Ring cameras are about to get increasingly chummy with law enforcement

LordEOD

Ars Scholae Palatinae
644
Big business and big money has always been authoritarian adjacent and in many instances, outright complicit.
In many ways, its how big corporations operate internally, so its not out of their comfort level.

That's nothing new - only real difference is that its now happening here instead of "over-there somewhere"
 
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Frodo Douchebaggins

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Well… there goes my Ring setup. Time to look at CCTV solutions that are local.


I like my Unifi stuff, FWIW. Supposedly now that you can use ONVIF cameras there are maybe better options for PQ for the price while still having the convenience of Unifi integration once set up.
 
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Fatesrider

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would be nice to see a bunch of Ring doorbells getting sledgehammered and the videos posted to social... :)
I'd watch that movie.

But this sounded encouraging:
“Any footage a Ring customer chooses to submit will be securely packaged by Flock and shared directly with the requesting local public safety agency through the FlockOS or Flock Nova platform,” the announcement reads.
However, that seems like it's just an open door to subpoena any Ring customer who doesn't choose to submit. After all, who the fuck believes the cops are a "local public safety agency"? They're LAW ENFORCEMENT, and with a fascist in charge of the nation, they can do what the fuck they please without a lot of brakes on their activities.

It's only a small step from being voluntary to being mandatory, and given the times, I tend to fear the cops far more than I trust them.

Once upon a time, people had to rely on a peephole to see what was going on outside of their door. For the most part, that worked. I don't know if it's an axiom someone's claimed or not, but it seems to me there's an inverse relationship between convenience and privacy.

And that's NOT how it should be.
 
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J4yDubs

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Dumped my Ring cameras last year and installed Frigate as a Home Assistant Add-on (might move it to it's own box at some point). Bought a Reolink doorbell camera to replace the Ring doorbell and a mix of EmpireTech cameras to replace the other Ring cameras. 7 cameras in all.

Everything is hosted/stored locally and I've gained features and have much better picture quality. So much better than Ring and no subscription.
 
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JAFO#101

Smack-Fu Master, in training
31
As far as I'm aware, [in the UK at least] your Video doorbell is only allowed to film to the limit of your property and not beyond. I have no problem with that but it's not enforced in the slightest and so on any local facebook page there are always people requesting Ring footage or people posting footage of their cameras covering public space.
 
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balthazarr

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“Any footage a Ring customer chooses to submit will be...

Will be? Will be appropriated as we bypass the suckers customers altogether and provide direct, realtime video feeds to our dystopian surveillance Ring network, which our suckers customers have paid for, but not asked for.

Amazon, in the very near future, almost certainly.
 
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balthazarr

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An anecdote - I live on a main road - and have a HomeKit doorbell camera. A few months ago a car swerved and almost hit the pole outside our house (there was a bollard installed to protect it because it carries high voltage lines as well).

The cops asked me for footage. I checked, and because of where it's pointing and how I've configured the motion sensing, the camera did not pick up the car's motion and did not trigger a record of the event. I told them this.

I asked the cops why they wanted footage - and they told me the driver claimed an animal ran onto the road - but they suspected he was hooning.

Fast forward a few weeks and I received a subpoena for my camera recordings. The amount of rigmarole and bullshit I had to go through to "prove" my camera didn't record anything, and that's why I didn't provide any footage... it was ridiculous.

And all because they wanted to impound some poor schmuck's car.

Nope. Ring can fuck right off - especially because they're enabling and assisting the above-the-law ICE "agents".
 
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175 (178 / -3)
Reminder that Ring was primarily created by Amazon to indemnify themselves against so-called "porch-pirates"/package thieves. Instead of a failed delivery in which they would have liability, they conned end users into paying money so Amazon can then show evidence, "no, see we delivered it, it's not our fault, it's the user/police's fault".
Think about it, what good does a video of a masked person stealing a package do for the end user? The police aren't going to investigate. However for amazon, they have enough evidence to cover their own asses because they have video of the delivered package itself being stolen.

Now they are monetizing it for mass surveillance off the backs of their paying customers. Truly abhorrent.
 
