I cannot imagine installing surveillance devices in my home but if I did set up cameras they would be on a private network and saving to devices I control.
At the rate the US is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes illegal. Add that most of these cameras are chinese and then maybe you won’t have that choice anymore.
I’d be interested to know if anyone has a moderate cost system that doesn’t force you to use a company’s cloud (and thus making them prone to abuse like this). I personally have a POE setup with some commercial grade cameras ($400 a pop), with attached NAS on a private network, and home-rolled a means to access the cameras remotely, but it’s not exactly economical or practical
Synology Surveilance Station [1], it supports 2 cameras per NAS for free, extra cameras $50 per device. I use an old 2 HDD NAS with 2 cameras for a few years already, it works perfectly well. (One Reolink camera, another Amcrest, both record video in h264).
Just use some Reolink or similar ONVIF cameras like Axis or Dahua. Block traffic from them to anywhere other than your NAS. They're pretty simple, mine have the ability to just FTP captures to a given system, and thus I've got redundant captures (on a system with a bunch of drives, and on the microsd cards in the cameras). Maybe there's some spooky backdoor crazy way they can phone home, but I doubt it given how they're PoE and access to basically every other system is locked down my firewall.
Thanks for recommending thingino. I’ve seen couple of other projects over the years that allowed swapping out the firmware on cheap Chinese manufactured wifi cams. But thingino is the first one that has support for the cameras I actually own. I stopped using those cameras after I moved over to Unifi. But this might give some of those cheap cams a new life and can probably find some use for them.
HomeKit Secure Video has a cloud, but it’s locally encrypted with keys Apple doesn’t have before it leaves the house. It supports a bunch of cheap cameras and doorbells (which will try to phone home, but you can block them from internet access without breaking local HomeKit).
Not exactly what you’re asking for, but great ease of use at a good price, and good privacy.
It seems like people are missing the fact that it's opt-in from the police to the consumer. It's within the end consumer's control to allow the access or not, so by that standard it's not in any way abuse.
It's not Orwellian overreach or, as the EFF claims a breach of Ring's customers' trust, if the customer gives up the data willingly and knowingly.
You’re missing the point. The last report in 2021 stated that they sold 1.7 million units in that year alone. The effect is that nearly every square inch of any populated area now has a camera pointed at it that police can access. Please tell me how you opt out of that.
So you are telling me the can get the data my Facebook, Google and any other US company without my consent but in this case it's somehow actually enforced?
Google added exactly this to SWE role attributes, to be checked each performance review cycle. Managers managing managers, directors managing directors. Are you shorting GOOG right now?
You have to be totally naive to buy a Ring camera in the first place. Of course it will be used in ways you can't control, it uploads everything to "the cloud".
Let me guess "opt-in" means checked by default and hidden 12 menus deep.
Or worse-yet, opt-in means "Hey our rates are going up, but not if you agree to this" (something comcast did recently).
Or opt-in is stored in some database somewhere and might "accidentally be misread" due to a "bug".
If they want real-opt-in then it should be a SMS message at the time they want to know, and a phone-number you can reach out to for more information. This would give an audit trail at the very least.
My comcast story is I have xfinity, and at some point the rate went from 80 to 120, and I called them on the phone about it, and they said "I've sent you a new user-agreement where if you agree and sign up on this link it's only $80 again. I read the link it basically said you they can 'share' my browsing data with 'partners' and such".
Really offended me on principle, but not $40 a month level offended, so I signed it.
We have a number of Ring devices and are overall happy with them but your 12 menus deep comment is on the money.
Even workaday settings for devices are scattered haphazardly hither and thither through the many pages of their app’s interface and I regularly find myself having to Google for the location of settings.
It’s crying out for, at least, some sort of smart search box.
So “hard to find” for something like this is practically guaranteed.
SMS isn't viable, this is about *realtime*--the cops are trying to use cameras to find or follow somebody.
And the reality is such cameras are designed to be pointed at public spaces. So what if the cops can see it? Using technology to expose that which is otherwise invisible should require a warrant, but I don't mind technology that simply provides eyeballs on what's public anyway. (Note that I feel differently about security cameras in general--they are often pointed at non-public spaces and access should be opt-in on a camera by camera basis. Cameras covering the front entrances, fine; cameras covering back entrances, ask or get a warrant!)
If the government wants access to a camera indefinitely, they should have written permission from the owner directly. It shouldn't be through a third party.
What's a good dumb way to check on pets via camera/talk to them while you're on vacation? I have ring cameras at home specifically for this use case. but I now want to get rid of them.
