companies at this, easy money.
Facebook claimed 2FA phone numbers would not be used for advertising. They eventually broke that claim.
There are thousands of companies breaking the GDPR (Facebook and Google included) and yet I have yet to see the tons of lawyers going after the easy money. Companies keep doing it because they know the regulation isn’t enforced.
There's no easy money for lawyers in GDPR - the big financial 'teeth' of GDPR are in the form of fines enforced by regulators to the state, not (as often in USA) in the form of huge civil lawsuits from which private law firms could get a share.
There's a big difference between Google Analytics and Sentry. Putting those in the same list is so reductive that it undermines your argument.
Tracking everything you can about your users so advertisers can better target you is evil.
Capturing all the local variables during some unexpected Exception (that might happen to include some user data) for the purpose of debugging is not even remotely evil.
User-data is totally fine to have, it's what you _do_ with it that matters
I disagree. By interacting with a web server, you are inherently sharing some data with the operator like your ip address (so you can get a response back) or any request headers you choose to set (User-agent for mobile vs desktop sites, for instance). Nobody is forcing you to make requests to any particular site, and nobody is forcing to you include all this info. If you don't want your data spread around, don't do all that spreading.
I agree that using user-data outside of some agreement is bad (and illegal under the GDPR), but I believe that an implicit agreement exists between web-server provider and user that their data will be used for the mechanical operation of the website, including logging stack-traces. Otherwise TCP/IP wouldn't work.
When I made the GPT-2 Chess notebook (sigh... do I link to it and risk seeming like I'm plugging my stuff, or let people google for it? Whatever: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/12hlppt1f2N0L9Orp8YC...) one of the first questions a reporter asked me was "How many people played it?"
I had to be like "I have no idea. A few thousand at least, based on bandwidth bills."
Then they started asking if I was tracking the games. "Nope. I don't like apps that track data, so I didn't want to make one here."
And at the end of it, I was like... this is stupid. I should have tracked clicks and tracked the games.
We should have a clear distinction between "user data" and "data that common people might reasonably care about being tracked." The headlines are a strange game of telephone. Every app tracks data. That's what most apps are for.
> And at the end of it, I was like... this is stupid. I should have tracked clicks and tracked the games.
Why do you feel this way? I agree with your positions at the beginning ("I don't like apps that track data, so I didn't want to make one here.") and the end ("Every app tracks data. That's what most apps are for."), but I don't see why that would cause you to want to have tracked games and interaction data on your own project.
Perhaps if I'd ever built something that got popular I'd know the feeling better.
Hm. Well, being able to answer basic questions like "How many people played it?" and "Can you use the human inputs to help improve the engine?" would be nice.
Can't use the human inputs to improve anything if the data doesn't exist.
Lichess tracks all games, for example, and I don't think they ask for permission. Is that a bad thing? I was forced to conclude it's probably fine, but perhaps an argument could be made.
Well generally I think anyone who creates something is interested in some feedback on how well it's going.
A developer might react differently if 10 people used their software or 10,000. Or even if 10 people used the program 1000 times vs 10,000 people using it once.
Not to mention that it's hard to iterate on something and make clear improvements if you can't tell how the software is being used. Sure you can read forums, tickets, issues, etc. But if your settings allow 1000 different configurations and 99% of your users use one of 5 different configurations that can be a very useful thing to know.
Makes you wonder why Facebook needs that data? To link who comes home to FB location and people's profiles? I'm sure they pay them for this but then you read what happened after the NSA leak in recent times where the NSA had put intentional backdoors in with companies
It's frustrating that Amazon is trying to hard to win the prize for being the creepiest tech giant. I generally like Amazon and much of my online shopping is through them, but this makes me more inclined to try alternatives.
I've already mostly dropped Facebook and Google, it'll be harder for me to ween myself off of Amazon.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadhttps://exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/
I've love to get a hangout/signal/IM text identifying anything approaching my door without having to look at a picture. Bonus if the face recognition is good enough to recognize family.
Our decision to use the Raspberry Pi 4 and not a proprietary development board was due to the ease in which AIKEA can be recycled into other projects and devices, should backers no longer need a home security device.
nice
Not really. If you aren't paying for the product, then you certainly are the product. If you are paying for the product, then you may still be the product, but you also may not. It all boils down in that case to how trustworthy and greedy the vendor is.
