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.
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.
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.
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".
Dogwood bushes and Rose of Sharon grow rather quickly and make a nice "green screen". They lose some of their coverage in the winter, though, so you way want to mix in a row of evergreens for good measure.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana 'Columnaris'. Grows quite fast, at the rate of 8 in to 1 ft per year and stays green in the winter. We have a regulation regarding fence height. Whoever wants a higher fence uses this tree, it can grow up to 40 feet.
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.
The company sequences human DNA. The number in the name of the corp is the number of chromosomes in human DNA. I hope you and I both have more than 21 chromosomes…
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.
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
both of my claims were subjective and thus not really refutable. As an outsider I think it is interesting, too. And think the flexibility is similar to many laws akin to what we have in the US via prosecutorial discretion
I should’ve included a source to where I read about it initially and that’s below
> 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.
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.
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).
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’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
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.
There is such a difference between listening in from within radio range vs across the entire internet. I have basically 0 worries about the neighbors; they have their own lives.
My consumer-grade “walkie talkie” had a very short range in a city, like one block.
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.
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).
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.
+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.
Thanks. You've answered my question about Home Assistant. I'm not familiar with Reolink and will give them a look.
I have a Wyze camera and their janky HA integration seems to have stopped working after a firmware update. They're also the epitome of enshittification and want to nickel and dime me for every feature -- I'd be glad to ditch them.
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I have a separate VLAN with its own WiFi SSID for iot things like cameras, sensors, washing machine, dryer, solar panels and a bunch of ESP32 based projects. It has no internet access, and is only accessible from my home automation server. Those devices really only need to send data to Home Assistant and expose some basic APIs to it.
My grandparents solved that by putting their mobile phone number on their door. They're slow to come down and open the door so it makes sense for the post person or visitor to know they're on their way
Relatively low tech compared to somehow hooking up a camera livestream system to ring your phone via the internet in some way but it works
Sorry for bugging you about this. I'm not the person you are responding to but this is important to me before buying so if you don't mind, could you verify that this is your setup?
1. The doorbell cam is connected only to the LAN.
2. The doorbell cam is definitely blocked from accessing the internet.
3. Having access to the LAN from your phone through VPN allows you to watch the feed and talk to people at the door through the app.
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.
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.
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).
While the OP doesn't emphasize this detail, it says this is a tool that will allow police to request access from the camera owners. Police can, of course, also request footage from the owners of non-cloud cameras, so the legal basis of disclosure -- consent -- can exist in either case, cloud or non-cloud camera.
If you are subpoenaed then you're obligated to respond, and the same is true for Ring. But that's not what we're talking about here. This is law enforcement requesting access, and Ring doesn't require a formal subpoena or warrant. They can decide to comply to nothing more than "someone from a .gov email asked nicely".
It's written out in their terms of service:
> you also acknowledge and agree that Ring may access, use, preserve and/or disclose your Content to law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or third parties, if legally required to do so or if we have a good faith belief that such access, use, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to:
>
> (a) comply with applicable law, regulation, legal process or reasonable preservation request; (b) enforce these Terms, including investigation of any potential violation thereof; (c) detect, prevent or otherwise address security, fraud or technical issues; or (d) protect the rights, property or safety of Ring, its users, a third party, or the public as required or permitted by law.
So Ring is quite happy to hand over your footage to anyone so long as Ring believes it's "reasonably necessary" to protect the rights or property of anyone.
This isn't about Ring complying with a legal request. This is about Ring undermining the fourth amendment entirely by saying "we'll give law enforcement whatever they want".
The feature discussed allows law enforcement to request access from the end user. It's the end user whose consent is required under that regime, not Ring's.
The feature doesn't exist yet. Ring have said it'll be user consent, but we don't know that for sure. My point is that Ring can change their minds about this at any time without informing you, so it doesn't matter how they say it will work if this possibility is still there.
If you want to have a tangential discussion about how you interpret Ring's terms to permit them to do wild things behind the user's back, that's fine; but it would have been better to be more clear about the tangential nature of your comments. If the terms allow them to do wild things behind the user's back, then they can do those things with or without introducing this feature. And they can also introduce this feature with or without the wild things; and with or without terms of service allowing those things. They're orthogonal issues.
