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Ring introducing new feature to allow police to live-stream access to cameras

381 points by xoa 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
greenie_beans 1y ago
fuck this bullshit
SoftTalker 1y ago
I cannot imagine installing surveillance devices in my home but if I did set up cameras they would be on a private network and saving to devices I control.
- csomar 1y ago
  At the rate the US is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes illegal. Add that most of these cameras are chinese and then maybe you won’t have that choice anymore.
  - donkeybeer 1y ago
    American government is the biggest threat to American citizens, not the Chinese. (Just as the Chinese government is the biggest threat to Chinese citizens, not the American.)
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      This is what the founders realized 250 years ago. They did a pretty good job with a constitution to limit government power. Not perfect though. I wish they had been able to foresee the risks of power-accumulating career politicians and had term-limited them. They thought the voters would reject abuses of power but turns out that voters will vote for promises of free stuff.
georgeburdell 1y ago
I’d be interested to know if anyone has a moderate cost system that doesn’t force you to use a company’s cloud (and thus making them prone to abuse like this). I personally have a POE setup with some commercial grade cameras ($400 a pop), with attached NAS on a private network, and home-rolled a means to access the cameras remotely, but it’s not exactly economical or practical
- rudedogg 1y ago
  They're a little pricey but https://www.ui.com https://www.ui.com is nice. It's what I want to replace my Ring with
  - mikeyouse 1y ago
    Recently replaced my Eufy system with UI ones - I’m a big fan so far. Picked up a few new 4k ones for important areas and got the rest used on marketplace via a 4-pack of 2k ones for $150 from a hair salon that had changed systems.
- nsxwolf 1y ago
  The TP Link Tapo ecosystem is really good and can record directly onto SD cards. Seamlessly works with Google Home, I can access my cameras outside of the house without signing up for their cloud option.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  I've got a bunch of POE Reolink cameras and their doorbell cam. LAN only, no centralized cloud server. So far happy with them.
  - ImaCake 1y ago
    +1 for Reolink. We have a reolink camera hooked into home assistant, the whole setup is local and reolink's API exposes every single feature in home assistant with no additional setup needed. My house also came with an existing NVR camera network which I can view in home assistant over my router without it ever going to the cloud as well.
ActorNightly 1y ago
Key point is police can request, they can't just log in to your cloud and take footage Then again, doesn't seem like the law matters anymore at least on a federal level.
aerostable_slug 1y ago
It seems like people are missing the fact that it's opt-in from the police to the consumer. It's within the end consumer's control to allow the access or not, so by that standard it's not in any way abuse. It's not Orwellian overreach or, as the EFF claims a breach of Ring's customers' trust, if the customer gives up the data willingly and knowingly. And lots and lots of people will.
- phendrenad2 1y ago
  [flagged]
- DJBunnies 1y ago
  Did you audit the code?
- bsder 1y ago
  > It seems like people are missing the fact that it's opt-in from the police to the consumer. There is no such thing short of a physical switch. To believe otherwise is the absolute height of naïveté.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- iJohnDoe 1y ago
  This has been in Ring for years and police have their own dashboard. Most importantly, it was already found Ring or Police have enabled access on their own. Based on the articles, do you really think Ring and police cannot just get whatever they want? https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2023/05/rings-privacy-failures-led-spying-and-harassment-through-home-security-cameras#:~:text=Before%20the%20days%20of%20internet,tied%20to%20who%20you%20are. https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2023/05/rings-priva... https://www.reviewed.com/smarthome/features/ring-changes-police-access-video-footage-january-2024 https://www.reviewed.com/smarthome/features/ring-changes-pol... https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-regulation/surveillance/amazon-ring-halts-controversial-police-video-sharing-program-547455/amp https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-regulation/surveillance/amazon-r... https://theintercept.com/2019/01/10/amazon-ring-security-camera/#:~:text=At%20the%20same%20time%2C%20the,their%20companions%20were%20similarly%20informed. https://theintercept.com/2019/01/10/amazon-ring-security-cam...
josephcsible 1y ago
[flagged]
- vidarh 1y ago
  The owner isn't the only party whose privacy is being affected unless you believe these cameras will never capture anything other than the owners.
  - josephcsible 1y ago
    You could also invite a police officer over to your house to watch recordings from a completely offline air-gapped camera pointed at the street.
    - cma 1y ago
      There is a major qualitative difference if it becomes something like police AI systems analyzing it all continuously.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - vidarh 1y ago
      You could, and then it would be limited by available number of police officers, and time, and so the risk of, and potential scale of, abuse would be far lower. The opportunity cost is often the difference between something being reasonable and nearly the same act becoming grossly invasive. A real world example: Norway has traditionally had public tax lists where anyone could see everyones taxable income and tax paid. Before the internet this involved going to an office, and so the opportunity cost was high enough that most people never would without good reason (e.g. suspecting tax fraud and wanting to substantiate it before going to the police; or investigative journalism). When the internet arrived, the lists were soon made available online. Suddenly all the newspapers offered searchable interfaces where you could look up all your neighbours and friends in seconds. What had been seen as a reasonable tradeoff between transparency of the tax system and transparency of society (though some would argue it was encouraging snitching...) became seen as grossly invasive, and the question was raised whether to shut off access entirely. Instead restrictions were added to try to redress the balance, and now while you can still look it up, there are limits (500 views per month, unless you're registered as part of the press, which has special access), and the person you look up can see who has viewed their information if they themselves log in[1], which raises the barrier to just randomly snooping. The same information has been available to the same people the whole time. All that has changed is how convenient accessing it is, and how likely it is that snooping at someones data might affect you, and the result has been wildly different perceived levels of invasiveness. [1] https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/forms/search-the-tax-lists/ https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/forms/search-the-tax-lists/
