4 ms·
Yes, scale matters but the crappiest camera (not even going as "far" as a couple of hundred dollars for a few cheap cameras, a Pi, a memory card, a Google Coral
by close04 3y ago
Yes, scale matters but the crappiest camera (not even going as "far" as a couple of hundred dollars for a few cheap cameras, a Pi, a memory card, a Google Coral, and Frigate) is better at surveillance than a regular human. Saving some simple event snapshots is orders of magnitude more reliable than someone's hazy memory. Even the simplest surveillance system is nothing like a grandma looking out the peephole and more like guards taking shifts to patrol.
Your internal surveillance system is fully within your control and mostly surveils you so that's good and a different world from cloud based external surveillance. But such a system still "surveils" more than a human could when it comes to other family members or guests just by its mere existence. Things that would go unnoticed, or easily forgotten don't have to anymore. That's a danger in itself because it cerates the social acceptability of permanent surveillance. Your kids don't get to break that vase and quickly hide the evidence because your system saved a snapshot. When that becomes normal for a person, being watched by every neighbor's Ring is a tiny extra step.
Disclosure, I run a setup similar to yours based on Frigate while taking great care to not intrude on anyone else's privacy because local laws and people don't take kindly to that. I am feeling that I'm invading my family's privacy though, which is why it tends to be on only when nobody else is at home.
- giantg2 3y ago"Things that would go unnoticed, or easily forgotten don't have to anymore. That's a danger in itself because it cerates the social acceptability of permanent surveillance. Your kids don't get to break that vase and quickly hide the evidence because your system saved a snapshot." Mine is only on the outside of the house. I also don't have it set to alert, so I'm only reviewing it if I discover a problem in some other way - this is actually less intrusive than the grandma scenario. I view private property surveillance as normal - stores have been doing this for over a generation already. I do agree that public surveillance, or the collation/centralization of private surveillance is a big problem.
- 082349872349872 3y agoI understand the difference you're describing, and agree with it; consider the difference between the cost of storage and retrieval to the StaSi and to any three letter organisation today. (One potential small mitigation: if any surveillance streams had to be public, at least the watching might be mutual?) I had just been considering that maybe we were fortunate enough to live through a local maximum of privacy: people in villages had less, and people in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longhouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longhouse cultures much less. (In https://barykin-pin-up.ru/#/i/neudachnoe-svidanie https://barykin-pin-up.ru/#/i/neudachnoe-svidanie the young couple seems to have been hoping to get a little privacy via an afternoon rendezvous, but her neighbourhood is as, or even more, curious than the cat...)