Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash
theverge.com399 points by c420 10 hours ago
399 points by c420 10 hours ago
> Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated.
That doesn’t sound like “we’re cancelling this because our customers let us know loud and clear that they were ethically against this”. If the only thing keeping them from doing this is time and money, what guarantee do we have that they won’t do it again if time and money allow?
You seem to be taking the company's words at face value and assuming good faith. I would caution against doing that.
Look, Amazon has our best interest at heart, alright? Surely they're not working on this still in the background.
Amazing how often people do that. Corporations have very little incentive to be truthful and often have good reason to be dishonest. I notice it particularly wrt video games, gamers are always taking studio’s messaging as gospel and not corporate comms.
I see this all the time at work. Folks treat their relationship with employer like a personal relationship. Be loyal to company and it will be loyal to you. But everyone lies. Your managers will stab you in the back and throw to the ditch anytime they can gain something from it.
And with Elon Musk! If he says we're going to Mars, then we're going to Mars. If he says full self driving next year, we're getting full self driving next year. He said that every year for 10 years? So what?
They're saying that because saying what they actually mean would paint flock in a negative light, which they likely want to avoid for various reasons.
So they'd rather lie in their press release.
Yes.
That's...not unusual.
I would strongly to advise you to assume companies are extremely willing to lie in press releases.
So they’re working around it and getting paid in another way (via a middleman) while still sending it to the stormtroopers
Right, but we have to call it out every time.
What? This is basic human social skills.
It’s like when you don’t like someone’s friends but you’re not actually going to say that out loud. Instead you say “I'm just too tired to go out” — it’s a “diplomatic out.” Yes it’s a lie at face value but you leave people with their dignity while simultaneously signal your intent. Your friend, who presumably has social skills, picks up the subtext and you successfully communicate two layers of meaning with one sentence.
Press releases are the same thing.
I’m sure this is also cultural, but that approach is terrible. Your friend can’t automatically guess you’re lying, not for the first few times, anyway. Of course they’ll believe you if you say you’re too tired to go out. Then they inadvertently catch you or you reject them so many times they start to believe you don’t want to go out with them, not the other friend. All the while they became closer with the other person, who actually did hang out with them.
Stop lying. You’re hurting the friendship. If you care about the person, eventually you’ll have to be an adult and explain why you’re not comfortable with the third person.
I say: "I don't like your friend because they are a neo-Nazi", and then I don't go out with them.
No, what you call "basic human social skills" is literally opposite of it. Having good social skills also involves saying "this person/institution is lying". Or even "this person/institution is harming people".
Having social skills means also being able to distinguish between innocent nicer phrase, outright enabling and being coconspirator.
Press releases are lies by default.
Press releases are partly to create a paper trail and partly for the stock market.
Saying bad stuff about their former business partner could get them sued.
1. Anyone can sue anyone
2. saying false things (not bad things per se) could be expensive
You really think someone would do that? Just write a press release and tell lies?
Yes?
That also sounds like the client came with list of additional requirements.
The ethical part you mentioned is still true.
Doesn't matter, I've come to the conclusion I'll never buy into one these networks. There's a reason "security" cameras were always on "closed circuit", there's no need give these companies money.
I've had a couple Ring cams for years. I hate the network, hate having to pay for the cloud storage, I've just been too lazy to research self-hosted alternatives. Is there solution you'd recommend that's relatively polished and easy to use?
I've been looking for cheap optionally non-cloud camera recently and cycled through 15 different vendors on amazon buying, testing, probing, and returning.
Here's what I found.
If you don't want to pay a lot, there's something called "wansview" which is a white-label to a number of cheap amazon cameras (sub $20). You can do ONVIF and RTSP on any of the wansview firmwared devices and then knock them off the internet to keep it local.
Most recommendations of cameras for things like home assistant point to things at rolls-royce prices (~sometimes 20x the cost of the cheap consumer ones).
You shouldn't have to pony up a 2,000% markup for the feature "has tcp port open for rtsp"
Anyway, here's some wansview firmwared cameras
https://amazon.com/dp/B0CBBT5RMP $14
https://amazon.com/dp/B07QKXM2D3 $18
https://amazon.com/dp/B0B1T8T1WD $17
https://amazon.com/dp/B0DN1W3SWM $12.5
There's probably more
You can do on-device storage and stream over network ... no cloud subscription needed and no huge price tag.
If you're looking for others, you don't even need to buy the camera and check. Just scroll through the marketing jpegs on the amazon page. If they have screenshots with wansview you're good.
It's the only vendor I've found that does this.
This should be long term stable. If they decided to remove it you'd have to manually "upgrade" the firmware - which you won't have to do.
It is not really cheap, nor best "value for the dollar", but I am extremely satisfied with UniFi [0]. Nearly instant setup, decent mobile apps, web interface, basically just works as you need.
[0] https://ui.com/
Edit, update link.
Thank you, that looks pretty good! I think the link should just be ui.com. The subdomain redirects to a login page.