conartist6 1y ago
"Show proof that you use AI to get promoted." Yep that company won't last too much longer. Managers managing managers managing lemmings.
- skirmish 1y ago
  Google added exactly this to SWE role attributes, to be checked each performance review cycle. Managers managing managers, directors managing directors. Are you shorting GOOG right now?
  - conartist6 1y ago
    No, I put all my chips on red. Started a startup to do the deep user-focused innovation work they no longer care to do.
haunter 1y ago
The feature exist and that guarantees the law enforcement will abuse this sooner or later. Opt-in doesn’t mean anything. You have to be total naive if you still believe that this is a “safe” feature to enable.
- xoa 1y ago
  Yes, this is my take as well, and I think it's the correct one from both a technical and legal POV. It's one thing for the government to try to compel an organization or person to create a feature they want from scratch. They have made noises in that direction in the past (like the FBI vs Apple trying to invoke the All Writs Act) but it's been on very shaky ground, on both 1st and 13th Amendment grounds as well as others. But the government can be a lot more aggressive and courts a lot more permissive when it comes to merely making use of functionality that already exists. Even putting aside all the massive numbers of perverse incentives, but the thing is of course those shouldn't be put aside, we've seen this movie before over and over and over again. Once a feature exists that can generate a lot of direct revenue for a company and the only thing that keeps them from turning the knob up is "we're totally not evil cross our hearts!". Like holy shit, in 2025 who really goes "oh well it's opt-in!" I think this particular one is pretty important to know about because a lot of people deploy Ring stuff almost by default, and some HNers (including me as it happens) have some level of influence or even control over it. I always meant to put some effort into updating my self-hosted security system efforts but this is a major kick in the butt. Have to know this exists and be able to offer solid credible alternatives. Edit: to add a direct pertinent example, WE LITERALLY JUST HAD 5 DAYS AGO ON HN A 500+ COMMENT HUGE THREAD ON "Oakland cops gave ICE license plate data; SFPD also illegally shared with feds" [0]. And there are people really claiming "nothing to see here, move along, local and feds would totally never conspire to abuse anything in violation of the law let alone not in violation of the law"!? ---- 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44561716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44561716
  - fnordpiglet 1y ago
    I am less worried about local law enforcement. They will have little ability to strong arm Amazon and have oversight and regulation, as well as judicial review, even if it’s not always effective it’s always there. DHS has become lawless, and they are eager to strong arm and over reach after having dismantled their own oversight and ignoring their own regulations. They are working hard to move fast and break the law faster than the law can keep up and the Supreme Court has made it very difficult to seek remedy. Because they are not doing criminal justice but instead civil administrative enforcement the web of oversight and review and stronger civil rights for criminal justice don’t apply. They have become the largest police force, militarized, and with enormous budget, latitude, and blank check support from the highest levels of political government. They absolutely can strong arm Amazon into doing what they want, and absolutely will use Ring camera against their owners and neighbors. In six months we created a secret police rivaling the KGB, gestapo, State Security Police, and SSD.
matt3210 1y ago
Opt in means nothing in the face of a legal subpoena
- xoa 1y ago
  >Opt in means nothing in the face of a legal subpoena Or scarier, a National Security Letter the government claims the company can't even talk about except maybe in secret court. Or perhaps scariest, a """"National Security Letter ;^)"""", ie, the company absolutely wants to gleefully cooperate with the government and give it whatever it wants for the right price, but also wants to maintain a veneer of "we totally care" and the government obligingly produces some demand and the company then goes "oh geez we totally place customers first and privacy is our highest priority ....but we had to because of terrorist pedo murder rioter jaywalkers, the government ORDERED us to not our fault nothing we could do!" while facilitating it without any challenge at all.
- floitsch 1y ago
  In that case they don't need consent anyway and it's not about this new feature.
zug_zug 1y ago
Let me guess "opt-in" means checked by default and hidden 12 menus deep. Or worse-yet, opt-in means "Hey our rates are going up, but not if you agree to this" (something comcast did recently). Or opt-in is stored in some database somewhere and might "accidentally be misread" due to a "bug". If they want real-opt-in then it should be a SMS message at the time they want to know, and a phone-number you can reach out to for more information. This would give an audit trail at the very least.
- Barbing 1y ago
  Good bet. What’s the Comcast story? (just did a quick search)
  - Tokumei-no-hito 1y ago
    was on HN a few weeks back. imaging through wifi and was auto enabled for their routers.
    - tzs 1y ago
      That can’t be what they are thinking of because (1) it is not enabled by default and (2) and is not associated with any price changes.
      - Tokumei-no-hito 1y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726 relevant quotes: Xfinity won't give folks in certain locales (maybe everywhere in the US?) unlimited bandwidth unless they use their modem/router. This seems like a good reason that practice should be illegal. AzzyHN 19 days ago | parent | next [–] If you want to remove the 1.2TB data cap, you can either pay $25/mo and get Xfinity's gateway router "included" OR pay $30/mo to use your own modem/router.
        tzs 1y ago
