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.
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.
I think there is an untapped market for providing "simplified" interface to important settings (e.g. privacy/security related) of various apps. Sort of a user-friendly settings-api for other apps' settings.
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.
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.
My sisters bought a Ring camera for my parent's house. They asked me to install it. Before I did I said to my parents "Everything that happens in front of this camera is sent to a 3rd party. Police and others may be able to access this without your permission and you never really know who they are selling data to. Do you still want me to install it?"
They said No. It is still in the box on the counter after over 2 years.
Tell your parents a stranger somewhere faraway really, sincerely appreciates them. And you can tell them too, objectively, that they're 1 (or 2) in a million.
The Ring situation was already slimy, having smoothly accessible channels for LE to bypass customer's refusal to cooperate with informal footage requests. Live streaming at will, would really put things in perspective, exalting the morose, lone clinical cynic to an urban archetype.
I understand folks who are into traipsing through life before a perennial, unblinking audience of strangers. I've been afflicted with diseases myself. But foisting it on neighbors seems biblically ungood.
I know it's socially acceptable to mock and belittle snowballs, but I think this will be a big one.
Yes, this is my take as well, and I think it's the correct one from both a technical and legal POV. It's one thing for the government to try to compel an organization or person to create a feature they want from scratch. They have made noises in that direction in the past (like the FBI vs Apple trying to invoke the All Writs Act) but it's been on very shaky ground, on both 1st and 13th Amendment grounds as well as others. But the government can be a lot more aggressive and courts a lot more permissive when it comes to merely making use of functionality that already exists. Even putting aside all the massive numbers of perverse incentives, but the thing is of course those shouldn't be put aside, we've seen this movie before over and over and over again. Once a feature exists that can generate a lot of direct revenue for a company and the only thing that keeps them from turning the knob up is "we're totally not evil cross our hearts!". Like holy shit, in 2025 who really goes "oh well it's opt-in!"
I think this particular one is pretty important to know about because a lot of people deploy Ring stuff almost by default, and some HNers (including me as it happens) have some level of influence or even control over it. I always meant to put some effort into updating my self-hosted security system efforts but this is a major kick in the butt. Have to know this exists and be able to offer solid credible alternatives.
Edit: to add a direct pertinent example, WE LITERALLY JUST HAD 5 DAYS AGO ON HN A 500+ COMMENT HUGE THREAD ON "Oakland cops gave ICE license plate data; SFPD also illegally shared with feds" [0]. And there are people really claiming "nothing to see here, move along, local and feds would totally never conspire to abuse anything in violation of the law let alone not in violation of the law"!?
I am less worried about local law enforcement. They will have little ability to strong arm Amazon and have oversight and regulation, as well as judicial review, even if it’s not always effective it’s always there.
DHS has become lawless, and they are eager to strong arm and over reach after having dismantled their own oversight and ignoring their own regulations. They are working hard to move fast and break the law faster than the law can keep up and the Supreme Court has made it very difficult to seek remedy. Because they are not doing criminal justice but instead civil administrative enforcement the web of oversight and review and stronger civil rights for criminal justice don’t apply. They have become the largest police force, militarized, and with enormous budget, latitude, and blank check support from the highest levels of political government.
They absolutely can strong arm Amazon into doing what they want, and absolutely will use Ring camera against their owners and neighbors.
In six months we created a secret police rivaling the KGB, gestapo, State Security Police, and SSD.
Ring already had this happen a dozen times with their own employees. Turns out giving random people access to other people's personal cameras is bad. Who would've thought?
Anyway, don't send potentially sensitive footage to a third party server.
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".
But everyone else does, so what's the point? My privacy is always compromised because tech junkies (as opposed to techies) insist on indulging in stupid things like 21 and me, Gmail, or Ring and I get swept along with it.
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.
Even if it were to happen, there would be a carve out for the state.
The DHS is collecting a massive database of facial geometry at the moment in preparation for nationwide constant realtime facial recognition, just China has.
The cameras are up and collecting data at every airport, as well as every traffic intersection in Las Vegas (and presumably other cities).