I remember buying a PS4 and still had to opt-out of data collection and then change like 20 settings on their bullshit social network I don't even want to use.
Windows 10 is paid and yet it has ads and insane data collection.
But I get your point. A lot of this IoT stuff is mostly pointless and serves only to make people feel like they are living in the future.
I...huh? How?
Are you a darknet dropshipper? (Nothing wrong with that, just can't imagine what carrier doesn't give you a tracking number that you can get alerts on delivery/check status of.)
However, it and the other cameras I have (including an actually decent one in the entryway) almost eliminated the random door-to-door solicitors and people leaving flyers all over my front door!
It's also really funny because people hate cameras. I've seen someone cover their face before pushing the doorbell button and then walk away because they felt too afraid to be seen on camera.
OTOH, the ring app is really, really terrible. Woof! If you install it and leave it on defaults, it'll notify you about anything your neighbors post. And boy the things they post lol. Kid riding their bike by? SUSPICIOUS! EVERYONE KEEP AN EYE OUT! Random dog?
They can easily be connected to zone minder, or any software that can take a rtsp:// URL. Even handles motion detection for specific areas of camera, so you can include the driveway but exclude the sidewalk. You can have it email or upload videos... without access to any reolink related cloud.
So you could easily put them in production with zero network access and let something you control notify you with images or video clips for any activity.
There's numerous cheap products, but the reolink seems to be one of the better ones that play well with others and doesn't require any WAN network access.
Ubiquiti and Axis also have some very nice products, but generally are more expensive.
There's quite a few solutions in this space: free, freemium, and commercial.
Blue Iris seems to be the overall favorite, and it's pretty inexpensive considering the fact that it seems to be so well regarded. I don't have Windows on my network, and I was strongly considering running BI on KVM, but I don't think my old server is beefy enough to reliably run windows with video software. I was also looking into building a box for it, but it turns out buying a used Optiplex on Ebay was cheaper and should be more than enough for tracking a few cameras.
I'll be setting it up this weekend, so I don't have much of my own experience to share, yet.
Maybe even use an esp32 cam board instead of a whole raspberry pi:
https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-cam-video-streaming-we...
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3996434
Note: one disappointment was that the app automatically reached out to an Amcrest server by default (I assume) on the assumption that everyone wants access to their home doorbell cam from outside the network ... I could not find a setting in the app so just took care of it the usual way—blocked it with the firewall. Regardless, it still works in this config.
Ever since I blocked the outgoing connection via firewall, the app now says my camera is offline. That being said, the camera feed is still working in Home Assistant, which is all I wanted. If you were using HA and wanted more functionality (audio, etc), it does appear to be available.
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/amcrest/
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/30/21042974/wyze-server-bre...
At $25 to replace, it's probably worth risking bricking it to try out alternative firmware: https://github.com/openipcamera/openipc-firmware
This is a non-starter for me since none of the places I would want to put a camera have an Ethernet jack available.
Which is still a nonstarter for me, since none of the locations I would want to put a camera have an electrical jack handy, and many of them don't get enough sunlight to make a solar panel a viable option.
Yes.
I don't need constant streaming of video, only when an event occurs that needs to be recorded.
Security cameras will have motion sensors built in. Recording would be elsewhere, the camera would just need to stream video for some configurable time if the motion sensor detects an event.
(This is all functionality built into Ring cameras, so for anyone looking for an alternative to them it doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me.)
See https://www.eufylife.com/products/604/654/battery-camera
It's a nice clean mount, I just use the template, drill a 1/2" or so hole for the PoE cable, and then 3 screws to finish the mount. It looks nice and clean, works great, never runs out of power, and is never impacted by the random Wifi issues.
Sure it's a pain to run cat5 everywhere, but I haven't found a better solution, none of my camera locations had power.
It's a little annoying Protect doesn't have a software install but the legacy unifi video still work fine. I put in ~5 cameras over the last few weeks and been really happy with them.
I was this || close to not going unifi because it wasn't clear what the longtime support for unifi video was. I'm still not super-happy with that aspect as it's not clear if the hardware is tied to protect or not.
I lose that if I switch to their custom hardware. I've also heard it doesn't scale well to multiple users or larger numbers of cameras.