Why don’t we call this by its true name - Amazon? You guys do realize that Amazon intentionally keeps its name off the product for a reason, right? They have Amazon batteries, web hosting, makeup, and every other thing you could possibly imagine. This product though? It’s just “Ring” so that Amazon can avoid the brand damage that comes from facilitating a police state. That is their intention, and they are keeping it at arms length for that reason. The headline of this article should read “Amazon Ring introducing new feature…” not just “Ring”. If we want it to stop, we need to hold the company responsible for what they’re doing.
So if I enable this will the police at least use the feeds to only summarily execute me for partaking in my 2nd amendment right to night time home defense, and let the rest of my family live?
It's time for regulation that no images of people may be retained for any commercial purpose without explicit permission of the person whose image is retained. Facial recognition performed on any person who has not granted explicit permission (or, in the case of government, against whom a search warrant has not been obtained) should be illegal. Nor shall any compressed version, broadly defined, of the data be retained (i.e., no training on any sort of facial or pose data without explicit permission of all whose images are used in training).
Penalties should be in the %s of revenue or company assets. Whistleblowers should receive large sums for identifying violations.
In a broader vein, it's time for regulation forbidding the retention or aggregation of any person's data for any commercial purpose other than the one most proximal to the actual transaction in which the person engaged, unless they explicitly opt in.
What would the latter mean? Among other things, targeted ads and recommendation systems would become illegal. Cross-user aggregation (or e.g., a company engaging in any user-longitudinal data analytics) would be illegal. In SQL language, ideally the only time you could do any query with a user ID returning multiple rows for further use would be to serve data directly back to the user. In the long run, such queries should be impossible by requiring something like a) per-user encrypted storage, b) user owned data, c) non-correlatable per-user IDs across transactions.
It will never happen because -- as noted in the article -- many folks in SillyCon valley and government are technofascists, but it should, because our current situation violates all reasonable notions of privacy.
I was looking at security systems. It seems, Ring makes it very difficult to have any sort of offline operations. Recording onto SD card is limited or impossible. After seeing this, I realize this is likely by design. You have to be connected so that the surveillance state can get access at some point, somehow.
I'm sad that we're quickly heading towards a future where there will be monitoring of all people, at all times. AI agents will flag people for leaving their house too late at night, or not leaving their house often enough. Our civilization is full of intelligence but it lacks wisdom.
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 76.4 ms ] thread[1] https://www.synology.com/en-global/surveillance
Install that and your open source backend of your choice and Bob's your aunty.
There's also thingino, I have not gone this route yet.
https://thingino.com/
Not exactly what you’re asking for, but great ease of use at a good price, and good privacy.
Then again, doesn't seem like the law matters anymore at least on a federal level.
It's not Orwellian overreach or, as the EFF claims a breach of Ring's customers' trust, if the customer gives up the data willingly and knowingly.
And lots and lots of people will.
You have to be total naive if you still believe that this is a “safe” feature to enable.
Or worse-yet, opt-in means "Hey our rates are going up, but not if you agree to this" (something comcast did recently).
Or opt-in is stored in some database somewhere and might "accidentally be misread" due to a "bug".
If they want real-opt-in then it should be a SMS message at the time they want to know, and a phone-number you can reach out to for more information. This would give an audit trail at the very least.
What’s the Comcast story? (just did a quick search)
Really offended me on principle, but not $40 a month level offended, so I signed it.
Even workaday settings for devices are scattered haphazardly hither and thither through the many pages of their app’s interface and I regularly find myself having to Google for the location of settings.
It’s crying out for, at least, some sort of smart search box.
So “hard to find” for something like this is practically guaranteed.
And the reality is such cameras are designed to be pointed at public spaces. So what if the cops can see it? Using technology to expose that which is otherwise invisible should require a warrant, but I don't mind technology that simply provides eyeballs on what's public anyway. (Note that I feel differently about security cameras in general--they are often pointed at non-public spaces and access should be opt-in on a camera by camera basis. Cameras covering the front entrances, fine; cameras covering back entrances, ask or get a warrant!)
Or put up their own cameras on the street.
This will be abused by the government, by the police, and every othet nefarious organizations and individuals possible.
Penalties should be in the %s of revenue or company assets. Whistleblowers should receive large sums for identifying violations.
In a broader vein, it's time for regulation forbidding the retention or aggregation of any person's data for any commercial purpose other than the one most proximal to the actual transaction in which the person engaged, unless they explicitly opt in.
What would the latter mean? Among other things, targeted ads and recommendation systems would become illegal. Cross-user aggregation (or e.g., a company engaging in any user-longitudinal data analytics) would be illegal. In SQL language, ideally the only time you could do any query with a user ID returning multiple rows for further use would be to serve data directly back to the user. In the long run, such queries should be impossible by requiring something like a) per-user encrypted storage, b) user owned data, c) non-correlatable per-user IDs across transactions.
It will never happen because -- as noted in the article -- many folks in SillyCon valley and government are technofascists, but it should, because our current situation violates all reasonable notions of privacy.