The taliban actually have a fascinatingly (philosophically) based law where it’s illegal to photograph a living thing. I’m not sure about the reason. Maybe derived from the not being okay to depict Mohammed. But I kind of dig the concept especially for living things that can’t consent to be captured in images
I'm saying we should not allow per-user analytics. Currently companies build a profile of each user and correlate that with all the other similar users. Then they target other users who are hypothesized to be similar.
I'm arguing that no per-user analytics should be able to be conducted. A store can track how many times product A is purchased, but not that product A and B were purchased by the same user. Using the latter info for anything other than providing a summary of what the user has purchased (to the user) should be illegal.
Yeah it would be complicated. But you could do it by creating a new obfuscated user ID for each transaction.
Or even better, by having each person store their own data and mandating that companies delete all records. The company can provide a signature on the transaction record (a receipt!) that the user keeps to prove the purchase if there's a conflict later on. But the company cannot keep a copy of any per-user info, the receipt, or the transaction info; nothing beyond the fact that product A was purchased on a certain date.
> 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.
Really? You have that sort of attitude towards normal everyday people who absolutely don’t have the experience or knowledge that this is even a factor?
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.
Trying to find an affordable camera / baby monitor that was both secure and offline was a tough one for me, it seems every single consumer oriented camera has a remote access functionality (= a backdoor) nowadays, and the baby monitors that don’t use wifi are only secure through obscurity with some of them being as easy to hack as buying the same model.
I ended up with an Amcrest IP2M-841 and Tinycam on Android (as I understand using RTSP), and blocking internet access of the camera through the router. As I found out, just connecting it to the internet will automatically connect to servers for allowing “easy setup” of the remote access feature.
+1 for Reolink. We have a reolink camera hooked into home assistant, the whole setup is local and reolink's API exposes every single feature in home assistant with no additional setup needed.
My house also came with an existing NVR camera network which I can view in home assistant over my router without it ever going to the cloud as well.
Recently replaced my Eufy system with UI ones - I’m a big fan so far. Picked up a few new 4k ones for important areas and got the rest used on marketplace via a 4-pack of 2k ones for $150 from a hair salon that had changed systems.
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.
I use a local NVR containing a couple of hard drives totalling maybe 8TB of storage attached to same-branded cameras (ranging between $80 and $150 each) that I can access locally, and remotely via Wireguard.
I'd say it's economical in comparison to cloud options, but, yes, not all that practical to the less technical crowd.
I specifically block the camera and NVR local IP addresses from accessing the internet. I don't really want the possibility of an private company accessing live (or recorded) video of where I live.
Brand is Reolink. I've been slowly building up the system over five-ish years and have not yet found any reason to kick myself for choosing that brand. I also have some TP-Link Tapo cameras for more temporary things, like monitoring pets.
I've also setup Frigate as an alternative system, both for my own interest and as a way to aggregate different camera brands to a single interface. Frigate can be a bit complex.
Is there anything that runs for a decent amount of time, wifi and essentially all-wireless? Blink somewhat works on its own local hub, but honestly its crap for detecting when things happen so I wont be upgrading from my used 2-pack + hub even though it does integrate well with HA.
I'd really like something that'd be apartment friendly so no drilling holes.
I also recently installed a Reolink system. I have 6 cameras (4 PoE and 2 WiFi) inside and outside my house. It’s amazing. I just set up a raspberry pi to act as an FTP server to backup files to cloud storage.
The TP Link Tapo ecosystem is really good and can record directly onto SD cards. Seamlessly works with Google Home, I can access my cameras outside of the house without signing up for their cloud option.
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.
If you have cameras the police can get a subpoena to force you to provide what you have saved. If you don’t have cameras, you can’t give what you don’t have.
Yes, but they have to subpoena you. That means process, that means getting a judge to sign it, and it means you can limit scope (i.e., if the incident under investigation occurred outside your home, you're not going to need to provide any footage from inside).
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.
Yes, they have a feature with their 'Pro' base station and Premium subscription, to store video locally on SD card, but still the only way to access the video is through the Ring app. IMO they are just choosing not to compete with the on-prem closed circuit systems, which represent a niche market compared to normies who want a notification when someone rings their video doorbell.