I'm probably not a good example, I live in a small apartment, don't have any valuables besides passports and loose change. I just don't see much of a point for having cameras. Instead I focus on deterring casual burglars by using semi-intelligent timer-based lights plus a simple radio tuned to a station with lots of talking when we're away from home. Perhaps a security cam has a deterring aspect, but not sure of the legality of it in Germany where I live, and I guess a dummy camera would achieve a similar effect as a real one?
What am I missing? :)
The cameras can read the license numbers of cars going up and down my dead end street, and have a NTP synced time stamp on them. So I have reported license plate numbers to the police a few times when various neighborhood issues have come up.
But no, I don't think it will magically arrest someone breaking into my house. But they are still pretty useful. Did someone leave a package on my front door? Is my kids friend's parent here for pickup/drop off? Did the garbage truck get here yet? WTF is that loud truck noise out front? Is that knock at the door someone with a clip board? Or someone trying to get me to believe in their god?
One thing it does help, is that at least in my area it's common for a thief to knock to see if anyone is home, then break down that door or force a rear door to enter the house is nobody answers. So being able to see and even respond to the knocker might well prevent a breakin, even if you aren't physically there.
But at least if you know something is happening in real-time, motion triggers being the most important, there is at least some chance to intervene or call the police depending on the circumstances. Even if you can't stop them, speed is key, and if they are on foot they could be caught in the area afterwards with vague id such as clothing only. Capturing a license plate is probably optimal though, if they aren't on foot. Cameras are very good these days - HD and higher 30/60fps video - not the pixelated/blocky/useless recordings of 10 years ago.
Also good to know ahead of time if there is anyone snooping around looking for easy targets (as small-time burglars do). Some systems do also have monitoring services.
Otherwise yeah, cameras are at best a deterrent and source of evidence, nothing more as a passive device. Best security system I've ever had was a German Shepherd. Fully autonomous deterrent + active response if necessary :)
Let's say Apple pre installs Google+ on all its phones. Then I want to know how much apple got paid for this, i.e. how many cents is a users privacy worth to them. And how much money did Google make by using this data, i.e. how much was the data really worth.
Because until we have such data, companies can always hide behind phrases such as "... share with partners ... to provide relevant services" and all that nonsense.
Having said that, I’ve always wondered the same for TV ads. Let’s say I wanted the option to pay extra to never see ads, how much would that be? Why doesn’t the market give me that option?
What’s more interesting is that it could be argued these fall under the intent of the EU cookie directive (even though in a lot of cases they don’t actually use cookies). The only app I have seen asking for cookie like consent is Airbnb (who use all of these same services and more)
Says who, the company itself? Why install trackers if you're not going to use them?
It’s the equivalent of Google Analytics.
Now how those companies then use the data they collect as part of providing analytics is another question (and why lots of people prefer to block Google Analytics for example)
True. This is why I have to firewall off all apps so that they can't communicate out without my permission. This is also the primary reason why I'm leaving the smartphone ecosystem entirely.
The invasiveness of apps is intolerable to me, getting worse, and getting increasingly hard to mitigate.
And if it's just a security camera watching my property/car, then a dumb one sounds fine and cheaper. Not to mention it'll actually look like a security camera which is arguably more valuable as a deterrent.
* rarely that local.
But if you live in a rural area, things are completely different. Which from my understanding is the same as EU for the most part.
Over literally thousands of deliveries during that time, the number that have disappeared mysteriously is under 1%. In fact, more have not been delivered at all (i.e., fraud on the part of the delivery person) than have been stolen.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/nyregion/online-shopping-...
So, it's pretty much priced into their margins already.
When I bring the card to post office they scan the barcode then send someone out back to fetch my package they ask me for some ID and check the name and address on the id with the name + address on the package. No fuss no drama. The idea of leaving package on doorstep seems bizarre.
In most of Europe a mailbox looks like this: https://imgur.com/ppSrO1W
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hifamb4LTgQooDBYj/worth-reme...
I speak from experience when I say they tend not to care about traditional 'dumb' cameras as, generally, nobody is going to be watching them until after the act.
Neither is really a great option in the US because:
most families have both adults working.
Other than a handful of cities, people are so spread out that having enough secure depot's in the right locations would be astronomically expensive.