UniFi device traffic is not E2EE, they technically can do the same to your video data if you enable remote access (necessary for some of their camera functionalities). https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/18j3bac/psa_if_yo...
You don't need to use their cloud. You can keep it all local, and use VPN to log in and view stuff.
So this link redirects to a page that wants me to either create an account, or log into one I already have, before it will tell me anything about this product. Sorry, no.
I think they just posted the link they log into. The site is ui.com or store.ui.com.
while i agree that unifi is worth looking at, id urge anyone reading this to be a little weery there:
i used to own extensive unifi equipment for my home network, 8 access points, 2 switches, gateway, a couple cams, etc… it was amazing, the initial setup, the interoperability, the stability and maintenance was absolutely painless. i will loudly sing them praises for those things, but i started noticing them trying to jam cloud features and subscriptions behind paywalls deeper into the integration, it’s pretty obvious that its only a matter of time before they enshitify with pay-for-features paywalled behind subscriptions, cloud first, etc…
keep that in mind before you dive headfirst. their stuff was perfect in that stability sweet spot of better than small office but not quite enterprise tier local only configurations, but i personally dipped as soon as i saw what i think is the writing in the wall.
i love their stuff, genuinely i did, but if the goal is to move further away from subscriptions and cloud-first, be very cautious of their current trajectory.
I did a full security system replacement for my previous employer in our data center. Replaced all the old IP cameras that connected directly to a small black box nvr with UniFi camera recording onto a UniFi Video server writing to a NAS cable locked to the rack in our locked data center. Two months later UniFi Video was discontinued and stopped receiving updates or support. If we wanted a supported platform we had to purchase a UniFi Protect NVR with less storage and less power/network redundancy than what I built. Plus all access to UniFi Protect would run through their cloud portal.
Yes I'm still bitter.
Guh.
This makes me wonder if it's inevitable for every hardware/software provider to be tempted by the candy now. Makes me ask myself if I could even resist it if I had a customer base with sunk costs who I could take advantage of. My feeling is that I could resist it, on principle, but most people wouldn't. And this is leaving out pressure from investors.
So such a company selling these solutions as locally run widgets - which we understand are under not just pressure to increase revenue, but also relentless pressure from governments to share their data - would definitely need to be completely self-funded, immediately profitable, and the solutions they sold would have to be permanent and not susceptible to any external market or government forces.
Zero updates and zero tracking of installations would be the goal.
[edit] but this is also not that hard. All the company needs to provide is a piece of software that stitches together existing hardware. The only updates would be when hardware updates, and those would be included in the price. If "NEVER CLOUD" was the company's entire corporate identity, then preserving that ethos would be a mandate.
[edit2] nevercloud.com is currently on sale for $8350. I'd suggest building the prime directive into the name, but that much money has better uses.
Were you using Unifi VOIP or the enterprise Identity stuff?
They're the only subscription things I've seen if you have your own controller.
I haven't seen that writing on the wall yet, Unifi are one of a select few tech companies I trust.
Been using the HomeKit ecosystem. If you already pay for iCloud you get secure* cloud storage included.
* Apple says it’s end-to-end encrypted. I assume, maybe incorrectly, that they can’t view it.
https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/icloud-homekit-secure...
Frigate and some cameras that can stream to an NVR. No cloud, you can use a VPN for remote access.
I'll second this, also adding that while it remains more of a project to setup Frigate has made significant advances over the last few years and has improved a lot. So if you previously looked at it and were put off, might be worth looking at again.
Also fwiw, if someone is willing to spin up a Windows VM or are running that stack anyway than Blue Iris is probably the default contender for local security software, well polished. I know a few people who still keep a single remaining W10 with GPU passthrough install just for that, not even for games anymore where Linux has gotten good enough in the last few years.
All of this though benefits a lot from already having some sort of homelab and/or self-hosted stack. If you do then the marginal investment may be pretty minimal and value quite high as you use it for a lot of other stuff. If starting from scratch it's a lot more of a haul which of course is precisely why a lot of people use other solutions.
I just try to look for companies that are a bit smaller in the space. Some of these features only work when you have enough coverage. Small companies don't have that.
I feel this way about many such networks. We avoid networked appliances, garage doors, door locks, external cameras, etc as often as we can.
I've gotta say, I'm at my absolute most smug when the internet is out and my Roku TV warns me "Are you sure you want to open Jellyfin, it probably won't work without internet access".
You're lucky, a fire tv stick just locks you into a "your internet is down so you're screwed" screen that you can't get out of when if you have Plex installed.
Yeah I should know better than to buy Amazon crap I know
Agreed. Doorbell is one thing, it terrifies me that people put these inside their homes. It's like 1984 but they're paying for it.
Same. The first thing I did when I bought my house was remove the Ring doorbell.
This should be a wakeup call for users of all cloud connected cameras that once they send their video to the cloud provider, they have no real control over how it's used.