That is wild, I think being able to record onto an SD card or whatever should be the bare minimum requirement. I personally would never buy anything that does not have an offline option.
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.
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.
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.
American government is the biggest threat to American citizens, not the Chinese.
(Just as the Chinese government is the biggest threat to Chinese citizens, not the American.)
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.
This has been in Ring for years and police have their own dashboard. Most importantly, it was already found Ring or Police have enabled access on their own.
Based on the articles, do you really think Ring and police cannot just get whatever they want?
>Opt in means nothing in the face of a legal subpoena
Or scarier, a National Security Letter the government claims the company can't even talk about except maybe in secret court. Or perhaps scariest, a """"National Security Letter ;^)"""", ie, the company absolutely wants to gleefully cooperate with the government and give it whatever it wants for the right price, but also wants to maintain a veneer of "we totally care" and the government obligingly produces some demand and the company then goes "oh geez we totally place customers first and privacy is our highest priority ....but we had to because of terrorist pedo murder rioter jaywalkers, the government ORDERED us to not our fault nothing we could do!" while facilitating it without any challenge at all.
But I can't avoid it. 2 of my 4 neighbors have this installed. So now, everytime we are outside, on my own property, we're being captured without consent.
This makes me seriously reconsider continuing with my Ring subscription. The chances this will be abused are 1000%.
* At the moment I only have sensors so that Ring tracks movement inside the house. Only when I'm out of the house for an extended amount of time (days), I turn on the cameras.
Are they breaking the E2EE feature, or is this for folks that didn't care/were scared off by the red text that said they wouldn't be able to recover their videos if they lost their trusted devices?
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?
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?
It feels like what is needed is some kind of protocol for decentralizing the police force (and judiciary downstream). It's a nice idea to have have choices (hopefully it is opt in) but it would be nice to have more choices for protection and law given our current situtation as it is unfolding in various countries.
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.
My strategy for Ring when I used it as it was cheapest option with cloud recording and notifications (what's the point of local recordings if someone can just steal them) was to just connect it to a smart plug and then to UPS. I simply disabled power to it just before I got home.
I mean what are the privacy-friendly alternatives? Assume others in this market are equally shady. What is the safe, self-hosted solution where we can monitor CCTV from our phones?
There are plenty, but they're all very DIY and I don't think there are any turnkey solutions that you can just plug in and have work.
I think a better question is... why do we all need this? I get that everyone these days is afraid of everyone and everything, but it's not rational. Very few people actually need a doorbell camera.
And if something actually does happen where you think video evidence might be useful, nine times out of ten the police aren't going to help you anyway.
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?
If they can get the data without a user's consent, then it's independent of this new feature and thus unrelated. If you believe that the government has unlimited access, then it was most likely already possible before this feature.
Now, there is at least a "proper" way to give law enforcement access.
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.
That was the case before as well, as you could easily export Ring footage and share it manually with police if you want. This just makes it slightly easier.
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.
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.
I think there is an untapped market for providing "simplified" interface to important settings (e.g. privacy/security related) of various apps. Sort of a user-friendly settings-api for other apps' settings.
6 replies →
Also any update resets your selected options.
And the updates are silent.
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.
Or put up their own cameras on the street.
Good bet.
What’s the Comcast story? (just did a quick search)
was on HN a few weeks back. imaging through wifi and was auto enabled for their routers.
3 replies →
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.
My sisters bought a Ring camera for my parent's house. They asked me to install it. Before I did I said to my parents "Everything that happens in front of this camera is sent to a 3rd party. Police and others may be able to access this without your permission and you never really know who they are selling data to. Do you still want me to install it?"
They said No. It is still in the box on the counter after over 2 years.
Tell your parents a stranger somewhere faraway really, sincerely appreciates them. And you can tell them too, objectively, that they're 1 (or 2) in a million.
The Ring situation was already slimy, having smoothly accessible channels for LE to bypass customer's refusal to cooperate with informal footage requests. Live streaming at will, would really put things in perspective, exalting the morose, lone clinical cynic to an urban archetype.
I understand folks who are into traipsing through life before a perennial, unblinking audience of strangers. I've been afflicted with diseases myself. But foisting it on neighbors seems biblically ungood.
