Ring or any corpo-cloud-controlled cameras are shit, but I want to know what happens around my house when I'm not watching.

This is just curiosity, no sides, the refund bit

If Amazon did their part, put the package on your door, it was stolen, is that their fault?

I have a Unifi doorbell and it takes great photos of the local badgers, foxes, and other wildlife. They are stored locally. Love it.

There's plenty of good arguments for not using cloud-connected video cameras, how they can share data with the government unethically or illegally, etc. I got rid of all of mine. But I still have cameras, that I own, that are only accessible to me. I didn't get them until my house was burgled. I found that experience to be traumatic. I find the cameras to be somewhat soothing.

I do think it's funny he focuses solely on the homeowner, the individual, for whom their entire life is in their home, but ignores all the cameras used by businesses, government, etc. Ask the police station take down their cameras! Ask the grocery store take down theirs! They can certainly afford to be robbed more than the guy just trying to make an honest living, and wanting to keep an eye on his stuff. But no, he focuses on the person who's likely been the victim of crime (a concept he tells you to pretend doesn't exist, because "capitalism" or whatever), to just ignore it, to just go with the flow, man. No, I don't think I will.

> But what if someone steals your Amazon package off your front steps? Well, what if they do? I guess you would have to get a refund. I guess you might suffer an extremely minor inconvenience. I guess it could be an opportunity to reflect on the painful predations of poverty under capitalism, which creates economic desires, renders people unable to satisfy them, and then taunts them with constant visions of abundance in which they cannot share. True, it is a tragedy of unimaginably small proportions that someone has stolen your box of paper towels. Would you let them steal your optimism, as well?

This kind of rhetoric is counterproductive. Telling people that package thieves are just misunderstood, is going to get people to do the opposite of what you suggest.

I understand where the author is coming from but this bends a little too far towards "recording outside your door is bad and you should feel bad because you are a horrible paranoid person" for my taste.

The reality is that a lot of societies or locales are not high-trust and it makes sense to take steps to insure oneself/family/possessions.

Installing cameras on your property does not necessarily mean you have a destructive attitude, or that you are storing and cataloging events and treating everything with suspicion and paranoia. It's a set-and-forget system that the majority of users probably don't think about on a daily basis. You install them in the hopes that you'll never have to use them.

I would rather see "_Amazon Ring_ is bad and you should feel bad, get a better surveillance system"

We shouldn’t have to surrender our privacy for simple conveniences.

Can someone make an open source, privacy-focused doorbell? Perhaps like the Software Conversancy’s OpenWRT One wifi router. A simple iPhone/Android intercom app usable only on my LAN would be lovely. I’m sure others would need a flashing light attachment. With an open specification, I’m sure there is a market here. Yes, one can get a ReoLink and muck with VLan settings but that is not very accessible.

I have several Reolink cams around the place, including a doorbell. They are on a VLAN called SEWER. I also have a VLAN called THINGS, which is for general IoT and SEWER is for those devices that scare me the most!

SEWER and THINGS don't get to see the internet at all, except via Squid. DNS A records with ntp in them resolve to the IPs of my equipment.

It is a bit crap that you need to be a networking and IT consultant to make this stuff mostly safe. If you can't, then getting the claw hammer out seems to be indicated.

> But what if someone steals your Amazon package off your front steps? Well, what if they do? I guess you would have to get a refund. I guess you might suffer an extremely minor inconvenience. I guess it could be an opportunity to reflect on the painful predations of poverty under capitalism, which creates economic desires, renders people unable to satisfy them, and then taunts them with constant visions of abundance in which they cannot share. True, it is a tragedy of unimaginably small proportions that someone has stolen your box of paper towels. Would you let them steal your optimism, as well?

One of the things I do actually like is not being constantly stolen from. It's a pretty nice improvement to my life to see that something has been delivered and know that it will be there when I'm home. I don't have a Ring camera or anything, but I can see why people would rather have the Christmas gifts they send each other (even if small in monetary value) than some insight about the "painful predations of poverty under capitalism". The latter might actually not be as valuable to others as it is to the author.

When I lived in India many decades ago, it was quite routine to have anything not latched down taken from you. We'd lock our bags to our train seats and so on, and if you had an expensive thing delivered you'd have to make sure you were home or you'd have to go acquire the thing and escort it home yourself, and you wouldn't do that with an expensive item at a time when people weren't around. If I'm being honest, I think I would much rather have my present life where I am confronted with such "tragedies of unimaginably small proportions" rarely at the cost of the "opportunities to reflect on the painful predations of capitalism". I actually really like not being stolen from. Here, in my wife's Taiwan, I can even forget my phone on a table and it's probably still going to be there. That's somehow even nicer, though I do admittedly reflect less often on "the painful predations of capitalism" because of it.

I don't specifically know for a fact that a Ring camera would help me achieve this goal of mine to be not stolen from at the cost of reflecting on capitalism, but it is presented in the article as if it would and that giving up reflections on capitalism for safety from theft is not useful. Given that I have found such a trade useful, I think this speaks more as an advertisement for Ring than anything else.

I use my non-ring, local-only front door camera to track the local cats.