...like a Post Office?
https://www.quora.com/Will-FedEx-deliver-my-package-to-my-lo...
https://www.walgreens.com/topic/promotion/fedex.jsp
https://www.cvs.com/content/ups?linkId=77387667
When I last lived in a rural area, the UPS guy would leave packages inside my unlocked car.
-send it to your workplace if it is allowed
-send it to an amazon locker and pick it up on the way home.
If you have it sent to your house and you're not in, a lot of the time it gets dropped off at a neighbours house. I've taken in a few parcels when I've been working from home.
It is true that the local depot for other parcel service (DPD etc) can be quite far away, but those services usually offer a a number of repeat delivery attempts or an option to leave with a neighbour.
The number of working adults in a household is irrelevant to delivering parcels securely.
That's not always a realistic option. I'd have to go pretty far out of my way to get to the nearest Amazon locker. And it only works if your packages are coming from Amazon.
Nowadays there are companies that offer evening time home delivery so that you can always be there.
It's just mostly people aren't used to doing that and are hard to change. People often just send packages to work or a friends house instead. With access points, they can and will return a package to sender beyond a certain time.
I'd say that about half of the packages that get delivered where I work are for individuals getting their personal stuff.
Most people prefer to have it left on their doorstep because the other options are a bit of a hassle.
It's not the lack of localness that's the problem for me in the UK, it's more that most depots are only open 9-5 when people are at work. If you have anything resembling a long commute (particularly by public transport) then you can get really screwed over, especially if you can't drive for whatever reason you pretty much have to take half a day off to collect your package in many cases.
I try to avoid using UPS when I can, since they are the most user hostile delivery service in my area. I have more of a chance of getting a package on time when they leave it on my porch unattended.
Amazon has "Amazon Lockers" that are available in many places in the US, many of which are open extended hours, and some of which are open 24x7.
These are not the only options.
Even the USPS has Post Office Boxes, and many US Post Offices have external spaces where the PO Boxes are accessible 24x7.
I think it's true that across most of the U.S. if it weren't safe to leave a package at one's house then people would be up in arms demanding that the police do their jobs. ISTR that the U.K. crime rate is about 2½ times that of the U.S.
This was such a terrible experience the 2 times in my life that I've been forced to do it, that I still remember both of them vividly almost 15 years later. You can be sure I'll never do that again regardless of the purchase or price. There is nothing for sale anywhere on this earth that would be worth it.
> If they decide to leave it outside my door and it gets stolen, I fully expect (and will get) another one delivered at no cost to me, other than the time penalty.
That's exactly what happened the one and only time I've had a package stolen from my porch. It was an external hard drive worth around $100. Amazon sent me a new one immediately. I even tried getting the serial number out of them (at the request of the police) and they were like "haha, no. Here's free one day shipping on your replacement, and we consider this matter closed."
Note: Maybe all apps shouldnt be tracking this. But this is currently how analytics in apps work.
Instructions on changing DNS settings https://joyofandroid.com/how-to-change-dns-on-android/
Nice idea in theory, exploitive data mine in practice. I hate it.
You could argue that the doorbell transmits the video/audio over the internet, but that transport is encrypted to the Ring app, and its deleted off of AWS after its viewed on the App.
If you really want privacy, you should also return your cellphone and go back to using a flip phone.
How do you know this? And how are you sure that information isn't shared before being deleted?
Also, it's not only about privacy (although I do think people should care a bit more about it than they do on average). Data stored and sold makes money that is dependent on you to produce, yet you get no compensation for it. Many people have a problem with that, including myself.
Ring states it on their website. https://shop.ring.com/pages/privacy
I mean, nobody REALLY knows, but if that's the standard you are going to use, then you pretty much have to assume that any company can and will spy on you, and apply the same critique to them.
Based on reports and news, Amazon has been perhaps the best out of the big companies when dealing with privacy, as they are fairly transparent on the data they collect for what use, and had not had any major cases of leaks despite them perhaps having the best data set of peoples behavior with shopping history which is the most relevant to advertisers.
Being that Ring uses AWS for back end, as can be verified through network traffic inspection, I personally don't see any red flags with them saying they delete the data.
>Data stored and sold makes money that is dependent on you to produce, yet you get no compensation for it.