        To recap, we are trying to figure out what someone meant when they said: >> Or worse-yet, opt-in means "Hey our rates are going up, but not if you agree to this" (something comcast did recently). We need something where they said rates are going up, but said you could keep your old price if you agreed to something. You suggested it was the "imaging through wifi and was auto enabled for their routers". To fit what we are looking for it would have to be that Comcast put that on their routers and enabled it and raised their rates, but said that if you kept it enabled you could keep the old rate. That doesn't fit because (1) they made it available on their routers but you have to explicitly enable it and (2) whether or not you enable it does not affect your price at all. The way they price unlimited data, $30/month if bought separately, or bundled with one of their routers for $25/month is annoying, but doesn't fit what we are looking for because the person said they are talking about something done recently. Unlimited has been handled that way for ages. They did recently announce a new set of 4 plans that are nationwide and for new customers replace their olds plans. These plans make a significant change to unlimited and to modem/router rental. Current customers can switch to the new plans if they want. But I don't think this is what he was thinking of. The new plans are 300 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1 Gbps, and 2 Gbps no contract plans. Currently you can get them with 1 or 5 year price guarantees, but as I said they are no contract plans so you are not locking yourself into staying with Comcast. I'm not sure why anyone would not choose the price guarantee option. For new users in my area the price without a guarantee is $80, $95, $110, and $140, respectively. With the 1 year guarantee those $40, $55, $70, and $100. (This all assumes you go paperless and use autopay--add $10 is not). With the 5 year guarantee those are $55, $70, $85, and $115. I'm an existing customer on a plan that is $69/month with 400 Mpbs download. To switch to the new plans without the guarantee the price is $70, $85, $100, $140. For the first 3 that is also the price with the 1 or 5 year guarantees. For the 2 gig plan it is $100 with the 1 year guarantee and $115 with the 5 year guarantee. All of these new plans are unlimited data. All of them include modem/router. You are not required to use the modem/router they provide. You can use your own, and you will get unlimited data. Whether you use theirs or yours does not affect the price. I don't think this is what he was thinking of, because existing users can keep their existing plans. They aren't raising prices on the old plans and saying "switch to the new plans if you want to keep the old price" so it doesn't fit. In fact it is more the opposite. Take my case, currently paying $69/month with a 1.2 GB cap and using my own modem. If I want to add unlimited to my current plan that would add $30/month, bringing it $99/month. If I switch to the 500 Mbps new plan and continue using my modem [1] that would get me a 25% speed boost and unlimited and save me $14/month over going unlimited on the old plan. [1] I'd probably use their modem. Mine is old and doesn't support the higher upload speeds the Comcast rolled out a while back. My current plan, and the non-gig new plans, can do 100 Mbps up, but my modem can only do 35.
sergiotapia 1y ago
What's a good dumb way to check on pets via camera/talk to them while you're on vacation? I have ring cameras at home specifically for this use case. but I now want to get rid of them.
mkbelieve 1y ago
"feature"
drannex 1y ago
Fuck the police state, and all the technology companies and executives trying to cash in on fascism in the name of "security" This will be abused by the government, by the police, and every othet nefarious organizations and individuals possible.
- pixxel 1y ago
  Fuck people for installing this shit. Parasites need a host.
  - op00to 1y ago
    Really? You have that sort of attitude towards normal everyday people who absolutely don’t have the experience or knowledge that this is even a factor?
    - xerox13ster 1y ago
      For what it’s worth I agree with them. Hanson’s razor says never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity. Nowhere in there, does it say that stupidity should be acceptable or accepted. Yes, fuck them for being too stupid to know better. At some point in their life they made a decision to disengage from any use of their brain, and have remained that way to the detriment of everybody around them.
      - ozgrakkurt 1y ago
        Hating people takes something away from you, if you start hating regular people you don’t know, that might be detrimental to your psychological peace
Havoc 1y ago
Don’t think anyone vaguely tech savvy is buying these anymore
IAmGraydon 1y ago
Why don’t we call this by its true name - Amazon? You guys do realize that Amazon intentionally keeps its name off the product for a reason, right? They have Amazon batteries, web hosting, makeup, and every other thing you could possibly imagine. This product though? It’s just “Ring” so that Amazon can avoid the brand damage that comes from facilitating a police state. That is their intention, and they are keeping it at arms length for that reason. The headline of this article should read “Amazon Ring introducing new feature…” not just “Ring”. If we want it to stop, we need to hold the company responsible for what they’re doing.
Beestie 1y ago
Reason #37 why I went with Eufy instead.
mindslight 1y ago
So if I enable this will the police at least use the feeds to only summarily execute me for partaking in my 2nd amendment right to night time home defense, and let the rest of my family live?
thephyber 1y ago
As if privacy-minded users needed any more reason to avoid Ring…
- binarymax 1y ago
  But I can't avoid it. 2 of my 4 neighbors have this installed. So now, everytime we are outside, on my own property, we're being captured without consent.
jsrozner 1y ago
It's time for regulation that no images of people may be retained for any commercial purpose without explicit permission of the person whose image is retained. Facial recognition performed on any person who has not granted explicit permission (or, in the case of government, against whom a search warrant has not been obtained) should be illegal. Nor shall any compressed version, broadly defined, of the data be retained (i.e., no training on any sort of facial or pose data without explicit permission of all whose images are used in training). Penalties should be in the %s of revenue or company assets. Whistleblowers should receive large sums for identifying violations. In a broader vein, it's time for regulation forbidding the retention or aggregation of any person's data for any commercial purpose other than the one most proximal to the actual transaction in which the person engaged, unless they explicitly opt in. What would the latter mean? Among other things, targeted ads and recommendation systems would become illegal. Cross-user aggregation (or e.g., a company engaging in any user-longitudinal data analytics) would be illegal. In SQL language, ideally the only time you could do any query with a user ID returning multiple rows for further use would be to serve data directly back to the user. In the long run, such queries should be impossible by requiring something like a) per-user encrypted storage, b) user owned data, c) non-correlatable per-user IDs across transactions. It will never happen because -- as noted in the article -- many folks in SillyCon valley and government are technofascists, but it should, because our current situation violates all reasonable notions of privacy.
- tantalor 1y ago
  > only time you could do any query with a user ID returning multiple rows for further use would be to serve data directly back to the user What do you mean by that?
  - jsrozner 1y ago