I know it's socially acceptable to mock and belittle snowballs, but I think this will be a big one.
The feature exist and that guarantees the law enforcement will abuse this sooner or later. Opt-in doesn’t mean anything.
You have to be total naive if you still believe that this is a “safe” feature to enable.
Yes, this is my take as well, and I think it's the correct one from both a technical and legal POV. It's one thing for the government to try to compel an organization or person to create a feature they want from scratch. They have made noises in that direction in the past (like the FBI vs Apple trying to invoke the All Writs Act) but it's been on very shaky ground, on both 1st and 13th Amendment grounds as well as others. But the government can be a lot more aggressive and courts a lot more permissive when it comes to merely making use of functionality that already exists. Even putting aside all the massive numbers of perverse incentives, but the thing is of course those shouldn't be put aside, we've seen this movie before over and over and over again. Once a feature exists that can generate a lot of direct revenue for a company and the only thing that keeps them from turning the knob up is "we're totally not evil cross our hearts!". Like holy shit, in 2025 who really goes "oh well it's opt-in!"
I think this particular one is pretty important to know about because a lot of people deploy Ring stuff almost by default, and some HNers (including me as it happens) have some level of influence or even control over it. I always meant to put some effort into updating my self-hosted security system efforts but this is a major kick in the butt. Have to know this exists and be able to offer solid credible alternatives.
Edit: to add a direct pertinent example, WE LITERALLY JUST HAD 5 DAYS AGO ON HN A 500+ COMMENT HUGE THREAD ON "Oakland cops gave ICE license plate data; SFPD also illegally shared with feds" [0]. And there are people really claiming "nothing to see here, move along, local and feds would totally never conspire to abuse anything in violation of the law let alone not in violation of the law"!?
----
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44561716
I am less worried about local law enforcement. They will have little ability to strong arm Amazon and have oversight and regulation, as well as judicial review, even if it’s not always effective it’s always there.
DHS has become lawless, and they are eager to strong arm and over reach after having dismantled their own oversight and ignoring their own regulations. They are working hard to move fast and break the law faster than the law can keep up and the Supreme Court has made it very difficult to seek remedy. Because they are not doing criminal justice but instead civil administrative enforcement the web of oversight and review and stronger civil rights for criminal justice don’t apply. They have become the largest police force, militarized, and with enormous budget, latitude, and blank check support from the highest levels of political government.
They absolutely can strong arm Amazon into doing what they want, and absolutely will use Ring camera against their owners and neighbors.
In six months we created a secret police rivaling the KGB, gestapo, State Security Police, and SSD.
We’re going to get a news article of aome cop is going to be scanning for his ex-girlfriend, I guarantee it
Ring already had this happen a dozen times with their own employees. Turns out giving random people access to other people's personal cameras is bad. Who would've thought?
Anyway, don't send potentially sensitive footage to a third party server.
at least 40% of police would
2 replies →
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".
That doesn't matter when all your neighbors have one, and the one in front of you has theirs pointed directly at your house.
17 replies →
Obviously i don't have Ring.
But everyone else does, so what's the point? My privacy is always compromised because tech junkies (as opposed to techies) insist on indulging in stupid things like 21 and me, Gmail, or Ring and I get swept along with it.
3 replies →
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.
Even if it were to happen, there would be a carve out for the state.
The DHS is collecting a massive database of facial geometry at the moment in preparation for nationwide constant realtime facial recognition, just China has.
The cameras are up and collecting data at every airport, as well as every traffic intersection in Las Vegas (and presumably other cities).
The taliban actually have a fascinatingly (philosophically) based law where it’s illegal to photograph a living thing. I’m not sure about the reason. Maybe derived from the not being okay to depict Mohammed. But I kind of dig the concept especially for living things that can’t consent to be captured in images
> have a fascinatingly (philosophically) based law
Is neither fascinating nor philosophically based. It's a long-running islamic tradition that gets broken and bent all the time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniconism_in_Islam
1 reply →
> 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
What do you mean by that?
I'm saying we should not allow per-user analytics. Currently companies build a profile of each user and correlate that with all the other similar users. Then they target other users who are hypothesized to be similar.
