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.
Until one day they auto-update ...
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
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".
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
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.
I ended up with an Amcrest IP2M-841 and Tinycam on Android (as I understand using RTSP), and blocking internet access of the camera through the router. As I found out, just connecting it to the internet will automatically connect to servers for allowing “easy setup” of the remote access feature.
I'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.
I'd really like something that'd be apartment friendly so no drilling holes.
Then again, doesn't seem like the law matters anymore at least on a federal level.
It's not Orwellian overreach or, as the EFF claims a breach of Ring's customers' trust, if the customer gives up the data willingly and knowingly.
And lots and lots of people will.
There is no such thing short of a physical switch. To believe otherwise is the absolute height of naïveté.
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...
Or use a checkbox that mysteriously takes on the checked state while you are sure you didn't check it.
You have to be total naive if you still believe that this is a “safe” feature to enable.
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"!?
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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.
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…
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.
Or worse-yet, opt-in means "Hey our rates are going up, but not if you agree to this" (something comcast did recently).
Or opt-in is stored in some database somewhere and might "accidentally be misread" due to a "bug".
If they want real-opt-in then it should be a SMS message at the time they want to know, and a phone-number you can reach out to for more information. This would give an audit trail at the very least.
What’s the Comcast story? (just did a quick search)
This will be abused by the government, by the police, and every othet nefarious organizations and individuals possible.
Penalties should be in the %s of revenue or company assets. Whistleblowers should receive large sums for identifying violations.
In a broader vein, it's time for regulation forbidding the retention or aggregation of any person's data for any commercial purpose other than the one most proximal to the actual transaction in which the person engaged, unless they explicitly opt in.
What would the latter mean? Among other things, targeted ads and recommendation systems would become illegal. Cross-user aggregation (or e.g., a company engaging in any user-longitudinal data analytics) would be illegal. In SQL language, ideally the only time you could do any query with a user ID returning multiple rows for further use would be to serve data directly back to the user. In the long run, such queries should be impossible by requiring something like a) per-user encrypted storage, b) user owned data, c) non-correlatable per-user IDs across transactions.
It will never happen because -- as noted in the article -- many folks in SillyCon valley and government are technofascists, but it should, because our current situation violates all reasonable notions of privacy.
What do you mean by that?
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.
They said No. It is still in the box on the counter after over 2 years.
SoftTalker•5h ago
csomar•7m ago