    I'm saying we should not allow per-user analytics. Currently companies build a profile of each user and correlate that with all the other similar users. Then they target other users who are hypothesized to be similar. I'm arguing that no per-user analytics should be able to be conducted. A store can track how many times product A is purchased, but not that product A and B were purchased by the same user. Using the latter info for anything other than providing a summary of what the user has purchased (to the user) should be illegal. Yeah it would be complicated. But you could do it by creating a new obfuscated user ID for each transaction. Or even better, by having each person store their own data and mandating that companies delete all records. The company can provide a signature on the transaction record (a receipt!) that the user keeps to prove the purchase if there's a conflict later on. But the company cannot keep a copy of any per-user info, the receipt, or the transaction info; nothing beyond the fact that product A was purchased on a certain date.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44608681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44608681
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
Not only do the prisoners have almost no rights, the innocent are treated like criminals too
fma 1y ago
I was looking at security systems. It seems, Ring makes it very difficult to have any sort of offline operations. Recording onto SD card is limited or impossible. After seeing this, I realize this is likely by design. You have to be connected so that the surveillance state can get access at some point, somehow.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- johnisgood 1y ago
  That is wild, I think being able to record onto an SD card or whatever should be the bare minimum requirement. I personally would never buy anything that does not have an offline option.
- jazzyjackson 1y ago
  Yes, they have a feature with their 'Pro' base station and Premium subscription, to store video locally on SD card, but still the only way to access the video is through the Ring app. IMO they are just choosing not to compete with the on-prem closed circuit systems, which represent a niche market compared to normies who want a notification when someone rings their video doorbell. https://ring.com/support/articles/pmod0/Using-MicroSD-Cards-for-Ring-Alarm-Pro https://ring.com/support/articles/pmod0/Using-MicroSD-Cards-...
  - fma 1y ago
    Yes I saw that...what's wild is if you pay more money to store locally on your own memory, you LOSE cloud storage. You don't get both. https://community-ring.sprinklr.com/conversations/ring-alarm/ring-edge-on-alarm-pro-local-video-storage/65803bc051f6e6fe7807613b?lang=en https://community-ring.sprinklr.com/conversations/ring-alarm...
KPGv2 1y ago
I feel vindicated by my choice to have local-only security cameras
deadbabe 1y ago
Is there some open source alternative to stuff like Ring?
booleandilemma 1y ago
I'm sad that we're quickly heading towards a future where there will be monitoring of all people, at all times. AI agents will flag people for leaving their house too late at night, or not leaving their house often enough. Our civilization is full of intelligence but it lacks wisdom.
Ccecil 1y ago
My sisters bought a Ring camera for my parent's house. They asked me to install it. Before I did I said to my parents "Everything that happens in front of this camera is sent to a 3rd party. Police and others may be able to access this without your permission and you never really know who they are selling data to. Do you still want me to install it?" They said No. It is still in the box on the counter after over 2 years.
- eth0up 1y ago
  Tell your parents a stranger somewhere faraway really, sincerely appreciates them. And you can tell them too, objectively, that they're 1 (or 2) in a million. The Ring situation was already slimy, having smoothly accessible channels for LE to bypass customer's refusal to cooperate with informal footage requests. Live streaming at will, would really put things in perspective, exalting the morose, lone clinical cynic to an urban archetype. I understand folks who are into traipsing through life before a perennial, unblinking audience of strangers. I've been afflicted with diseases myself. But foisting it on neighbors seems biblically ungood. I know it's socially acceptable to mock and belittle snowballs, but I think this will be a big one.
stuaxo 1y ago
Wow, that is completely terrible.
surume 1y ago
Thanks, I think I’ll stay with the old school non-malware version ;)
qmr 1y ago
Stop putting this shit in your homes people.
almosthere 1y ago
yikes - and I also wonder how many people have these installed inside their house (as in filming the interior).
precommunicator 1y ago
My strategy for Ring when I used it as it was cheapest option with cloud recording and notifications (what's the point of local recordings if someone can just steal them) was to just connect it to a smart plug and then to UPS. I simply disabled power to it just before I got home.
nobodywillobsrv 1y ago
It feels like what is needed is some kind of protocol for decentralizing the police force (and judiciary downstream). It's a nice idea to have have choices (hopefully it is opt in) but it would be nice to have more choices for protection and law given our current situtation as it is unfolding in various countries.
hulitu 1y ago
> Ring introducing new feature to allow police to live-stream access to cameras Don't worry, you have nothing to hide, don't you ? They forgot "legaly" in this sentence. Police already has access to it.
kid64 1y ago
I mean what are the privacy-friendly alternatives? Assume others in this market are equally shady. What is the safe, self-hosted solution where we can monitor CCTV from our phones?
- Szpadel 1y ago
  I personally use unifi doorbell, mostly because I already had dream machine, but AFAIK they have also less expensive options.
- kelnos 1y ago
  There are plenty, but they're all very DIY and I don't think there are any turnkey solutions that you can just plug in and have work. I think a better question is... why do we all need this? I get that everyone these days is afraid of everyone and everything, but it's not rational. Very few people actually need a doorbell camera. And if something actually does happen where you think video evidence might be useful, nine times out of ten the police aren't going to help you anyway.
  - pixxel 1y ago
    [dead]
- pixxel 1y ago
  [dead]
henvic 1y ago
This makes me seriously reconsider continuing with my Ring subscription. The chances this will be abused are 1000%. * At the moment I only have sensors so that Ring tracks movement inside the house. Only when I'm out of the house for an extended amount of time (days), I turn on the cameras.
- ilinx 1y ago
  Let me know if you find a good privacy-focused alternative. I’m absolutely replacing mine after this.
- saucymew 1y ago
  +1 here. The last time I checked, they're custom (read: expensive) and require building out your own backend video storage.
howdyhowdy 1y ago
Are they breaking the E2EE feature, or is this for folks that didn't care/were scared off by the red text that said they wouldn't be able to recover their videos if they lost their trusted devices?
type0 1y ago
Such a great feature, for the police.