Ring does support end to end encryption (which disables most of the cloud features), but users are still at the mercy of Ring to trust that it really is e2e encrypted and not the "fake" end to end encryption that some marketers have used to mean "Well it's encrypted from your end all the way to our end where we decrypt it". I don't trust that Ring doesn't have a law enforcement toggle to break the e2e encryption on demand if the police ask for it.
Frigate NVR + Amcrest cameras. 100% local, private, on-device AI object recognition and classification. Can use a Google Coral USB TPU to speed that up. Runs on hardware as modest as a Raspberry Pi.
Great. Now package that as a plug-and-play product so more than 1000 nerds will use it instead of participating in the largest dragnet in history ;)
This is only half the problem.
The other half, at least for Ring doorbells, is making it easy to get push notifications when button pressed, with instant two-way connection for chatting through the camera.
It's already hard enough as a "certified homelabber" to get these things set up and running.
Well, open Reolink and UniFi website and there it is.
(Yes, I know you did the post with "haha, this is too hard for average human", but it really isn't. Don't be a big corp shill.)
I've found Reolink to be pretty much plug and play. Totally local. The NVR itself has PoE ports so all you have to be able to do is run a long ethernet cable.
Security systems used to be 100x the cost (parts+install) before the cloud because you essentially needed a local NAS and to run a bunch of PoE enabled ethernet to each corner of your house.
“Canceled” for now. Maybe it was just a video, they’ll continue with the “quiet” development and slowly launch it
Definitely this. Now way they are saying no to that bag (and/or gag orders....). This isn't over.
I still don't understand how otherwise sensible people can have an Alexa or Google Home. Like what part of that seems like a good idea to them?
Having an Alexa or Google Home doesn't seem any worse (or even less worse) than carrying a phone around everywhere I go. If you're worried that the device can be hacked to listen to you full-time (or that the provider is lying about it only listening to you after it hears the wake word), you should be worried about your phone for the same reason. Plus my Alexa isn't going to give google a map of everywhere I travel so they can see where I work, eat, shop, etc.
Ability to “Hey Google, play Spotify” in every room and shower is pretty great. That’s literally the only reason I’ve been using it for 5+ years. Oh, and it was practically free.
This is still unthinkable to me. Trading that much privacy for a little bit of convenience? How does it not make you uncomfortable to know that every conversation in your house is live streamed to someone else's computer?
Not even just for my own sake, but for the sake of my guests as well. Unthinkable, because it's highly dystopic. If it wasn't for all that Science Fiction literature and philosophy that warns people about that, the Stasi wasn't too long ago either.
Yeah I'm definitely in the "I keep my laptop powered down and in a Faraday cage" camp so I guess a lot of these products aren't really aimed at me.
Honestly? I don’t care enough about that. I’ve simplified my life to a degree where I’m not depended on anything, nor I get that much ads anywhere. So it’s just a life built around conveniences and focusing on things I care about.
> I’m not depended on anything
Yet you mention Google and Spotify in one command.
Independence seems to be something different for me. Even thinking about tools, maintenance and the repairs over the years... convenience and independence are closely related, and privacy is at least just a welcoming side effect.
Would it feel any different if your Google Home recordings were streamed to me, an individual, directly?
I used mine for two things: setting a timer while cooking, and adding things to my shopping list, again, while cooking. I still miss that second feature a bit since I unplugged it, but it isn't too big of a deal
Convenience.
Same with AI, the same people who fought against Google and Microsoft‘s data collecting now throw everything on data but the kitchen sink at their AI services.
This is such a weird thing to wrap my head around. I don't even use Bluetooth.
Which Super Bowl LX ads haven't backfired yet?
The Anthropic one? Although I'm sure they'll put ads into claude eventually
Early audience response suggested the message struggled to land. According to an iSpot survey of 500 viewers, the ad’s likeability score placed it in the bottom 3% compared with Super Bowl ads over the past five years. Its top-two-box purchase intent scored 24% below Super Bowl norms and 19% below ads in its category that aired over the last 90 days. Viewers most commonly described their reaction as “WTF,” signaling confusion around both the message and the execution.
https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/super-bowl-revealed-a...
I think that the ideas of AI boosters and other tech maximalists will pretty much always "struggle to land" with normal people. (See also: the ring ad.)
Only when the underlying product sucks. "Here's how the Torment Nexus is going to torment you - subscribe now!" is never going to be a popular message because it is actively making the world worse.
People aren't being luddites or not understanding innovation. They know perfectly well what is being sold, and they hate it.
Contrast it with the Dotcom bubble, where people mainly thought it wasn't for them or that they didn't need it. Look at interviews of people back then, and the services advertised are at worst described as "unnecessary": you would've had very little trouble convincing them that there would be some market for them.
But with those extreme AI examples? Normal people understand it, and they hate it.
I don't think "normal people" especially run-of-the-mill office workers, like the idea of AI or want it to succeed. Not that it's going to stop Silicon Valley from ramming it down everyone's throats.
The worst one I remember was "Gerbils" by outpost dots com , a Super Bowl ad with a gerbil cannon. But opinions differ on that one.