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graylshaped

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“It will be turned on for free for every customer, and I think all of them will use it,”

More likely... "It will be enabled by default for every customer, and disabling it will be very, very hard to do”
If anyone has details on the opt-out process, I'll forward to the people I know who I have been unable to convince their Ring is a trojan horse but who would opt out from this.
 
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divisionbyzero

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Big business and big money has always been authoritarian adjacent and in many instances, outright complicit.
In many ways, its how big corporations operate internally, so its not out of their comfort level.

That's nothing new - only real difference is that its now happening here instead of "over-there somewhere"
I was going to say the same thing. If anyone thought Amazon wouldn’t jump at the chance to join the surveillance state to enforce fascism on society, they need only look at how they treat their own employees.
 
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I've found consumer-grade routers, even on the higher end, suck at egress filtering (hint, they generally don't block ANYTHING from reaching out, by default - and otherwise limited egress control). Bought cameras from a well-known brand, they leak to some endpoint on the net, even when in "local mode". I have a solution, but general consumers aren't capable / aren't going to bother. Meanwhile, I wonder what agency already has meat hooks into THAT repository, entirely bypassing any feigned hat-tip to privacy. :/
 
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chaos215bar2

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Person I know is on the board for her community HOA and thought about getting Flock cameras until they had a lawyer look at the T&Cs. Lawyer, apparently, advised them to run screaming.
I sat in on a Flock sales pitch to an HOA a few years ago. Thankfully, most of the board had the sense to run screaming without involving the lawyer.

Not only are the terms onerous — the HOA doesn't actually own the camera, meaning terms and service fees can change any time, even after you pay handsomely for installation — but Flock simply didn't have good answers to what should have been some really basic questions about access controls. For instance, options to require X number of board members to be present in order to access feeds.

That on top of the rep pushing how great law enforcement integration was, some iffy answers about owners opting out, etc. The whole thing was a security and privacy nightmare. Which is why, of course, Flock cameras are showing up all over on commercial properties.

What's depressing is how many HOAs obviously just go and install the cameras anyway, without understanding.

In a sane country, the whole operation would be incredibly illegal.
 
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jdale

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Requests must include “specific location and timeframe of the incident, a unique investigation code, and details about what is being investigated,” and users can look at the requests anonymously, Flock said.

The requests go out based on the location of the event and the location of your home. Unless there are many Ring cameras on your block, these can't be anonymous, because the person looking at the request must be living in the house where the camera is installed. Extremely dishonest to frame it this way.
 
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jdale

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I’m honestly surprised Amazon doesn’t get FB level flack for how deliberately evil their privacy stances are. At this point they really should have a widespread skepticism of using any of their devices
It's because, as bad as their privacy practices are, they do so many other things that are worse.
 
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sfbiker

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If you have Ring cameras, you can gain more control over your video footage by enabling end-to-end encryption which, in theory, should prevent Ring from being able to see any of your video or sharing it with a third party. Assuming that Ring is telling the truth about the encryption, and since enabling e2e disables pretty much all of their server-side processing, it seems that they really can't see your encrypted video.

https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-end-encryption-e2ee?redirect=true
 
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sfbiker

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Guess it’s finally time to pull the trigger on replacing all the Ring cameras that came with my house with UniFi gear.
I've replaced some of my Ring cameras with Unifi, but the lack of battery powered options is limiting. I live in a condo and can't make any holes through the exterior walls for cabling. So for now, I still have some ring battery powered cameras and a doorbell.
 
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Frodo Douchebaggins

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I live in a condo and can't make any holes through the exterior walls for cabling.
If you start from "I can't", you will prove yourself right. Just think bigger: Take over the condo association, change the rules to suit your needs.

Bribe a state legislator or two, get a law made that supercedes HOA rules about security camera cabling.

A lack of a well-trodden path doesn't mean there's not a way!
 
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Dumped my Ring cameras last year and installed Frigate as a Home Assistant Add-on (might move it to it's own box at some point). Bought a Reolink doorbell camera to replace the Ring doorbell and a mix of EmpireTech cameras to replace the other Ring cameras. 7 cameras in all.

Everything is hosted/stored locally and I've gained features and have much better picture quality. So much better than Ring and no subscription.
This is the way to go. Local hosting.
 
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