381 points by xoa 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

greenie_beans 1y ago

fuck this bullshit

SoftTalker 1y ago

I cannot imagine installing surveillance devices in my home but if I did set up cameras they would be on a private network and saving to devices I control.

csomar 1y ago
At the rate the US is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes illegal. Add that most of these cameras are chinese and then maybe you won’t have that choice anymore.
- donkeybeer 1y ago
  American government is the biggest threat to American citizens, not the Chinese. (Just as the Chinese government is the biggest threat to Chinese citizens, not the American.)
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    This is what the founders realized 250 years ago. They did a pretty good job with a constitution to limit government power. Not perfect though. I wish they had been able to foresee the risks of power-accumulating career politicians and had term-limited them. They thought the voters would reject abuses of power but turns out that voters will vote for promises of free stuff.

georgeburdell 1y ago

I’d be interested to know if anyone has a moderate cost system that doesn’t force you to use a company’s cloud (and thus making them prone to abuse like this). I personally have a POE setup with some commercial grade cameras ($400 a pop), with attached NAS on a private network, and home-rolled a means to access the cameras remotely, but it’s not exactly economical or practical

rudedogg 1y ago
They're a little pricey but https://www.ui.com https://www.ui.com is nice. It's what I want to replace my Ring with
- mikeyouse 1y ago
  Recently replaced my Eufy system with UI ones - I’m a big fan so far. Picked up a few new 4k ones for important areas and got the rest used on marketplace via a 4-pack of 2k ones for $150 from a hair salon that had changed systems.
nsxwolf 1y ago
The TP Link Tapo ecosystem is really good and can record directly onto SD cards. Seamlessly works with Google Home, I can access my cameras outside of the house without signing up for their cloud option.
ryandrake 1y ago
I've got a bunch of POE Reolink cameras and their doorbell cam. LAN only, no centralized cloud server. So far happy with them.
- ImaCake 1y ago
  +1 for Reolink. We have a reolink camera hooked into home assistant, the whole setup is local and reolink's API exposes every single feature in home assistant with no additional setup needed. My house also came with an existing NVR camera network which I can view in home assistant over my router without it ever going to the cloud as well.

ActorNightly 1y ago

Key point is police can request, they can't just log in to your cloud and take footage Then again, doesn't seem like the law matters anymore at least on a federal level.

aerostable_slug 1y ago

It seems like people are missing the fact that it's opt-in from the police to the consumer. It's within the end consumer's control to allow the access or not, so by that standard it's not in any way abuse. It's not Orwellian overreach or, as the EFF claims a breach of Ring's customers' trust, if the customer gives up the data willingly and knowingly. And lots and lots of people will.

phendrenad2 1y ago
[flagged]
DJBunnies 1y ago
Did you audit the code?
bsder 1y ago
> It seems like people are missing the fact that it's opt-in from the police to the consumer. There is no such thing short of a physical switch. To believe otherwise is the absolute height of naïveté.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
iJohnDoe 1y ago
This has been in Ring for years and police have their own dashboard. Most importantly, it was already found Ring or Police have enabled access on their own. Based on the articles, do you really think Ring and police cannot just get whatever they want? https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2023/05/rings-privacy-failures-led-spying-and-harassment-through-home-security-cameras#:~:text=Before%20the%20days%20of%20internet,tied%20to%20who%20you%20are. https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2023/05/rings-priva... https://www.reviewed.com/smarthome/features/ring-changes-police-access-video-footage-january-2024 https://www.reviewed.com/smarthome/features/ring-changes-pol... https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-regulation/surveillance/amazon-ring-halts-controversial-police-video-sharing-program-547455/amp https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-regulation/surveillance/amazon-r... https://theintercept.com/2019/01/10/amazon-ring-security-camera/#:~:text=At%20the%20same%20time%2C%20the,their%20companions%20were%20similarly%20informed. https://theintercept.com/2019/01/10/amazon-ring-security-cam...

josephcsible 1y ago

[flagged]

vidarh 1y ago
The owner isn't the only party whose privacy is being affected unless you believe these cameras will never capture anything other than the owners.
- josephcsible 1y ago
  You could also invite a police officer over to your house to watch recordings from a completely offline air-gapped camera pointed at the street.
  - cma 1y ago
    There is a major qualitative difference if it becomes something like police AI systems analyzing it all continuously.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - vidarh 1y ago
    You could, and then it would be limited by available number of police officers, and time, and so the risk of, and potential scale of, abuse would be far lower. The opportunity cost is often the difference between something being reasonable and nearly the same act becoming grossly invasive. A real world example: Norway has traditionally had public tax lists where anyone could see everyones taxable income and tax paid. Before the internet this involved going to an office, and so the opportunity cost was high enough that most people never would without good reason (e.g. suspecting tax fraud and wanting to substantiate it before going to the police; or investigative journalism). When the internet arrived, the lists were soon made available online. Suddenly all the newspapers offered searchable interfaces where you could look up all your neighbours and friends in seconds. What had been seen as a reasonable tradeoff between transparency of the tax system and transparency of society (though some would argue it was encouraging snitching...) became seen as grossly invasive, and the question was raised whether to shut off access entirely. Instead restrictions were added to try to redress the balance, and now while you can still look it up, there are limits (500 views per month, unless you're registered as part of the press, which has special access), and the person you look up can see who has viewed their information if they themselves log in[1], which raises the barrier to just randomly snooping. The same information has been available to the same people the whole time. All that has changed is how convenient accessing it is, and how likely it is that snooping at someones data might affect you, and the result has been wildly different perceived levels of invasiveness. [1] https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/forms/search-the-tax-lists/ https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/forms/search-the-tax-lists/

conartist6 1y ago

"Show proof that you use AI to get promoted." Yep that company won't last too much longer. Managers managing managers managing lemmings.