The Anthropic ads are heavily into the uncanny valley. The services they are demonstrating looks horrible - even before the ad.
A soulless psychiatrist who'll give you generic cookie-cutter advice about deeply personal issues? Why would you want that!?
Same with the personal trainer, the startup coach, and the professor. Any of them would be incredibly creepy in real life, with their fake smiling, uncanny repeated stock phrases, and fake positivity.
They are trying to spin it like the integrated ads are the problem, but the services are too far detached from genuine human behaviour for that to matter. "Our creepy ripoff psychiatrist doesn't have ads" isn't exactly a great message, is it?
Aside from the ads/no-ads, they're also trying to lampoon chatgpt (especially the "sycophantic" 4o style), since Claude is supposed to be a more "human" LLM (or at least Anthropic likes to think so given their focus on constitutional rlaif, "soul doc" and whatnot).
But it's not a good ad when the only people who will get the reference are those plugged into "ai twitter". But association by implication doesn't work, the only thing most people will end up associating is the creepy guy with "Claude"
pokemon?
A fail IMO because it exposed people as only liking Gen 1 Pokemon. Except that guy who liked Zygarde.
I hope everyone will remember how eagerly AMZN's subsidiary was willing to sell it's cameras to whomever was willing to pay.
This is a temporary rollback while there’s a choice to speak against it.
Cloud connected doorbells must die as well as dragnet surveillance.
> Cloud connected doorbells must die as well as dragnet surveillance.
I'd disagree and restate that cloud services willing to make these kinds of deals must die, painfully, in a fire after being stung by a million killer bees, after receiving a million paper cuts and having lemon juice poured all over them.
It is possible for a company to charge a monthly fee to provide a service and only that service without attempting to leverage their users and their data for any other form of income. Companies used to do it all of the time. It just takes a C-suite/board/founder to have the moral fortitude to not sell out their users.
The problem now is how can you trust any of these companies? The infrastructure is there to link this data if you have cameras that connect to the internet. How can you ever be sure this wont happen in secret? We have no guarantees that companies will follow the laws and laws are not even being enforced.
How hard would it be to sell a solution that makes it easy for a consumer to set up on-site recording? Ship a small box loaded with Tailscale and some software that connects to cameras over a LAN, and runs a webserver that allows user logins through a web interface. Nothing needs to go into the cloud. Yes, then you sell it once to a customer and that's it. No subscription or planned obsolescence. Fine, so factor that into the price. Make your money and go on to do other good things.
It’s called an NVR and there’s a whole industry of companies catering to this, though you rarely hear about it in the news. There are plenty of consumer options in the space too.
They have been selling NVR based camera systems for decades. It's clunky. It takes a network savvy person to open up their home network to allow remote access. It takes an even savvier person to not do that in a way that guarantees getting their network pwnd.
Having a cloud based solution from an ethical company would be the consumer friendly solution people are actually wanting. Lots of people are willing to spend money to make problems go away.
I know businesses that have these setups and outside tech support to maintain them. I've also seen them have all kinds of issues when routers are replaced or they change ISPs. That's why I was saying a company could sell a box preloaded with Tailscale and a custom installer that walks a non-technical person through it. The default setup for a tailnet is pretty safe. Yeah you could have your own signaling servers or whatever, but TS usually manages to punch right through most NAT issues. They don't need a reverse proxy to login to their private webserver, although I guess you could provide that as an add-on service. They just need TS on their phone.
[edit] To my mind, the biggest hurdle wouldn't be networking to allow this box to host its own app that was accessible to the user from elsewhere. The hurdles would be things like lack of "smart" reporting / facial recognition, backup power, backup connectivity, etc..But in theory, a repurposed smartphone as the platform could solve the backup power and connection issues.
This isn't an inherently unsolvable problem. Peer-to-peer file sharing and video calls have been able to work around it for ages.
The same approach could be used for cameras - see for example Home Assistant's remote access. Sure, you'd still need a cloud-based STUN-like discovery service, but a small one-time fee should easily cover operating it.
Right..Or instead of STUN/TURN just use Tailscale for now. I think the reason no one's packaged this into a slick Ring-like plug-and-play probably comes down to corporate greed and how hard it is to raise money if your intention is to start a business that doesn't have ever-expanding verticals. Like, this is a set of solved problems. They just need to be smoothed and packed for the user.
You seem pretty sure of yourself. So when will you be releasing this product that you claim is such low hanging fruit? Right, now you know why this product doesn't exist.
He just explained why. Because packaging, QA, setting up a storefront, customer service, the sum total requires significant up front investment to get off the ground. Good luck raising money when your pitch is "we won't be greedy and do the things that could make even more money".
Or was your intent merely to taunt him for failing to be independently wealthy?
> It just takes a C-suite/board/founder to have the moral fortitude ...
Just for context, could you provide some examples of such people?
