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bryancoxwell | 4 months ago

Might be a good time to enable E2EE on your Ring cams if you haven’t already:

https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...

discuss

order

nerdponx|4 months ago

Consider not sending your doorbell footage to accompany that has no respect for user privacy, and is now actively partnering with a police surveillance company.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|4 months ago

> now actively partnering with a police surveillance company

You can make this point stronger: Amazon is a police surveillance company (with Ring), just not primarily.

cholantesh|4 months ago

Yeah there are plenty of self-hosted solutions that work just as well.

kotaKat|4 months ago

Bad news: Ring just enabled opt-in-by-default "search parties" for people to leverage your outdoor cameras to find their "lost animals".

https://ring.com/search-party

captainkrtek|4 months ago

The feature in the app is also worded cleverly:

“Search party lets you use your outdoor Ring cameras to help neighbors in your area”

Note: doesn’t mention pets yet. Then:

“Starting with lost pets, Search party will…”

What comes after lost pets? Very open ended

ceejayoz|4 months ago

“Do it for the lost puppies!” is darkly comedic as a way to ease people into the idea.

mihaaly|4 months ago

Oh, Jesus!!

This f shameless pretention of doing something noble - barely helpful above normal practices btw. - while manipulating clueless users into turning on mass-surveillance is revolting and disgusting. And ordinary employees figured this out, phrased, created content, implemmented, pubished, and are maintaining this dirty practice. Many times with (very misplaced) pride. Shame on all of them actively participating in this coward scheme!

somehnguy|4 months ago

Thanks for the heads up, just went in and disabled it on my 2 cameras. Next step will be to throw these privacy invading pieces of junk in the trash. Just need to find a comparable product.

Are there any wireless (running power to these locations is not an option) doorbell cams that record to local storage instead of the cloud? I refuse to pay a subscription for these things.

Ideally they would record to my server instead of onboard SD card so that the footage can't just walk away if someone grabs the camera.

taneq|4 months ago

“Opt-in-by-default” is a lot of words to say “opt-out”.

treyd|4 months ago

I love how evil the concept of "opt-in-by-default" is. It's so rapey and sinister.

ta1243|4 months ago

The best time to not buy into all this non-free surveilence-as-a-service crap was a decade ago.

The second best time is today.

Unfortunately the public love this stuff, and are quite happy to have CCTV pointing at your house. Privacy never existed 300 years ago, it doesn't today. Accept your feudal masters and make peace with it, because they won years ago.

andrepd|4 months ago

Is this seriously your conclusion? Might be a good time to get rid of the fucking spy camera owned by a multitrillion dollar corporation partnering with the state surveillance apparatus, is my opinion.

Have people never read/watched a sci-fi book/film before?

bryancoxwell|4 months ago

I think encouraging people to enable E2EE is more realistic than asking everyone to throw out the Ring cams they’ve potentially spent hundreds on, yeah.

drdaeman|4 months ago

Is Ring camera encryption actually independently audited and known to be implemented correctly and provide all the desirable security properties?

Because when I reverse engineered my Tuya-based camera-equipped pet feeder, I've discovered that there was an encryption on the video stream, but they only encrypted I-frames and left P-frames unencrypted. Amazon is not Tuya, but IoT is IoT.

My point is, there are myriad of ways IoT vendor can boast "encryption" and "security" on the marketing materials, while the actual implementation could be flawed beyond redemption.

croes|4 months ago

Does that prevent something like a Flock mode that sends the data directly to them?

comboy|4 months ago

Just keep your cameras on separate vlan and access through eg. wireguard. Any company can have the best intentions but gov can just come to them, tell them to implement whatever is needed - even if that means lying to their users - and have access to everything. Probably even with plausible deniability for all parties involved, but not sure anyone even still cares about that.