skirmish 1y ago
Google added exactly this to SWE role attributes, to be checked each performance review cycle. Managers managing managers, directors managing directors. Are you shorting GOOG right now?
- conartist6 1y ago
  No, I put all my chips on red. Started a startup to do the deep user-focused innovation work they no longer care to do.

haunter 1y ago

The feature exist and that guarantees the law enforcement will abuse this sooner or later. Opt-in doesn’t mean anything. You have to be total naive if you still believe that this is a “safe” feature to enable.

xoa 1y ago
Yes, this is my take as well, and I think it's the correct one from both a technical and legal POV. It's one thing for the government to try to compel an organization or person to create a feature they want from scratch. They have made noises in that direction in the past (like the FBI vs Apple trying to invoke the All Writs Act) but it's been on very shaky ground, on both 1st and 13th Amendment grounds as well as others. But the government can be a lot more aggressive and courts a lot more permissive when it comes to merely making use of functionality that already exists. Even putting aside all the massive numbers of perverse incentives, but the thing is of course those shouldn't be put aside, we've seen this movie before over and over and over again. Once a feature exists that can generate a lot of direct revenue for a company and the only thing that keeps them from turning the knob up is "we're totally not evil cross our hearts!". Like holy shit, in 2025 who really goes "oh well it's opt-in!" I think this particular one is pretty important to know about because a lot of people deploy Ring stuff almost by default, and some HNers (including me as it happens) have some level of influence or even control over it. I always meant to put some effort into updating my self-hosted security system efforts but this is a major kick in the butt. Have to know this exists and be able to offer solid credible alternatives. Edit: to add a direct pertinent example, WE LITERALLY JUST HAD 5 DAYS AGO ON HN A 500+ COMMENT HUGE THREAD ON "Oakland cops gave ICE license plate data; SFPD also illegally shared with feds" [0]. And there are people really claiming "nothing to see here, move along, local and feds would totally never conspire to abuse anything in violation of the law let alone not in violation of the law"!? ---- 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44561716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44561716
- fnordpiglet 1y ago
  I am less worried about local law enforcement. They will have little ability to strong arm Amazon and have oversight and regulation, as well as judicial review, even if it’s not always effective it’s always there. DHS has become lawless, and they are eager to strong arm and over reach after having dismantled their own oversight and ignoring their own regulations. They are working hard to move fast and break the law faster than the law can keep up and the Supreme Court has made it very difficult to seek remedy. Because they are not doing criminal justice but instead civil administrative enforcement the web of oversight and review and stronger civil rights for criminal justice don’t apply. They have become the largest police force, militarized, and with enormous budget, latitude, and blank check support from the highest levels of political government. They absolutely can strong arm Amazon into doing what they want, and absolutely will use Ring camera against their owners and neighbors. In six months we created a secret police rivaling the KGB, gestapo, State Security Police, and SSD.

matt3210 1y ago

Opt in means nothing in the face of a legal subpoena

xoa 1y ago
>Opt in means nothing in the face of a legal subpoena Or scarier, a National Security Letter the government claims the company can't even talk about except maybe in secret court. Or perhaps scariest, a """"National Security Letter ;^)"""", ie, the company absolutely wants to gleefully cooperate with the government and give it whatever it wants for the right price, but also wants to maintain a veneer of "we totally care" and the government obligingly produces some demand and the company then goes "oh geez we totally place customers first and privacy is our highest priority ....but we had to because of terrorist pedo murder rioter jaywalkers, the government ORDERED us to not our fault nothing we could do!" while facilitating it without any challenge at all.
floitsch 1y ago
In that case they don't need consent anyway and it's not about this new feature.

zug_zug 1y ago

Let me guess "opt-in" means checked by default and hidden 12 menus deep. Or worse-yet, opt-in means "Hey our rates are going up, but not if you agree to this" (something comcast did recently). Or opt-in is stored in some database somewhere and might "accidentally be misread" due to a "bug". If they want real-opt-in then it should be a SMS message at the time they want to know, and a phone-number you can reach out to for more information. This would give an audit trail at the very least.