Craig Newmark (Craigslist) and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) come to mind, both founders could have made platfoms that would have been ad-ridden (and made a boat full of cash) but the founders chose not to
Uhh, Craigslist is literally an ad platform. They just didn't want anything to do with a middleman.
I think we can all agree the "ads" on CL are not even close to the same ballpark as the offerings of ad tech. Like to conflate the two as the same would be the most disingenuous bit of logic that I'd be embarrassed if I were the one to have made it.
In America, whether a deal is publicly made or not, if your personal data is stored on the cloud, it is neither private nor your data any longer. Any belief to the contrary is just to help you sleep better at night.
No it is not. Your mandate is to grow your company’s revenue and profits, not act according to your conscience as an executive, especially if something is not illegal.
This is why regulations are extremely important. There need to be a strong enough counterincentive or companies will eventually always follow the path of least resistance to growth. Ethics when present may create some form of friction along some specific paths, but it’s never enough for those to not become, eventually, that very path.
Why, in this given scenario, does the individual’s mandate to their company automatically trump the mandate given to them by an ethical society, or even their own moral code? Why is this position held up as infallible? The situation could easily be re-framed as “my corporate mandate is to grow revenue, but the larger mandate I have is to my own ethical truth.” Why are corporate desires allowed to get the “shrug, that’s just what I’m supposed to do” treatment?
If the answer is you lose your job and your means to provide for your family if you don’t put corporate desires first, then we’ve constructed the society we want already and no one should be complaining.
You can easily put it into the corporate charter that you will not "do evil". At that point, you have a mandate to grow revenue while abiding by the charter..
Just because majority of people choose to be assholes does not mean everyone has to be. Be the change you wish to see in the world, or something
"Companies primarily consider profit" is not the gotcha you think it is. It's possible to consider profit via goodwill towards customers. A number of companies do this. This doesn't mean that you're inherently wrong, but this argument certainly isn't the right one.
I worked in large union data centers, decades ago.
Cannot even imagine what is going on these days, inside & out.
Can you elaborate? This is interesting
I worked across several facilities and obviously cannot talk specifics about those. It is public knowledge that one of them housed a large metro area's main ISP "meet-me room."
During Snowden revelations I'd already been apprenticing for years; nothing Edward documented surprised me. I'd literally walk around our 500,000sqft elevated floors knodding my head [none of this exists, officially].
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Nothing is as it seems.
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During DEF CON ~XX~ (approximately same timeframe as story above) it was publicly revealed that intelligence communities had redefined the word "intercept," to mean when a human operator catelogs a certain piece of data/traffic (i.e. not algorithms sorting). #1984 #newspeak #elevenyearsago
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I no longer carry a cell phone. Don't use email. PO Box in profile
> I no longer carry a cell phone.
I'm not quite there yet, but after Netanyahu made that comment like "if you have a phone you're carrying a little piece of Israel with you" right after the pager attack stuff.. I keep the phone in the back of my backpack away from my meat bits.
Yeah well aware of that stuff here. Two companies I worked at had entirely airgapped infrastructure because they knew the adversarial situation wasn't winnable. Everything was checked for implants at goods in. It's shocking some of the shit that goes on.
I run grey man where I can. Stuff that's private stays private. Paper and physical security is still good.
> PO Box in profile
Pretty sure government agencies will have no trouble finding you from that bit alone, and then tracking your movements is trivial. I mean, you have to show up and check the box periodically..
They implement a physical Tor each time their check their box - layers of Taskrabbits hiring Taskrabbits. One picks up the Mail and hands it off to the next. The owner is one of the Taskrabbits somewhere in the chain.
Agreed, but this would then inconvenience millions of non-techies.
Could a solution be forcing Amazon (and Google and Flock and...) to open their backend software either for self-hosting or for running on somebody else's "cloud"? So subscribing to such a device isn't that different from getting web hosting from Dreamhost or Hetzner?
Maybe there's a host or IP field in the settings that users can easily change?
If there was an IP setting users could change, all the self-hosting etc. forums would be talking about how to change it instead of explaining other options. I'd expect not just fixed hosts and an ecosystem dependent on their proprietary protocols, but also pinned certificates and secure boot so you can't change any of it.
N.B. Flock isn't really targeting the consumer market.
Over in my neck of the woods, these cameras are illegal when they point at the street. They should also be accompanied by a clearly visible sign indicating the presence of a security camera.
Of course no one gives a fuck, and they're sadly ubiquitous. Police love them. Complaints about illegal monitoring are just ignored.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, but the 21st century main mode of operation is Distrust. We are constantly, actively fostering distrust in our neighbours and communities. Everyone is constantly suspicious of one another. When in reality the vast majority of us are very well behaved.
"Instead we'll partner with Fluck Security, a young and small company with 0 employee which surely has no ties to Flock Safety:TM:"
Spiderman pointing at Spiderman?
Daily Struggle over two buttons labeled "RECOVER LOST PUPPY" and "DEPORT NEIGHBORS"
Is it a struggle for them? Clearly they're pressing both buttons.
Who wouldn't?
People who aren’t psychopaths.