This is HORRIBLY wrong. Gmail, youtube, reddit and most everything that is free on the web and on mobile is your compensation for your data. Yes, companies make profit, but they still spend that advertising revenue on hosting and maintaining that service, and recouping the initial investment they put into building the thing.
That is the standard I use and I do apply the same critique to every company.
> Gmail, youtube, reddit and most everything that is free on the web and on mobile is your compensation for your data.
First off, I don't use all of those services. According to your logic, you and every other person who has data in their system and is not using a service is owed cold hard cash. Secondly, the value that I get out of using them is not commensurate with the profit they are making. These companies are making EXORBITANT amounts of money off of peoples data. It is in no way acceptable compensation. Third, I can't opt out of them using the data, even if I stop using a service or if I never used their service at all.
Then why are you on HN? They could be collecting your IP and data on you.
>First off, I don't use all of those services. According to your logic, you and every other person who has data in their system and is not using a service is owed cold hard cash.
The only data that exists for people that don't use services is 3p tracking data, which is from people visiting websites, that are supported by ads. So yes, if you view content on a website and a tracking cookie or pixel records you, that is you using the website, and the advertiser is paying the host for this which allows the host to continue hosing the website.
> These companies are making EXORBITANT amounts of money off of peoples data
Whoa, this is like almost a communism argument. Dictating how much money anyone should make is not a good road to go down on. There is nothing wrong with companies generating profit, they are capitalizing on supply versus demand.
They pitch their Ring doorbells as a surveillance network to police departments, provide law enforcement with an easy to use interface and map of their camera network, and allow police to go after people who choose not to share their recordings without a warrant.
With a warrant or subpeona, all police have to do is serve it to Amazon, and the company can hand over your recordings without ever letting you know.
Or how about an iPhone with minimal or no 3rd party apps?
Which is practically impossible unfortunately because in order operate in the modern world you need at least a few 3rd party messenger apps, your bank's app and maybe a few more. Theoretically, however, I can have a phone free from social platforms and 3rd party analytics platforms like MixPanel or AppsFlyer, with regard to whom I have absolute zero trust.
I think that this may be true for convenient operation, but not for operating period. I have none of these apps on my phone and, in fact, don't regularly use my phone for anything but receiving calls and listening to audiobooks. (Oh, and alarms, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting; but not otherwise for interacting with the outside world.)
If you ever take a brand new iPhone and connect it to wifi and inspect the traffic in this manner, you will see all the crap it sends to apple servers.
On the other hand, I also have a custom rooted android phone, with no google apps and minimal 3d party apps (use the mobile browser for most stuff). If you inspect it in the same manner as above, the only requests it makes when it turns on is to the ntp time server, which I could probably kill with a firewall if I cared enough, making it 100% silent until I use an app.
If you want privacy, you get it yourself.
If you are remotely concerned about handing data to a 3rd party then I would just not use this doorbell. You can probably find a "dumber" one or construct one yourself. I might end up doing it, too, tbh.
I won’t apologize for Ring being a bad product while this and every other related article supports that they take ownership and share your data without your approval.
Mine was a gift otherwise I’d have returned it too.
Even though BBC purposefully puts the wrong thing in the title for clicks, I would hope that HN users would pay more attention to detail.
In other news, smartphones spy on you.
I hope I really don't have to explain the implication in this statement of how the doorbell sits there, records/listens, and then sends out data to FB/Google.
Versus saying that a smartphone app collects tracking analytics, like pretty much every other major app out there.
Is there an opt-out? Or, more importantly, was there an explicit opt-in?
Data from crashes on my device is still my data, not Google's. Google can pop up an alert telling me things went pear-shaped, and then ask to send it back to the devs for analysis.
You're not wrong about ownership of data. But highlighting Ring and Google in this manner is some seriously biased and dishonest reporting.
If it really were just crash reporting, this would have probably gone unreported on.
The bar to deciding that Google is getting user's data somehow and this is newsworthy is lower, and requires no grasp of underlying details. Technology journalists are often journalists first, and technologists second if at all. I don't blame them, it's the nature of the job.
How do you know this?
Is it "pedantic hand-wringing" to not want my DNA analyzed by an advertising company as well?
The bar should be a lot higher for them, it's not some free tic-tac-toe app.
