A Super Bowl ad for Ring security cameras boasting how the company can scan neighborhoods for missing dogs has prompted some customers to remove or even destroy their cameras.
Online, videos of people removing or destroying their Ring cameras have gone viral. One video posted by Seattle-based artist Maggie Butler shows her pulling off her porch-facing camera and flipping it the middle finger.
Butler explained that she originally bought the camera to protect against package thefts, but decided the pet-tracking system raised too many concerns about government access to data.
“They aren’t just tracking lost dogs, they’re tracking you and your neighbors,” Butler said in the video that has more than 3.2 million views.
“They aren’t just tracking lost dogs, they’re tracking you and your neighbors,”
Uh, yeah. You didn’t get the news about them sharing with ICE?
I think the majority of people don’t even have tech conversations with their friends and coworkers, they just talk about sports or gambling or whatever else normal people do.
Talking trivia instead of consequential stuff…
If I could figure out how to engage with your nonsense I would.
During Superbowl I was talking with a software guy working for a big shopping ( data) company, he was telling us how every interaction on their website is recorded for data analysis, and his own wife was shocked. It came up after I prompted for that conversation, talking about the license plate tracking in parking lots (which she didn’t know about).
People seem suprised when they find out that they capture where their mouse moves, where their finger swipes, the duration, the speed. Everything is a metric.
I don’t talk sports ball, I only talk tech. Want to be friends?
just get a Chinese one like tapo so that the Chinese government can spy on you instead
Or hear me out,
Buy one that stores its data only on your local network and does not rely on corporate cloud or servers in any way or form.
This counts for all most all consumer home technology.
People should think about a NASS or Home servers like they do about owning a vehicle.
Build a server….in this economy? With these component prices?
I just installed Linux on my old laptop, added a 4Tb SSD and some HDDs connected with a docking bay and voilà, I have a server. Getting into the software side, now that’s a bit harder but manageable.
I recommend proxmox!
Haven’t heard about it, but will check it out, thanks!
Edit: Oh and it’s open-source😁 Is it hard to use?
Not hard at all. Its basically a debian system that you can access trough the browser with your main pc from which you can make different vms and lxc (vm but smaller and more efficient)
Every service or project gets its own lxc, all lxc share hardware resources automatically.
You can get an old HP microserver on eBay for less than 100 bucks. Still runs fine. I threw debian on it. Great for starting out… I use mine for backups, services and Jellyfin. It gave my beloved 870 a home. :,)
Yeah right. Next you’ll be telling people to get off corporate owned social media and use something without an algorithm.
use something without an algorithm.
Lemmy uses an algorithm.
Technically yes, but unlike e.g. Facebook it isn’t specifically calibrated to prioritise engagement over anything like truth or sanity. https://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/machinelearningtimes/five-points-for-anger-one-for-a-like-how-facebooks-formula-fostered-rage-and-misinformation/12344/
People should think about a NASS or Home servers like they do about owning a vehicle.
I wholeheartedly agree. Hell, home server/nas should be more common than cars, I don’t drive every day, but my data is used every minute of every day.
Which is actually better because the chinese have no jurisdiction in the USA.
Yet…
President Xi, my people yearn for freedom.
At the rate this is going, you may be saying this seriously soon
I mean if we already have a dictator anyway, how about some infrastructure to go with it?
High speed rail… mmmmm…
i have 5 tapo cameras because they’re cheap and work well in HA and frigate and they aren’t allowed on the internet and only communicate with the app during onboarding and…
okay i’ll get rid of them
For anyone not liking Tapo, a good alternative is Reolink. They offer about the same features, but use cameras with higher megapixels.
And can be configured to only communicate within your network.
what is ha and frigate
HA = Home Assistent, to manage your smart home Frigate = Self Hosted Webcam Server
How do you manage remote viewing without internet?
2 methods
home assistant (installed on mini pc thru proxmox) via the tapo: camera controls integration
frigate(installed on a dsm 7.2 synology) via go2rtc (mini pc)
also i’ve set my routers firewall settings so all the wifi cameras can only see eachother (and the mini pc)
edit: oh and tailscale
Cheers.
Do you recommend tapo cameras? Are they poe?