I'm arguing that no per-user analytics should be able to be conducted. A store can track how many times product A is purchased, but not that product A and B were purchased by the same user. Using the latter info for anything other than providing a summary of what the user has purchased (to the user) should be illegal.
Yeah it would be complicated. But you could do it by creating a new obfuscated user ID for each transaction.
Or even better, by having each person store their own data and mandating that companies delete all records. The company can provide a signature on the transaction record (a receipt!) that the user keeps to prove the purchase if there's a conflict later on. But the company cannot keep a copy of any per-user info, the receipt, or the transaction info; nothing beyond the fact that product A was purchased on a certain date.
> 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.
This is basically GDPR
> It's time for regulation that no images of people may be retained for any commercial purpose
And we know exactly how such a regulation will be met by both companies and the tech crowd. See GDPR, AI Act etc.
Fuck the police state, and all the technology companies and executives trying to cash in on fascism in the name of "security"
This will be abused by the government, by the police, and every othet nefarious organizations and individuals possible.
Fuck people for installing this shit. Parasites need a host.
Really? You have that sort of attitude towards normal everyday people who absolutely don’t have the experience or knowledge that this is even a factor?
2 replies →
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).
[1] https://www.synology.com/en-global/surveillance
This was a good answer, but Synology is making their new devices increasingly hostile towards non-Synology-branded HDDs.
1 reply →
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.
Trying to find an affordable camera / baby monitor that was both secure and offline was a tough one for me, it seems every single consumer oriented camera has a remote access functionality (= a backdoor) nowadays, and the baby monitors that don’t use wifi are only secure through obscurity with some of them being as easy to hack as buying the same model.
I ended up with an Amcrest IP2M-841 and Tinycam on Android (as I understand using RTSP), and blocking internet access of the camera through the router. As I found out, just connecting it to the internet will automatically connect to servers for allowing “easy setup” of the remote access feature.
I got me a hand me down...It was a Motorola and had no Internet access. All I had to do was replace the battery.
Lots of the radio baby monitors are trivial to listen in on with RTL-SDR kit.
1 reply →
Had the same requirements, I used the DXR-8 PRO from Infant Optics.
I'm full Unifi. With all of Ubiquiti's faults considered. I still feel 10000000x better about it than Ring.
My fear is that we just don't know about Ubiquiti.
1 reply →
I've got a bunch of POE Reolink cameras and their doorbell cam. LAN only, no centralized cloud server. So far happy with them.
+1 for Reolink. We have a reolink camera hooked into home assistant, the whole setup is local and reolink's API exposes every single feature in home assistant with no additional setup needed.
My house also came with an existing NVR camera network which I can view in home assistant over my router without it ever going to the cloud as well.
1 reply →
> LAN only, no centralized cloud server.
Until one day they auto-update ...
7 replies →
Can you use the app to talk to someone at the door if it’s LAN only?
6 replies →
They're a little pricey but https://www.ui.com is nice. It's what I want to replace my Ring with
Recently replaced my Eufy system with UI ones - I’m a big fan so far. Picked up a few new 4k ones for important areas and got the rest used on marketplace via a 4-pack of 2k ones for $150 from a hair salon that had changed systems.
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.
Through various different apps HKSV supports ALL cameras. :)
I use a local NVR containing a couple of hard drives totalling maybe 8TB of storage attached to same-branded cameras (ranging between $80 and $150 each) that I can access locally, and remotely via Wireguard.
I'd say it's economical in comparison to cloud options, but, yes, not all that practical to the less technical crowd.
I specifically block the camera and NVR local IP addresses from accessing the internet. I don't really want the possibility of an private company accessing live (or recorded) video of where I live.
Brand is Reolink. I've been slowly building up the system over five-ish years and have not yet found any reason to kick myself for choosing that brand. I also have some TP-Link Tapo cameras for more temporary things, like monitoring pets.
I've also setup Frigate as an alternative system, both for my own interest and as a way to aggregate different camera brands to a single interface. Frigate can be a bit complex.