In any case, you're mistaken about what the terms allow. When you paraphrased the terms as saying they can "hand over your footage to anyone so long as Ring believes it's 'reasonably necessary' to protect the rights or property of anyone", you neglected to account for the clause: "as required or permitted by law". Under the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S. Code § 2702 (b), there is only a short and narrow list of circumstances under which it is permissible for a provider to disclose communications content without a warrant. The most pertinent is an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury (exigent circumstances), which is what the link in the OP regarding warrantless and consentless disclosures is about. But exigent circumstances are also a longstanding exception to fourth amendment search protections in general: law enforcement can break into your house without a warrant if there are exigent circumstances requiring them to do so.
With a subopena you would be the one unencrypting your disk. Being in comptent of the court usually means imprisonment or daily fine until you comply with the court order.
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 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.
>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.
This is way overblown, since it's strictly opt-in and always requires the owner's explicit consent. It would only be a privacy issue if either of those things weren't true.
I mean people complained so Amazon stopped giving police access. Now as soon at Amazon thought they could get away with it, Amazon started giving access again. That's pretty shady behavior in my book.
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.
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 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?
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?
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also any update resets your selected options.
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
at least 40% of police would
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.
So you decided it's ok to be part of the problem because others are too?
Dogwood bushes and Rose of Sharon grow rather quickly and make a nice "green screen". They lose some of their coverage in the winter, though, so you way want to mix in a row of evergreens for good measure.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana 'Columnaris'. Grows quite fast, at the rate of 8 in to 1 ft per year and stays green in the winter. We have a regulation regarding fence height. Whoever wants a higher fence uses this tree, it can grow up to 40 feet.
There is no solution to that as far as I can tell, and it really stinks.
Legislation would help. As one example, a neighbor pointing their Ring at your property without your consent is entirely illegal in Germany.
And thankfully this will run afoul of the First Amendment in the United States.
I think in the US it’s more like “everything you can see through the window is public”, which is also an extreme.
lasers?
Even better: an infrared laser.
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.
> 21 and me
The company sequences human DNA. The number in the name of the corp is the number of chromosomes in human DNA. I hope you and I both have more than 21 chromosomes…
Shows you how little I care about knowing my genome.
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.
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
both of my claims were subjective and thus not really refutable. As an outsider I think it is interesting, too. And think the flexibility is similar to many laws akin to what we have in the US via prosecutorial discretion
I should’ve included a source to where I read about it initially and that’s below
https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-media-moralit...
> 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
> 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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
[dead]
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
I'm full Unifi. With all of Ubiquiti's faults considered. I still feel 10000000x better about it than Ring.
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.
Lots of the radio baby monitors are trivial to listen in on with RTL-SDR kit.
There is such a difference between listening in from within radio range vs across the entire internet. I have basically 0 worries about the neighbors; they have their own lives.
My consumer-grade “walkie talkie” had a very short range in a city, like one block.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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
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.
All wireless means all of your cameras can be disabled at any time by anyone with a $20 jammer off eBay.
They’d have to know you’re running wireless, though.
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.
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.
Thanks. You've answered my question about Home Assistant. I'm not familiar with Reolink and will give them a look.
I have a Wyze camera and their janky HA integration seems to have stopped working after a firmware update. They're also the epitome of enshittification and want to nickel and dime me for every feature -- I'd be glad to ditch them.
> LAN only, no centralized cloud server.
Until one day they auto-update ...
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I have a separate VLAN with its own WiFi SSID for iot things like cameras, sensors, washing machine, dryer, solar panels and a bunch of ESP32 based projects. It has no internet access, and is only accessible from my home automation server. Those devices really only need to send data to Home Assistant and expose some basic APIs to it.
Cameras (like other iot devices) should be forbidden from going outside LAN.
Can you use the app to talk to someone at the door if it’s LAN only?
My grandparents solved that by putting their mobile phone number on their door. They're slow to come down and open the door so it makes sense for the post person or visitor to know they're on their way
Relatively low tech compared to somehow hooking up a camera livestream system to ring your phone via the internet in some way but it works
As far as I've tried, it's fully functional if you VPN into your LAN.
Sorry for bugging you about this. I'm not the person you are responding to but this is important to me before buying so if you don't mind, could you verify that this is your setup?