Not by me. I'm not going to debug the app; I'm just going to kill it and restart it. If the developer of the app wants my data to help his debugging, he needs to ask.
> if an action you took on the client causes a crash on my server I'm not going to ask you for permission to look at my crash logs.
Of course not, but your crash logs aren't coming from my phone. If you want to look at data from my phone, you need to ask.
https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.ringapp...
Wait until the BBC finds out how many of us are giving Amazon user data. (I mean, it's s3 and RDS, but that clarification would be overly pedantic)
Facebook and Google on the other hand make their money from stalking people and developers are giving them data in a nice standardised format.
Amazon is very much the latter and that would seem to provide plenty of incentive to do dig through data / recognize the value / use it as they wish.
I'm sure they do plenty of analytics on data from their own platforms and that considerable effort could easily be extended to include any other data that they have access to.
[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-gaining-google-search-a...
Yet React and Angular are quite popular
they definitely do this for physical goods so i'm not naive enough to think they aren't talented enough to do it digitally.
But I don't think Amazon will try to dumpster dive your encrypted S3 buckets in the process of doing the above. At least, not yet.
Google and Facebook only have advertising; they have nothing to lose by being unethical and/or breaking privacy laws like they do with the GDPR.
https://apnews.com/a5ad925b06b7454ea746764399e1a096
Do we know that the privacy policy/terms of service for these services allow Google/Facebook to use the data in the way that the BBC article seems worried about?
And before you say that "it doesn't matter what the ToS says", it does very much matter, breaking a ToS would paint a very big target no these companies, there are tons of lawyers out there that would love to catch companies at this, easy money.
There are thousands of companies breaking the GDPR (Facebook and Google included) and yet I have yet to see the tons of lawyers going after the easy money. Companies keep doing it because they know the regulation isn’t enforced.
Tracking everything you can about your users so advertisers can better target you is evil.
Capturing all the local variables during some unexpected Exception (that might happen to include some user data) for the purpose of debugging is not even remotely evil.
User-data is totally fine to have, it's what you _do_ with it that matters
Unless the user explicitly opts into having that data recorded, it isn't ok to stockpile it, regardless if the intent behind it.
The path to hell is paved with good intentions.
I agree that using user-data outside of some agreement is bad (and illegal under the GDPR), but I believe that an implicit agreement exists between web-server provider and user that their data will be used for the mechanical operation of the website, including logging stack-traces. Otherwise TCP/IP wouldn't work.
Growth at all costs.
A growth at all costs mindset in many cases leads to redundant and irresponsible overuse.
When I made the GPT-2 Chess notebook (sigh... do I link to it and risk seeming like I'm plugging my stuff, or let people google for it? Whatever: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/12hlppt1f2N0L9Orp8YC...) one of the first questions a reporter asked me was "How many people played it?"
I had to be like "I have no idea. A few thousand at least, based on bandwidth bills."
Then they started asking if I was tracking the games. "Nope. I don't like apps that track data, so I didn't want to make one here."
And at the end of it, I was like... this is stupid. I should have tracked clicks and tracked the games.
We should have a clear distinction between "user data" and "data that common people might reasonably care about being tracked." The headlines are a strange game of telephone. Every app tracks data. That's what most apps are for.
Why do you feel this way? I agree with your positions at the beginning ("I don't like apps that track data, so I didn't want to make one here.") and the end ("Every app tracks data. That's what most apps are for."), but I don't see why that would cause you to want to have tracked games and interaction data on your own project.
Perhaps if I'd ever built something that got popular I'd know the feeling better.
Can't use the human inputs to improve anything if the data doesn't exist.
Lichess tracks all games, for example, and I don't think they ask for permission. Is that a bad thing? I was forced to conclude it's probably fine, but perhaps an argument could be made.
A developer might react differently if 10 people used their software or 10,000. Or even if 10 people used the program 1000 times vs 10,000 people using it once.
Not to mention that it's hard to iterate on something and make clear improvements if you can't tell how the software is being used. Sure you can read forums, tickets, issues, etc. But if your settings allow 1000 different configurations and 99% of your users use one of 5 different configurations that can be a very useful thing to know.
I've already mostly dropped Facebook and Google, it'll be harder for me to ween myself off of Amazon.