Is there anything that runs for a decent amount of time, wifi and essentially all-wireless? Blink somewhat works on its own local hub, but honestly its crap for detecting when things happen so I wont be upgrading from my used 2-pack + hub even though it does integrate well with HA.
I'd really like something that'd be apartment friendly so no drilling holes.
8 replies →
Best to keep Reolink stuff off the Internet anyway, and ideally in their own isolated VLAN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37586457
I also recently installed a Reolink system. I have 6 cameras (4 PoE and 2 WiFi) inside and outside my house. It’s amazing. I just set up a raspberry pi to act as an FTP server to backup files to cloud storage.
Ubiquiti's ecosystem. You own the NVR, it stores locally and they have a doorbell w/ camera.
>home-rolled a means to access the cameras remotely, but it’s not exactly economical or practical
Cloudfare tunnels are free. You just pay for your domain name. Ngrok is also an option.
If you want to be extra secure, you can do ssh port forwarding through the cloudfar
Personally I'd look through the brands listed in the Home Assistant integrations, either Local Push or Local Polling :
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/?cat=camera&iot_c...
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/?cat=camera&iot_c...
The documentation for setting up the integrations should also indicate whether there's any cloud involved.
The TP Link Tapo ecosystem is really good and can record directly onto SD cards. Seamlessly works with Google Home, I can access my cameras outside of the house without signing up for their cloud option.
I think you would basically want to do custom firmware on your camera basically.
There's also thingino, I have not gone this route yet.
https://thingino.com/
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.
If you have cameras the police can get a subpoena to force you to provide what you have saved. If you don’t have cameras, you can’t give what you don’t have.
Yes, but they have to subpoena you. That means process, that means getting a judge to sign it, and it means you can limit scope (i.e., if the incident under investigation occurred outside your home, you're not going to need to provide any footage from inside).
7 replies →
You don’t have to keep your recordings for a long time. It’d be pretty easy to set up a system that only keeps records for a few days.
Good luck unencrypting my drives.
1 reply →
There exist third party firmware for $10-20 cameras available on Amazon.
Install that and your open source backend of your choice and Bob's your aunty.
There's lot's of generic NVRs and cameras for relatively cheap at the usual far-East retailers.
Eufy Security?
Sounds oxymoronic.
Key point is police can request, they can't just log in to your cloud and take footage
Then again, doesn't seem like the law matters anymore at least on a federal level.
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.
Yes, they have a feature with their 'Pro' base station and Premium subscription, to store video locally on SD card, but still the only way to access the video is through the Ring app. IMO they are just choosing not to compete with the on-prem closed circuit systems, which represent a niche market compared to normies who want a notification when someone rings their video doorbell.
https://ring.com/support/articles/pmod0/Using-MicroSD-Cards-...
Yes I saw that...what's wild is if you pay more money to store locally on your own memory, you LOSE cloud storage. You don't get both.
https://community-ring.sprinklr.com/conversations/ring-alarm...
That is wild, I think being able to record onto an SD card or whatever should be the bare minimum requirement. I personally would never buy anything that does not have an offline option.
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.
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.
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.
American government is the biggest threat to American citizens, not the Chinese. (Just as the Chinese government is the biggest threat to Chinese citizens, not the American.)
1 reply →
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.
And lots and lots of people will.
> It seems like people are missing the fact that it's opt-in from the police to the consumer.
There is no such thing short of a physical switch. To believe otherwise is the absolute height of naïveté.
This has been in Ring for years and police have their own dashboard. Most importantly, it was already found Ring or Police have enabled access on their own.
Based on the articles, do you really think Ring and police cannot just get whatever they want?
https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2023/05/rings-priva...
https://www.reviewed.com/smarthome/features/ring-changes-pol...
https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-regulation/surveillance/amazon-r...
https://theintercept.com/2019/01/10/amazon-ring-security-cam...
People aren't missing the fact - they're getting bad information from a supposedly reputable source. I don't really know how to solve that problem.
Did you audit the code?