Barbing 1y ago
Good bet. What’s the Comcast story? (just did a quick search)
- Tokumei-no-hito 1y ago
  was on HN a few weeks back. imaging through wifi and was auto enabled for their routers.
  - tzs 1y ago
    That can’t be what they are thinking of because (1) it is not enabled by default and (2) and is not associated with any price changes.
    - Tokumei-no-hito 1y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726 relevant quotes: Xfinity won't give folks in certain locales (maybe everywhere in the US?) unlimited bandwidth unless they use their modem/router. This seems like a good reason that practice should be illegal. AzzyHN 19 days ago | parent | next [–] If you want to remove the 1.2TB data cap, you can either pay $25/mo and get Xfinity's gateway router "included" OR pay $30/mo to use your own modem/router.
      - tzs 1y ago
        To recap, we are trying to figure out what someone meant when they said: >> Or worse-yet, opt-in means "Hey our rates are going up, but not if you agree to this" (something comcast did recently). We need something where they said rates are going up, but said you could keep your old price if you agreed to something. You suggested it was the "imaging through wifi and was auto enabled for their routers". To fit what we are looking for it would have to be that Comcast put that on their routers and enabled it and raised their rates, but said that if you kept it enabled you could keep the old rate. That doesn't fit because (1) they made it available on their routers but you have to explicitly enable it and (2) whether or not you enable it does not affect your price at all. The way they price unlimited data, $30/month if bought separately, or bundled with one of their routers for $25/month is annoying, but doesn't fit what we are looking for because the person said they are talking about something done recently. Unlimited has been handled that way for ages. They did recently announce a new set of 4 plans that are nationwide and for new customers replace their olds plans. These plans make a significant change to unlimited and to modem/router rental. Current customers can switch to the new plans if they want. But I don't think this is what he was thinking of. The new plans are 300 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1 Gbps, and 2 Gbps no contract plans. Currently you can get them with 1 or 5 year price guarantees, but as I said they are no contract plans so you are not locking yourself into staying with Comcast. I'm not sure why anyone would not choose the price guarantee option. For new users in my area the price without a guarantee is $80, $95, $110, and $140, respectively. With the 1 year guarantee those $40, $55, $70, and $100. (This all assumes you go paperless and use autopay--add $10 is not). With the 5 year guarantee those are $55, $70, $85, and $115. I'm an existing customer on a plan that is $69/month with 400 Mpbs download. To switch to the new plans without the guarantee the price is $70, $85, $100, $140. For the first 3 that is also the price with the 1 or 5 year guarantees. For the 2 gig plan it is $100 with the 1 year guarantee and $115 with the 5 year guarantee. All of these new plans are unlimited data. All of them include modem/router. You are not required to use the modem/router they provide. You can use your own, and you will get unlimited data. Whether you use theirs or yours does not affect the price. I don't think this is what he was thinking of, because existing users can keep their existing plans. They aren't raising prices on the old plans and saying "switch to the new plans if you want to keep the old price" so it doesn't fit. In fact it is more the opposite. Take my case, currently paying $69/month with a 1.2 GB cap and using my own modem. If I want to add unlimited to my current plan that would add $30/month, bringing it $99/month. If I switch to the 500 Mbps new plan and continue using my modem [1] that would get me a 25% speed boost and unlimited and save me $14/month over going unlimited on the old plan. [1] I'd probably use their modem. Mine is old and doesn't support the higher upload speeds the Comcast rolled out a while back. My current plan, and the non-gig new plans, can do 100 Mbps up, but my modem can only do 35.

sergiotapia 1y ago

What's a good dumb way to check on pets via camera/talk to them while you're on vacation? I have ring cameras at home specifically for this use case. but I now want to get rid of them.

mkbelieve 1y ago

"feature"

drannex 1y ago

Fuck the police state, and all the technology companies and executives trying to cash in on fascism in the name of "security" This will be abused by the government, by the police, and every othet nefarious organizations and individuals possible.

pixxel 1y ago
Fuck people for installing this shit. Parasites need a host.
- op00to 1y ago
  Really? You have that sort of attitude towards normal everyday people who absolutely don’t have the experience or knowledge that this is even a factor?
  - xerox13ster 1y ago
    For what it’s worth I agree with them. Hanson’s razor says never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity. Nowhere in there, does it say that stupidity should be acceptable or accepted. Yes, fuck them for being too stupid to know better. At some point in their life they made a decision to disengage from any use of their brain, and have remained that way to the detriment of everybody around them.
    - ozgrakkurt 1y ago
      Hating people takes something away from you, if you start hating regular people you don’t know, that might be detrimental to your psychological peace

Havoc 1y ago

Don’t think anyone vaguely tech savvy is buying these anymore

IAmGraydon 1y ago

Why don’t we call this by its true name - Amazon? You guys do realize that Amazon intentionally keeps its name off the product for a reason, right? They have Amazon batteries, web hosting, makeup, and every other thing you could possibly imagine. This product though? It’s just “Ring” so that Amazon can avoid the brand damage that comes from facilitating a police state. That is their intention, and they are keeping it at arms length for that reason. The headline of this article should read “Amazon Ring introducing new feature…” not just “Ring”. If we want it to stop, we need to hold the company responsible for what they’re doing.

Beestie 1y ago

Reason #37 why I went with Eufy instead.

mindslight 1y ago

So if I enable this will the police at least use the feeds to only summarily execute me for partaking in my 2nd amendment right to night time home defense, and let the rest of my family live?

thephyber 1y ago

As if privacy-minded users needed any more reason to avoid Ring…

binarymax 1y ago
But I can't avoid it. 2 of my 4 neighbors have this installed. So now, everytime we are outside, on my own property, we're being captured without consent.

jsrozner 1y ago

It's time for regulation that no images of people may be retained for any commercial purpose without explicit permission of the person whose image is retained. Facial recognition performed on any person who has not granted explicit permission (or, in the case of government, against whom a search warrant has not been obtained) should be illegal. Nor shall any compressed version, broadly defined, of the data be retained (i.e., no training on any sort of facial or pose data without explicit permission of all whose images are used in training). Penalties should be in the %s of revenue or company assets. Whistleblowers should receive large sums for identifying violations. In a broader vein, it's time for regulation forbidding the retention or aggregation of any person's data for any commercial purpose other than the one most proximal to the actual transaction in which the person engaged, unless they explicitly opt in. What would the latter mean? Among other things, targeted ads and recommendation systems would become illegal. Cross-user aggregation (or e.g., a company engaging in any user-longitudinal data analytics) would be illegal. In SQL language, ideally the only time you could do any query with a user ID returning multiple rows for further use would be to serve data directly back to the user. In the long run, such queries should be impossible by requiring something like a) per-user encrypted storage, b) user owned data, c) non-correlatable per-user IDs across transactions. It will never happen because -- as noted in the article -- many folks in SillyCon valley and government are technofascists, but it should, because our current situation violates all reasonable notions of privacy.