1. The doorbell cam is connected only to the LAN.
2. The doorbell cam is definitely blocked from accessing the internet.
3. Having access to the LAN from your phone through VPN allows you to watch the feed and talk to people at the door through the app.
>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.
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.
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.
There's lot's of generic NVRs and cameras for relatively cheap at the usual far-East retailers.
Ubiquiti's ecosystem. You own the NVR, it stores locally and they have a doorbell w/ camera.
Eufy Security?
Sounds oxymoronic.
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).
While the OP doesn't emphasize this detail, it says this is a tool that will allow police to request access from the camera owners. Police can, of course, also request footage from the owners of non-cloud cameras, so the legal basis of disclosure -- consent -- can exist in either case, cloud or non-cloud camera.
The two are very different.
If you are subpoenaed then you're obligated to respond, and the same is true for Ring. But that's not what we're talking about here. This is law enforcement requesting access, and Ring doesn't require a formal subpoena or warrant. They can decide to comply to nothing more than "someone from a .gov email asked nicely".
It's written out in their terms of service:
> you also acknowledge and agree that Ring may access, use, preserve and/or disclose your Content to law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or third parties, if legally required to do so or if we have a good faith belief that such access, use, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to: > > (a) comply with applicable law, regulation, legal process or reasonable preservation request; (b) enforce these Terms, including investigation of any potential violation thereof; (c) detect, prevent or otherwise address security, fraud or technical issues; or (d) protect the rights, property or safety of Ring, its users, a third party, or the public as required or permitted by law.
So Ring is quite happy to hand over your footage to anyone so long as Ring believes it's "reasonably necessary" to protect the rights or property of anyone.
This isn't about Ring complying with a legal request. This is about Ring undermining the fourth amendment entirely by saying "we'll give law enforcement whatever they want".
The feature discussed allows law enforcement to request access from the end user. It's the end user whose consent is required under that regime, not Ring's.
The feature doesn't exist yet. Ring have said it'll be user consent, but we don't know that for sure. My point is that Ring can change their minds about this at any time without informing you, so it doesn't matter how they say it will work if this possibility is still there.
If you want to have a tangential discussion about how you interpret Ring's terms to permit them to do wild things behind the user's back, that's fine; but it would have been better to be more clear about the tangential nature of your comments. If the terms allow them to do wild things behind the user's back, then they can do those things with or without introducing this feature. And they can also introduce this feature with or without the wild things; and with or without terms of service allowing those things. They're orthogonal issues.
In any case, you're mistaken about what the terms allow. When you paraphrased the terms as saying they can "hand over your footage to anyone so long as Ring believes it's 'reasonably necessary' to protect the rights or property of anyone", you neglected to account for the clause: "as required or permitted by law". Under the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S. Code § 2702 (b), there is only a short and narrow list of circumstances under which it is permissible for a provider to disclose communications content without a warrant. The most pertinent is an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury (exigent circumstances), which is what the link in the OP regarding warrantless and consentless disclosures is about. But exigent circumstances are also a longstanding exception to fourth amendment search protections in general: law enforcement can break into your house without a warrant if there are exigent circumstances requiring them to do so.
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.
With a subopena you would be the one unencrypting your disk. Being in comptent of the court usually means imprisonment or daily fine until you comply with the court order.
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.
As if privacy-minded users needed any more reason to avoid Ring…
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.
yikes - and I also wonder how many people have these installed inside their house (as in filming the interior).
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.
This is way overblown, since it's strictly opt-in and always requires the owner's explicit consent. It would only be a privacy issue if either of those things weren't true.
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.
There is a major qualitative difference if it becomes something like police AI systems analyzing it all continuously.
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.
I mean people complained so Amazon stopped giving police access. Now as soon at Amazon thought they could get away with it, Amazon started giving access again. That's pretty shady behavior in my book.
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.
"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?
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...
Did you audit the code?
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Wow, that is completely terrible.
Stop putting this shit in your homes people.
Thanks, I think I’ll stay with the old school non-malware version ;)
Don’t think anyone vaguely tech savvy is buying these anymore
Reason #37 why I went with Eufy instead.
Not only do the prisoners have almost no rights, the innocent are treated like criminals too
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?
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'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.
Is there some open source alternative to stuff like Ring?
I feel vindicated by my choice to have local-only security cameras
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44608681
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.
fuck this bullshit
"feature"