[flagged]
Opt in means nothing in the face of a legal subpoena
>Opt in means nothing in the face of a legal subpoena
Or scarier, a National Security Letter the government claims the company can't even talk about except maybe in secret court. Or perhaps scariest, a """"National Security Letter ;^)"""", ie, the company absolutely wants to gleefully cooperate with the government and give it whatever it wants for the right price, but also wants to maintain a veneer of "we totally care" and the government obligingly produces some demand and the company then goes "oh geez we totally place customers first and privacy is our highest priority ....but we had to because of terrorist pedo murder rioter jaywalkers, the government ORDERED us to not our fault nothing we could do!" while facilitating it without any challenge at all.
In that case they don't need consent anyway and it's not about this new feature.
As if privacy-minded users needed any more reason to avoid Ring…
But I can't avoid it. 2 of my 4 neighbors have this installed. So now, everytime we are outside, on my own property, we're being captured without consent.
This makes me seriously reconsider continuing with my Ring subscription. The chances this will be abused are 1000%.
* At the moment I only have sensors so that Ring tracks movement inside the house. Only when I'm out of the house for an extended amount of time (days), I turn on the cameras.
Let me know if you find a good privacy-focused alternative. I’m absolutely replacing mine after this.
+1 here.
The last time I checked, they're custom (read: expensive) and require building out your own backend video storage.
Are they breaking the E2EE feature, or is this for folks that didn't care/were scared off by the red text that said they wouldn't be able to recover their videos if they lost their trusted devices?
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?
"Show proof that you use AI to get promoted." Yep that company won't last too much longer. Managers managing managers managing lemmings.
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?
No, I put all my chips on red. Started a startup to do the deep user-focused innovation work they no longer care to do.
It feels like what is needed is some kind of protocol for decentralizing the police force (and judiciary downstream). It's a nice idea to have have choices (hopefully it is opt in) but it would be nice to have more choices for protection and law given our current situtation as it is unfolding in various countries.
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.
My strategy for Ring when I used it as it was cheapest option with cloud recording and notifications (what's the point of local recordings if someone can just steal them) was to just connect it to a smart plug and then to UPS. I simply disabled power to it just before I got home.
Not only do the prisoners have almost no rights, the innocent are treated like criminals too
> Ring introducing new feature to allow police to live-stream access to cameras
Don't worry, you have nothing to hide, don't you ? They forgot "legaly" in this sentence. Police already has access to it.
I feel vindicated by my choice to have local-only security cameras
Is there some open source alternative to stuff like Ring?
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44608681
Thanks, I think I’ll stay with the old school non-malware version ;)
Don’t think anyone vaguely tech savvy is buying these anymore
yikes - and I also wonder how many people have these installed inside their house (as in filming the interior).
Such a great feature, for the police.
Reason #37 why I went with Eufy instead.
Wow, that is completely terrible.
I mean what are the privacy-friendly alternatives? Assume others in this market are equally shady. What is the safe, self-hosted solution where we can monitor CCTV from our phones?
There are plenty, but they're all very DIY and I don't think there are any turnkey solutions that you can just plug in and have work.
I think a better question is... why do we all need this? I get that everyone these days is afraid of everyone and everything, but it's not rational. Very few people actually need a doorbell camera.
And if something actually does happen where you think video evidence might be useful, nine times out of ten the police aren't going to help you anyway.
[dead]
I personally use unifi doorbell, mostly because I already had dream machine, but AFAIK they have also less expensive options.
[dead]
Stop putting this shit in your homes people.
"feature"
fuck this bullshit
[flagged]
The owner isn't the only party whose privacy is being affected unless you believe these cameras will never capture anything other than the owners.
You could also invite a police officer over to your house to watch recordings from a completely offline air-gapped camera pointed at the street.
3 replies →
They could use dark patterns. E.g. make you click yes in an inattentive moment.
Or use a checkbox that mysteriously takes on the checked state while you are sure you didn't check it.
If they do those things, then it would indeed be a privacy issue, but right now they're not.
1 reply →
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?
If they can get the data without a user's consent, then it's independent of this new feature and thus unrelated. If you believe that the government has unlimited access, then it was most likely already possible before this feature. Now, there is at least a "proper" way to give law enforcement access.
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.
That was the case before as well, as you could easily export Ring footage and share it manually with police if you want. This just makes it slightly easier.
1 reply →