To be clear, I’m claiming you are one based on that question.
The tech industry is a bloody Spider-Man pointing orgy at this point.
The success case for much of silicon valley seems to be government contracts. Gov't is the polite way of saying military
> Following intense backlash to its partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that works with law enforcement agencies, Ring has announced it is canceling the integration.
Ring (owned by Amazon, who runs a private airgapped AWS region for the CIA onsite at Langley) also works with law enforcement agencies.
A lot of you won’t want to hear it but HomeKit + iCloud secure video is the only way to go. For one thing it’s end to end encrypted. You can also do ML stuff like face recognition which happens locally on your Apple TV. And you can set it to trigger HomeKit scenes if eg the person in the video isn’t recognized, or if it recognizes a particular person. Yeah Apple bad, blah blah. But they don’t have an incentive to sell your data.
Unless you explicitly enable Advanced Protection mode for all your devices, Apple stores your key in their servers and will give it to whoever legitimate looking asks for it. Aka ICE etc will definitely be granted access.
I wouldn't trust E2EE implemented by an entity against itself that can also push arbitrary updates in principle. Also, any E2EE product that has a non-E2EE mode seems prone to accidental leaks.
I don't think that's true for HomeKit Secure Video (HKSV). Advanced Protection turns on E2EE for various iCloud services like iCloud backups and Apple photos. But HKSV is already E2EE'd and the decryption keys aren't part of the device's iCloud backup. At least that's my understanding. I believe health data and the iCloud keychain is similar.
> Unless you explicitly enable Advanced Protection mode for all your devices
This is very easy though, you just go to your iCloud account settings under the settings app and enable it. It should be on by default imo, but I understand the argument for why it isn't.
Either way, enabling it is not a barrier and ICE cannot be granted access once you do unless you yourself give them that access.
Extremely tricky in the UK (Apple (at the behest of the Gov AFAIK) disabled it)
Home data is always E2EE https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
Can you point me to the source code i can run on the device? Otherwise it's just another pinky promise for a blackbox by a company that can change at any time even for individual user.
I would like to replace Ring with something fully local.
Local ML/face recognition would be a bonus. Ability to sync to a private owned server owned by me would be a bonus.
I'm assuming there are projects out there that would enable this -- does anyone have recommendations?
Frigate NVR tied to a home assistant instance has my phone getting proactive notifications about people, birds, and buses (in their select areas...). It's not the easiest thing to setup, but if you're using ethernet cameras it seems to work very very well. The few POS wyze cameras's I have on the system tend to cause some problems, but I know for a fact it's 100% a combination of a) wifi (no matter how 'quality') b) wyze.
So, yeah. Look into frigate.
When I got an Apple TV I never expected the main value I'd get out of it was being a smart home hub. I do wish the automations were a bit more programmable. Other than that it has been perfect, everything even failed over to my other Apple TV when rearranging the living room without having to think about setting either up as hubs.
Also it's the perfect Tailscale exit node that's always online in your home (They have a tvOS app)
I bought a windows minipc a couple months ago for this purpose, and it's basically useless if I'm on the road more than a week, because every windows update causes a reboot and a logout. I know, I should run Linux on it.
I'm a heavy Apple user (Apple TVs, Mac Mini, iPad), but we also have Android phones in my household, so HomeKit Secure Video is a no-go.
If Apple ever releases an Apple Home app for Android, I'd transition my entire home over by the time of my next Google Home Premium subscription renewal.
And you can run open source camera firmware on a disconnected vlan if you don't want to trust a phone app or a camera with internet access.
Huh? Just roll your own, thats hacker news after all.
Frigrate nvr + cameras that are confined to internal network. Easy peasy. And you get to set it up exactly as you want.
p.s. i am not saying going with apple is a bad idea (i dont have an opinion), i am just saying thats far from the "only way to go"
There’s actually another alternative: Just don’t install surveillance in your home. Approximately nobody had it 20 years ago. Before asking which unreliable, overpriced, invasive gadget to buy, think about whether you really need any of them.
Why? I like to keep an eye on my dogs when we're away, and it's all done securely using HomeKit video. My iCloud is e2e encrypted and the camera doesn't upload anywhere besides there.
What's the invasive part? Not giving my dogs privacy when we're out of the home?
Did your CCTV increase the time you leave the dogs alone, out of interest?
We never needed CCTV in the 90s/00s for dogs. We would have someone take the dogs out for a walk/toilet, or if having to regularly leave them alone beyond what is fair to them, re-home them
And if you need to check they're not causing mischief they're likely not tired enough
So I'm wondering what use case remains really
> We never needed CCTV in the 90s/00s for dogs.
We never needed the telephone back when we had smoke signals and carrier pigeons either.
Here are three real scenarios that have happened to us just off the top of my head where I was thankful we had cameras and locally stored footage rather than smoke signals and old timey folklore:
1. We couldn't find our cat last summer. Turns out she was sitting in the living room window and pounced on a fly that landed on the screen. The corner of the screen pushed out and she fell right out the window. She has no interest in going outside so we never looked for her out there, but she was huddled in a bush right where she fell hours later.