A file server by Synology will have built-in software for this, or you can get a free one by not using a Synology server
Seance or crystal ball, mainly
They’ve backed off this and ended the partnership, claim Flock never got any footage, which I think is a total lie.
They’ll re-partner when the heat is off, or just do it silently, Amazon shouldn’t be trusted. Explain why to your friends and neighbors.
Where did you hear they ended the partnership? (Even if you supply a source, I probably won’t believe it.)
Edit: nm. found it. https://www.engadget.com/home/ring-calls-off-partnership-with-police-surveillance-provider-flock-safety-031717605.html
deleted by creator
This isn’t referring to the flock thing, they put out a commercial in the Superbowl about creating a cam-network to help find lost pets.
“Amazon says the system is secured against hackers” …You dumb evil pieces of shit, your employees and malicious government and law enforcement entities are a far greater risk than hackers. “We’re spying on everything you do and giving Trump’s constitution-ignoring lackeys access, but at least hackers aren’t, probably”
I put Google cameras on my house years ago out of convenience and this is it, I’m spending the money on a PoE system where my footage stays on my own hardware.
Reolink is decent
Very happy with my Reolink cameras and NVR. Works better than the rings ever did.
I don’t even have their NVR and am impressed that the camera works both in an NVR / LAN / and direct to PC
What does PoE have to do with it?
He’s talking about a cheap NVR with poe built in. The only thing on the network is the NVR.
Check out frigate.
Maybe next time they’re thinking of spending $8M on a Super Bowl ad, they can save themselves some money and pay me half that amount. I’m perfectly happy to tell everyone how Ring cameras are a privacy nightmare and recommend Reolink instead.
WiFi connected cameras were a mistake. Although, if people are going to use these mass surveillance devices, using it to find dogs is great. It needs cat detection too.
WiFi connected cameras were a mistake.
Double so, when people are doing auto thefts in neighborhoods, they’re using wifi jammers to block out the footage
Why? They finally woke up to the fact they were being spied on and that they pay money for the privilege of doing so…
Why not?
Because they all connect to the Kremlin via a single washing machine CPU.
does anyone have a link to the original superbowl ad?
Found it: https://youtu.be/hiaIHLwJvPQ?t=1449
In regards to flock I wonder if there’s any material we can use on our dash or license plate that the cameras cannot see. I think I saw something like that but unsure if it’s effective.
Ben Jordan has several videos on flock cameras on YouTube. Excellent series of videos. Here’s one where he uses modified license plates to fuck with them.
But why? I thought this people have nothing to hide! Now all of a sudden they have something to hide. 🤣
Hey, you’re not a criminal and have nothing to hide. Mind sharing your address and banking details here? Put a key under the mat, I’ll come check out what’s in your cupboards, you have nothing to hide right?
Lol, you sound like an incel
I hope what really gets people to pay attention is how the FBI said they searched that news ladies’ moms’ ring camera footage even though she didn’t have an active subscription.
It was a NEST camera from Google, which is only a meaningful distinction because it means they ALL do this shit.
The only ones that don’t are ones that only send data to your data storage.
And even then, big question mark, as most Chinese produced camera modules have black box firmware. If it’s on the Internet it’s not yours.
My cameras have local network access only. Most people who are tech savvy enough to set up their own storage are also able to block Internet access for security cameras.
But another big concern for externally mounted cameras with microsd cards is the confiscation of those cards. They are are very easy to remove, often without tools and I don’t believe for a minute that the fact that a warrant is required would make police actually get one before taking the card.
Which cameras do you use?
TP-Link (which are cheap but so unreliable I had to add smart switches to reset them when they stop working), Foscam and Dahua. Dahua is by far the best. All of them record to a local server running Home Assistant and Frigate.
I really need to set up frigate. Been procrastinating for months 😐
TP-Link
I hope its not one of the 32 TP-Link cameras that have unpatched auth flaws allowing malicious actors to reset the admin credentials in them.. This is a local exploit, so you’re probably okay, but these exploits could be used in concert with others to compromise your security/privacy.
And the NEST camera apparently has some sort of free tier that saves a short amount (the last few hours) of video by default, so NEST users shouldn’t be surprised at all that their video feed is sent to the cloud as its one of the features of the subscription-less model.
