Oh noooo, that thing we warned people about when it came out is being misused in exactly the way we warned people it would be misused.
Oh nooooo.
I’m tired grandpa. Too damn many stupid people in this world.
this is great news for my leftist in-laws who decided to get ring cameras out of the convenience they offered.
I did warn them that this would happen, but like most people, “that would never happen!”
Can we all agree to print out flyers of this to share around with neighbors and our communities? People ARE under educated. It starts with us educating because the oligarchs wont
This really highlights how important it is for people to understand what they’re opting into with smart devices. Transparency and informed choice matter more than ever.
I enjoy having cameras on my house to see what’s going on in the neighborhood. It has come in handy at least once when my neighbor’s truck was stolen in broad daylight.
They are ring cameras because two were installed already when I moved in. What should I switch to? I just really want motion alerts and proof when something bad happens.
Dammit, I fell for rings assurances of “only in response to a warrant”. Mostly out of laziness, but still …… I really am going to have to figure out self hosting a video doorbell, aren’t i
Sorry, wasn’t meant as a slight against you.
Remember people: Proprietary systems are never yours. And in this case, they own you.
As far as I can tell it’s still voluntary. This is their policy. It sounds like if you choose to share photos or video with public safety organizations, that now Flock and hence ICE can access it.
That all said, fuck Flock and I certainly don’t want anything I share (which I never have) to contribute to the profits of a private surveillance company. The solution here appears to be share nothing with public safety at all ever so that contract is worth nothing.
Nice of them to completely undermine what “public safety” means for the 326,774,980th time.
Ditch your internet connected shit and boycott these companies
Is there some really good open source and local cameras that people are using? Because many people default to ring.
Not sure if it is open source, but I switched to ReoLink a while back and have been very happy with it. Good Home Assistant integration, no subscription, and everything can be local (store video clips to an onboard SD Card).
I am looking at using Eufy, no subscription. Unsure of potential of it joining the darkside.
Edit: China-owned, so it’s a pick-your-poison kind of deal.
You can just use analog security cameras and a DVR of your choosing. Don’t let the word analog fool you, the cameras are available in up to 4K resolution. Since the video is recorded to the DVR and not some random company’s server it is safe. It requires a little more setup and know-how but it is by no means difficult. Check the surveillance section on B&H’s website. There are tons of options.
I use ReoLink cameras blocked from the Internet. Locally, the app is p2p and works fine. For remote viewing, I have the rtmp proxied through my home server.
I remember last year when there was a trend of AI generated videos that depicted animals or people doing ridiculous and crazy things on doorbell cameras. Everyone was surprised at how realistic they looked but never questioned why there was enough training data of doorbell cameras to make them in the first place.
Not that relevant, but it makes it pretty clear how “private” this data was in the first place.
To be fair, a LOT of people voluntarily post doorbell videos on public sites like Facebook, X, Next Door etc. plenty for AI to scrape without even touching “private” brands.
Also, even this is vastly overstating how difficult that it would be.
You don’t need to train an entire network to make doorbell camera videos/pictures. There are techniques (like IP Adapters) that can take a single photo during inference and copy the style onto any other generated work. With applications like ComfyUI, this is a matter of dropping a node onto the generation graph and choosing a photo (or several photos), 3-4 clicks.
Home “security” cameras cause far, far more angst and grief than they do benefit.
“Hey, mister policeman, here’s a video of a guy stealing my truck.”
“Yep, that’s a guy stealing your truck, alright.”
“…”
“Should’a put it in your garage.”
“My garage is full of crap I bought on Amazon. Some of it, I haven’t even opened. Also, the truck didn’t fit in the garage after I had it lifted.”
“The report is filed, I’ll let you know if we find anything.”
“You’re not going to find anything, are you?”
“We’re not even going to look.”
One-third of Nextdoor is lost pets. One-third is people selling crap they bought at Goodwill. And, the last third is people asking about the “suspicious” (non-white) man who walked down the sidewalk past their house at 5AM.
Time to put a goatse picture in front of the camera!
Thank God I still haven’t looked that up.
Crazy how a company owned by Amazon would do this. /s
This may finally convince my parents to get rid of their ring camera. Thank you
I’ve been trying to talk my wife out of using the them, hopefully this will. Good luck.
Free law enforcement access to my private security system? Seems like a bad idea.