tantalor 1y ago
> only time you could do any query with a user ID returning multiple rows for further use would be to serve data directly back to the user What do you mean by that?
- jsrozner 1y ago
  I'm saying we should not allow per-user analytics. Currently companies build a profile of each user and correlate that with all the other similar users. Then they target other users who are hypothesized to be similar. I'm arguing that no per-user analytics should be able to be conducted. A store can track how many times product A is purchased, but not that product A and B were purchased by the same user. Using the latter info for anything other than providing a summary of what the user has purchased (to the user) should be illegal. Yeah it would be complicated. But you could do it by creating a new obfuscated user ID for each transaction. Or even better, by having each person store their own data and mandating that companies delete all records. The company can provide a signature on the transaction record (a receipt!) that the user keeps to prove the purchase if there's a conflict later on. But the company cannot keep a copy of any per-user info, the receipt, or the transaction info; nothing beyond the fact that product A was purchased on a certain date.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44608681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44608681

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago

Not only do the prisoners have almost no rights, the innocent are treated like criminals too

fma 1y ago

I was looking at security systems. It seems, Ring makes it very difficult to have any sort of offline operations. Recording onto SD card is limited or impossible. After seeing this, I realize this is likely by design. You have to be connected so that the surveillance state can get access at some point, somehow.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
johnisgood 1y ago
That is wild, I think being able to record onto an SD card or whatever should be the bare minimum requirement. I personally would never buy anything that does not have an offline option.
jazzyjackson 1y ago
Yes, they have a feature with their 'Pro' base station and Premium subscription, to store video locally on SD card, but still the only way to access the video is through the Ring app. IMO they are just choosing not to compete with the on-prem closed circuit systems, which represent a niche market compared to normies who want a notification when someone rings their video doorbell. https://ring.com/support/articles/pmod0/Using-MicroSD-Cards-for-Ring-Alarm-Pro https://ring.com/support/articles/pmod0/Using-MicroSD-Cards-...
- fma 1y ago
  Yes I saw that...what's wild is if you pay more money to store locally on your own memory, you LOSE cloud storage. You don't get both. https://community-ring.sprinklr.com/conversations/ring-alarm/ring-edge-on-alarm-pro-local-video-storage/65803bc051f6e6fe7807613b?lang=en https://community-ring.sprinklr.com/conversations/ring-alarm...

KPGv2 1y ago

I feel vindicated by my choice to have local-only security cameras

deadbabe 1y ago

Is there some open source alternative to stuff like Ring?

booleandilemma 1y ago

I'm sad that we're quickly heading towards a future where there will be monitoring of all people, at all times. AI agents will flag people for leaving their house too late at night, or not leaving their house often enough. Our civilization is full of intelligence but it lacks wisdom.

Ccecil 1y ago

My sisters bought a Ring camera for my parent's house. They asked me to install it. Before I did I said to my parents "Everything that happens in front of this camera is sent to a 3rd party. Police and others may be able to access this without your permission and you never really know who they are selling data to. Do you still want me to install it?" They said No. It is still in the box on the counter after over 2 years.

eth0up 1y ago
Tell your parents a stranger somewhere faraway really, sincerely appreciates them. And you can tell them too, objectively, that they're 1 (or 2) in a million. The Ring situation was already slimy, having smoothly accessible channels for LE to bypass customer's refusal to cooperate with informal footage requests. Live streaming at will, would really put things in perspective, exalting the morose, lone clinical cynic to an urban archetype. I understand folks who are into traipsing through life before a perennial, unblinking audience of strangers. I've been afflicted with diseases myself. But foisting it on neighbors seems biblically ungood. I know it's socially acceptable to mock and belittle snowballs, but I think this will be a big one.

stuaxo 1y ago

Wow, that is completely terrible.

surume 1y ago

Thanks, I think I’ll stay with the old school non-malware version ;)

qmr 1y ago

Stop putting this shit in your homes people.

almosthere 1y ago

yikes - and I also wonder how many people have these installed inside their house (as in filming the interior).

precommunicator 1y ago

My strategy for Ring when I used it as it was cheapest option with cloud recording and notifications (what's the point of local recordings if someone can just steal them) was to just connect it to a smart plug and then to UPS. I simply disabled power to it just before I got home.

nobodywillobsrv 1y ago

It feels like what is needed is some kind of protocol for decentralizing the police force (and judiciary downstream). It's a nice idea to have have choices (hopefully it is opt in) but it would be nice to have more choices for protection and law given our current situtation as it is unfolding in various countries.

hulitu 1y ago

> Ring introducing new feature to allow police to live-stream access to cameras Don't worry, you have nothing to hide, don't you ? They forgot "legaly" in this sentence. Police already has access to it.

kid64 1y ago

I mean what are the privacy-friendly alternatives? Assume others in this market are equally shady. What is the safe, self-hosted solution where we can monitor CCTV from our phones?

Szpadel 1y ago
I personally use unifi doorbell, mostly because I already had dream machine, but AFAIK they have also less expensive options.
kelnos 1y ago
There are plenty, but they're all very DIY and I don't think there are any turnkey solutions that you can just plug in and have work. I think a better question is... why do we all need this? I get that everyone these days is afraid of everyone and everything, but it's not rational. Very few people actually need a doorbell camera. And if something actually does happen where you think video evidence might be useful, nine times out of ten the police aren't going to help you anyway.
- pixxel 1y ago
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pixxel 1y ago
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henvic 1y ago

This makes me seriously reconsider continuing with my Ring subscription. The chances this will be abused are 1000%. * At the moment I only have sensors so that Ring tracks movement inside the house. Only when I'm out of the house for an extended amount of time (days), I turn on the cameras.

ilinx 1y ago
Let me know if you find a good privacy-focused alternative. I’m absolutely replacing mine after this.
saucymew 1y ago
+1 here. The last time I checked, they're custom (read: expensive) and require building out your own backend video storage.

howdyhowdy 1y ago

Are they breaking the E2EE feature, or is this for folks that didn't care/were scared off by the red text that said they wouldn't be able to recover their videos if they lost their trusted devices?

type0 1y ago

Such a great feature, for the police.