2. A train carrying chemicals derailed and caught fire in my hometown several years ago, causing an evacuation order while we were out of town (https://www.kcci.com/article/evacuation-order-lifted-followi...). The sheriff wouldn't let us back into town for several hours, but we were at least able to judge that our animals were nervous yet okay.
3. My wife came in from the back yard with the dog, who had suddenly started foaming at the mouth. She's panicking, thinking he ate some kind of poison. I have no idea what's going on, so while she calls the vet I look at the camera feed for our patio and see he had been following a little toad around on the deck while my wife was in the garden before finally scooping it up and giving it a few licks.
Would we have gotten by without a camera in all of these scenarios? Absolutely. But it never hurts to have more data, especially when it's privacy friendly and local, and it's disingenuous to nitpick the very basic human desire for peace of mind as if you don't understand it.
> or if having to regularly leave them alone beyond what is fair to them, re-home them
> And if you need to check they're not causing mischief they're likely not tired enough
Don't patronize me.
Like, its fine that you use it for that, you do you... but I don't understand the actual use case? What are you watching the dogs for? Like are you going to rush home if they shit on the carpet or something?
Approximately nobody was using everything x years ago. That's not really a measure of what's nice to have and what's not, it's a measure of how long the nice to have has been around.
A 1080p cam with night vision a mic and speakers is 20 bucks. Baby monitors where more expensive in the past (audio only).
Tons of people had cameras 20 years ago. It was 2006, not 1906. Besides, we've had pets for surveillance for hundreds of thousands of years. Literally nobody in history has thought "nah no need for security".
What a ridiculous way to try and be on a high horse.
I always wonder what the overlap of this economically is. If you can afford all this home surveillance gear aren't you already likely to live in a place that's comically safe? Why are in particular Americans with their gated communities full of soccer moms and Labradors putting cameras on their house as if they're living on a US military base?
We have cameras to watch our dogs and make sure they're not getting into trouble with each other, things in the house, the cats, etc. We're not worried about bad guys or our personal safety.
Apple totally sells your data, they just anonymize it first. Why do you think they shifted towards services?
They also can give the Feds access to your iCloud data through a NSL. Just like Prism.
iCloud data can be end to end encrypted (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108756)
McDonald's can give my data to the feds through an NSL, yet I still buy their fries every now and then despite the risk.
The good news is they can't catch you if you're already dead from a heart attack.
Now whenever the cameras detect a lost dog, all your neighbors' phones begin playing "Angel" by Sarah McLachlan
They also play this when the cameras in your house detect you using more than one square of toilet paper at a time.
Too little too late. I’m cancelling prime and returning my ring camera, even past the return deadline. Andy Jassy funded that Melania documentary and is generally a spineless oligarchic friend of the Trump administration. Amazon is basically anti constitutional.
An aside: The Verge’s paywall is ridiculous, especially given that they still live off slimy affiliate revenue and ads that run directly counter to their own editorializing. Their smugness and superiority given their business model makes me wish we had better alternatives.
The writers and editors don’t dictate how the business side monetizes the content.
Meaning they’ll wait until about June and then quietly roll it out
No one being surprised at this statement is an indication of how much enshittification and betrayal we have agreed to accept.
I’d like to acknowledge the damage I carry as a human being as a result of the pressure to pretend that this is normal. Just because there doesn’t seem to be real alternatives in so many areas of this “free market” /s economy.
It has been a long decent. I blame advertising, because I doubt we would have put up with as much enshittification if the majority of our digital lives wasn't free, paid for by advertising, like it currently is.
We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They don't care. We say we care but do nothing
Yep. Anyone got alternatives? I love the convenience of a video doorbell but I really really would like to not help the police or ICE or anyone else for that matter unless I decide it's a good idea.
> Yep. Anyone got alternatives?
The self-hosted and home-automation and home-assistant subreddits are _full_ of discussion threads on this. The good news is that you have a TON of options to pick from. The bad news is that they're all deficient in one way or another so you really do have to spend a bit of time to figure out who executes best on the things you care most about.
If you don't mind the lock-in, Unifi is nice. Reolink (and the other DaHua re-brands) usually leave a lot to be desired in terms of software / quality but they are cheap and they reliably spit out a regular video stream that can be used with just about any software. Just don't let them onto the WAN!
Are there any such systems for general users that don't want to manage or maintain such systems?
Alternatives really need to be for the masses that have little Knowles in server hosting.
This is one reason I invest in Linux Smartphone company's that are work towards a clean solution for the masses. Daily drivers that are satisfactory for us build the stepping stones to walk to the alternative.
Home Assistant has the plug and play Green box: https://www.home-assistant.io/green/
Hubitat is a different player in this space: https://hubitat.com/
UniFi is simple to keep running and updated. It’s mostly plug and play as long as you have Ethernet lines. You sometimes have to hit update in the iPhone app.