The problem isn’t that it’s being sent to the cloud, the problem is that it’s not being encrypted and Amazon is doing whatever they fuck they want with it, including giving it to law enforcement without a warrant.
encryption wouldn’t solve the problem, just raise more questions. how is it encrypted, with what algorithm? was the alg implemented securely? who has the decryption keys? how were the keys generated? were they generated from a good enough entropy source? these are non-trivial questions that have to be asked in an encrypted system where encryption is not just a gimmick or a marketing buzzword.
having encryption and “secure!” plastered all over the box and the phone app does not mean anything, especially when you need protection against the manufacturer.
When people in a Lemmy technology community say “encryption” it should be obvious we’re referring to effective encryption, not a marketing claim on a product box.
yes, that would be ideal, but at any point in time we will have newcomers, for them it won’t be obvious
Your prior comment was for newcomers?
"How is it encrypted, with what algorithm? was the alg implemented securely? who has the decryption keys? how were the keys generated? were they generated from a good enough entropy source? "
This was obviously written for people with quite a bit of knowledge. Most newcomers would have absolutely no idea what any of it means.
Just to note here, they are referring to nest which is google.
A big exception to the rule are the HomeKit secure video cameras that work in Apple’s ecosystem. If your HomeKit compatible camera is going straight into HKSV, and isn’t paired with manufacturer’s own cloud video service, then it’s all E2EE and it can’t be accessed by Apple, even with a warrant.
Problem is, camera offerings are limited, and scrolling clips in HomeKit is paaaainful. Also, if you’re not in Apple’s ecosystem, you can’t use it.
Can’t you get a surveillance camera from anywhere and use that?
They’re pointing out that HomeKit cameras are specifically end to end encrypted and claimed inaccessible. Apple has really been pushing online privacy as a feature
You can get a camera from anywhere and either use it locally only or implement your own encryption before saving to a cloud resource if you can get one with any expectation of privacy. But you have to do all the work and it is never end to end encrypted
Depends on your precise definition of the camera “end” I suppose, but an IP camera absolutely can be and should be end to end encrypted. Even if the camera itself does not support native encryption, at worst the aggregation point/server should. Really, surveillance cameras should be on their own dedicated private IP network anyway, ideally with physical isolation on any wired connections. Besides a physical, on-site attack (which is what the cameras are for!) there really should not be any plausible method of an outside attacker breaching into the non-encrypted part of the network at all.
And that’s the worst case, real-world scenario. Quite a few cameras do in fact support on-device encryption now so “never” is still definitely incorrect. You do have to do the work though. That’s how good security works, it doesn’t come in a box as much as many wish it would and even if it does it’s never one-size-fits-all.
My wife and I recently moved to a home with ring cameras preinstalled, but no subscription of course. We can only access a live feed via the cloud service. I told my wife, I don’t think it matters whether we have a subscription or not… if they want to use the footage from our home cameras for any reason at all, it’s in their power to do so. They can save it, scan it, watch it, … they don’t even need to save the video, they can save results from a scan to get out the important details more efficiently.
My wife didn’t want to hear it. She said we aren’t paying them, so there’s nothing they can do. Then this news story dropped about Google Nest. I showed my wife. We no longer have the ring cameras.
I wonder if removing the cameras is the best move.
It might be better to let them run but have them watching a TV streaming Disney movies.
Then drop the dime to Disney that they are copying their IP.
Copyright theft is only an issue for the poor.
Have you been in a cave where AI doesn’t exist, or…?
I’m half curious if I cut open the box… you think there’d be an easy way to replace the camera with a video stream of my choosing? Because I wouldn’t mind cutting out the camera and leaving the device plugged into my PC for a constant headless stream of video content.
Print out a image of your asshole, though I suppose it could be anyone’s, and tape it to the front of the camera, then poke a needle through the microphone.
Or you know… Just unplug it.
unplug what? his asshole?
Theoretically they wouldn’t have internet access if a previous occupant set them up unless one of your neighbors has an unsecured AP. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding you and you’re saying you set them up on your wireless network after you moved in. Still a good move to get rid of them but I wouldn’t be as concerned about them if the only AP they were set up to use was no longer present.
Nope. Ring cameras are part of Amazon Sidewalk which is effectively an automatic, invisible, and not end-user-controllable wireless mesh network “meant to keep devices working during wifi outages” or in other words to ensure the data makes it back to the cloud at any cost.
Their are more and more device manufacturers starting to use techniques like this to ensure connection regardless of owner intent.
I can’t say that’s surprising but I have only heard of smart TVs having been confirmed to do that
Interesting, I didn’t think about that nor did I know about the mesh network someone else mentioned in a reply to you. In my case, I’m renting the home. The landlord pays for a very small internet package that is reserved for the cameras. He stopped paying for the subscription at some point but he still pays for the Internet it connects to, which is how we were able to access live footage in the past.
When I said “we no longer have the ring camera.” More accurately I could have said “we stopped charging it.” The landlord would probably have a minor aneurism if we tried explaining why we want to replace the camera he mounted a case for into the stucko by the front door.
Initially, NBC Nightly News (Savannah Guthrie’s network) stated that Ring cameras could only record 4-6 hours before the footage would start to rewrite over itself. Yet being able to uncover what they did after the fact seems hella sketchy.
amazon likely has a backup anyways somewhere, eventhough the customer doesnt.
Not at all, that’s tons of time.
That was a nest and I don’t know about them, but for Ring they store snippets activated by motion or ringing the bell. Once you’re only saving snippets, 4-6 hours video could be weeks
Ring can also save snapshots, at regular intervals, but that’s a still photo taking much less storage.
I used to have a nest doorbell. You can set it to record continuously, just FYI.
E: that will also require a subscription, which includes 60 days of saved footage (and other stuff)
Yet being able to uncover what they did after the fact seems hella sketchy.
Not really if you know how this kind of computing/information technology works.
A file consists of the data itself, and a pointer to the data location on the storage device or index record. When the computer wants to retrieve the data, it looks at the index to get the data location, then goes to that location to get the data. This is how the majority of computers/devices work. When a file is “deleted” the index is usually the only thing that goes away, not the data itself. Over the course of time, the data is eventually overwritten as its in areas marked as “free space”. So other new files will occupy some or all of that space changing it to hold the new file data.
If you want to get rid of the data itself, that is usually considered “purge” where the data is intentionally overwritten with something else to make the data irretrievable.
What the Google engineers were able to do was essentially go through all the areas marked as “free space” across dozens (hundreds?) of cloud servers that hold customer Nest camera data and try to find any parts that hadn’t been overwritten yet by new data. This is probably part of why it took so long to produce the video. Its like sorting through a giant dumpster to find an accidentally discarded wedding ring.
I’m late to your reply but it was well explained and I feel like I learned something new. Thanks!
I’m glad it was helpful!
The subscription is ostensibly to cover the cost of bandwidth. But of course they’re uploading anyway…
If your stupid gadget needs a separate proprietary app that demands internet access, anticipate that all data is shared for all kinds of shady business.
Not always the case. Some cameras require a proprietary app for set up but can then be set to stream to a local server. Internet access can then be completely blocked with router settings.
Still, would you really want that? A half-baked device in your network, a device you suspect would constantly betray you, if given the chance?
I personally can’t imagine getting used to that. I’d despise the device (and myself probably).
It’s pretty trivial to block devices from accessing the Internet.
For those that know what they’re doing, and those that know what they’re doing don’t buy ring to begin with.
some of those that know what they’re doing, do it through pihole. But a DNS sink is really not enough. Even blacklisting the MAC might not be enough. If it requires a key from a server it might even be necessary to hack the device if it’s not a SoC and you can’t defile or use M-x Butterflies
So, what security cameras would you use or are you just back seat driving without a good suggestion?
The latest Raspberry Pi cameras have decent sensors, variants with night vision are available. Axis makes reliable, network attached cameras.
Open-source software like Frigate or ZoneMinder exists.
I have absolutely no problem using these kinds of devices.
I have an old phone and a generic Play account that I used for setup so the companies have nothing of consequence but my public IP address. Setup takes less than 15 minutes and after that all Internet access is completely blocked just like it would be if I unplugged my cable modem. There is no way for the cameras to override my router settings.
My smart TV is much more of a concern.