Any non-Chinese, plug and play systems? Does simplisafe offer on premise video surveillance?
Reolink has doorbell cameras[0] that you can keep disconnected from the internet. They also have some pretty useful local recording hubs if self-hosting is not your deal[1].
[0] https://reolink.com/ca/product/reolink-video-doorbell-wifi/
Reolink also fixed a problem with some of their cameras that prevented them from working with scrypted fully. I have a bunch now completely isolated from the internet and linked through HomeKit.
Got the UniFi Doorbell from Ubiquiti and I'm really happy with it. It's hooked up to my Dream Machine, records video on disk and I access it via Tailscale. Not paying any subscription and it doesn't live in a cloud.
you can use a company that is self hosted like Unifi and have complete control over your data, still have remote access, and not pay a subscription. “self hosted” scares people off but its literally a box you plug in and forget about. Pretty trivial.
I dont understand why anyone chooses Ring when the costs of Unifi are so much better.
The ring app also sucks imo and all their hardware is quite slow.
Honestly, that commercial convinced me to dump my Nest cameras because, eventually (if not already), they'll do the same.
Normal door bells are pretty great and have less overhead and maintenance...
All tech puts it's best foot forward, some of it's really nifty, but a camera on every street corner is always going to pose more risks than it's worth IMO...
It's work to go back to the old ways but I think this is one we step we should really all take.
I think your take on cameras is legitimate, but from my home office I can't hear my doorbell if I have the door closed or if I have music playing at even a low volume. Installing a smart doorbell that notifies me when rung was a significant upgrade over the old doorbell.
I use Amcrest's AD410. I don't pay for their cloud, have my own NVR, and can access them through Wireguard if I'm out of the house.
Frigate is incredible. I have 3 instances of it (different homes across the family) running using various amcrest and reolink local-only PoE and Wifi cams. I access the remotely using wireguard. One is running on a 2017 miniatx box (Intel i7-7700T) using openvino to do local-only object detection with the 2017 intel CPU. One is using a Beelink EQ14 Mini PC, Intel Twin Lake N150, also using openvino for object detection (people, dogs, cars, etc). One is using a nvidia 5070 gpu. All notifications are processed via the home assistant integration.
Truly top-notch quality, full-featured, very low maintenance, easy to set up, cheap to operate. I'm glad so many people are using it now.
For video doorbell I just have a cam that can see the front door and I drew a box around the area I want notifications for. When a person enters the box, I get a notification and snapshot.
Reolink with Frigate NVR. Can also put Home Assistant on the same box. Pretty much any 12+ gen intel CPU with QSV should be able to handle the encoding for streaming to your device. Probably will want to use tailscale so that you don’t have to open any ports.
I have a Reolink doorbell. It records to a SD card and works great with my Home Assistant setup. So much better than the Ring it replaced.
Hard agree. I have their doorbell and some of the wifi light fixtures (that go into mains power). They integrate great with home assistant and record locally.
We've got an analogue video phone on our apartment. Works flawlessly. No digital path other than the ring selection. Has a flat monochrome CRT which is kind of cool.
I made it half a century without a doorbell in my phone. I don't need it now.
Eh. I have a Logitech Circle View, and appreciate seeing whether it's a delivery person or some rando selling vacuum cleaners. It also pops up a picture of the person on our TV and chimes my phone, so even if we have the music up or we're not at home, we can still see that someone's there. I like these.
I’ve been pretty happy with Reolink. No subscription required and uses local storage. Notifications are done through smtp which works pretty well. Mobile app is pretty solid as well.
The difficult lesson is that getting off the treadmill of always chasing greater convenience is the only way to stop the bleeding of increasing dependence on technology.
None of these agencies get your video data without your consent. The feature was designed so they have an easy way to present you the request for footage.
Unfortunately a portion of the information getting circulated is the complete opposite.
> None of these agencies get your video data without your consent.
You certainly can't be sure of that. In fact, it is almost certain that these companies provide the data they collect to the police and government agencies data, often without warrant.
Doesn't matter, unless you're an asshole you shouldn't continue to give money to companies like Ring that partner with ICE or Flock.
I'm not an asshole so I cancelled my subscription.
Yes, for now. But ultimately you have no control or say over these features because you do not own the software or data. You must have pure blind faith that this will be the way it continues to work.
If other people are cool with doing things without any reasons and based on pure trust, that's on them. But that's not gonna be me
If you don't own the entire stack you don't decide who does what with the data.
I'm certain they get your video data without your consent when the agencies have a warrant. I think it's very likely that they won't necessarily require a warrant, either.
Consider the Nancy Guthrie case. The owner wasn't around to give consent, and the camera didn't even have an active subscription, yet law enforcement was still able to recover video from Google's systems.
The only way it could be as you say is if the video was only stored locally without any remote access, or if the video was encrypted with keys only you control. Google clearly is not doing this. I really, really doubt Amazon is.
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I highly recommended setting up a hotkey for toggling JavaScript in your browser of choice.