27 ms·

Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock

581 points by gman83 1y ago

sriram_malhar 1y ago
Of course they are.
- c0balt 1y ago
  I'm surprised they weren't already, if one discards the ethical and moral issues (like one would expect from an Amazon product), they do have a lot of opportunities for working with each others data.
  - hopelite 1y ago
    This is just the systemization, scaling of what existed previously. It's a rather predictable pattern at this point in America. Introduction through innocuous means, expansion through a combination of convenience and fear, then systematic expansion once the slaves have become accustomed to the new state of things. It's a rather common ratcheting normalization staircase. Even public information clearly describes how it is the "CIAs" one trick pony, whether it's orchestrating a "color revolution" for "democracy", instigating conflicts and war to feign innocent self-defense, implementing social engineering and Constitutional subversion, or implementing mass surveillance specifically. It's the same wife-beater and child rapist type pattern of grooming abuse that then feigns innocence and deflects blame to anything and anyone else. Most people are really not all that different than any run of the mill battered wife (even if only in the making), psychologically. I get it a lot when I point out what a trap and an illegitimate, enemy entity that the EU is (not to pick on the EU, because it also applies to the US and many other places, but it's far more pronounced with the "EU-cultists")... You get the constant predictable defenses of the love-bombing "abusive boyfriend"/wife beater in the making responses. "you don't understand", "the EU really loves me", "you never want anything good for me", "he showers me with all kinds of benefits and slick marketing", "we are going to be happy forever". It's sad, and as someone that has watched that cycle unfold even in my own family, it's really kind of demoralizing and somewhat depressing to know exactly where it's heading and being unable to counter the forces that have roots a long long time ago, forces of nature. So, the US and the EU will have to suffer that which is predictable and was preventable, no matter how much they wanted to see the world through rose colored glasses. Maybe for humanity's sake, China can free the world of the scourge of this cycle and the psychopathic, narcissistic, maniacal group of people that causes it all... if they don't just kill all life on the planet because if they can't be in control then no one can be in control.
touwer 1y ago
Big tech is nothing different from the German industrialists one hundred years ago
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  If history has thought us anything, it has to be that capitalists have absolutely no spine and only think about profits, no matter what.
  - themafia 1y ago
    We used to know this inherently and we spent half a century passing really well thought out and actionable laws designed to thwart the darker side of capitalism while still allowing it's benefits to accrue to the masses. Since then we've forgotten how to enforce anti monopoly and media ownership rules. Similarly we've somehow completely turned campaign financing into an open competition for bribes.
    - card_zero 1y ago
      So, in this situation when a large company cooperates with intrusive policing, you think the problem is that the company is too large and that enforcement of laws should have taken place? To prevent this collaboration with law enforcement?
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        It's a much bigger problem when a company with >50% market share connects all the cameras to law enforcement than if a company with 0.5% market share does that, but the first one can't happen if there are no companies with a double digit market share. And when there are more companies it's easier to tell people to buy a different one because that one is doing something shady. When Amazon does it, you recommend that unsophisticated people do what, use a Chinese camera which is presumably shunting the feeds to that government?
        1y ago
gitfan86 1y ago
To all the people talking about government surveillance do you not realize the government already can track you by your cell phone?
- themafia 1y ago
  I have deniability with the phone. I can also just leave it at home if I want or turn it off entirely. That access should also be illegal without a warrant; however, this is far worse than cellular "metadata" tracking.
  - gitfan86 1y ago
    I don't understand why you assume that the government is following all the laws when it comes to cell phones and cloud data but won't when it comes to ring data?
    - sailingparrot 1y ago
      What laws do you suppose they have to follow, exactly? Cops need a warrant to track your phone, check which tower it connected to or tail your car for extended period of time. Cops do not need a warrant to use Flock system. They have an app where they can simply put your license plate and they will get a path showing every move of your car as tracked by the flock cameras, and there are a looot of them (e.g. near San Jose: https://deflock.me/map#map=16/37.335318/-121.881316 https://deflock.me/map#map=16/37.335318/-121.881316). And thats without the integration of ring. This essentially allows them to GPS tag anyone, with no warrant, while "following the laws". So no, it's not all the same.
    - night862 1y ago
      Well, they don't. They definitely need to follow the law when they get it from the Telco, but Cops can use their CSS/IMSI catcher all they want, theres almost no way to tell. But they can not then go to court and say "Yeah—we listened to their phone call and searched the car." With this its no problem. No Hailstorm to buy for the entire force and there isn't any federal oversight on this sort of thing as near as I can tell. If you think police don't do crimes I've got a bridge to sell you.
bryancoxwell 1y 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-end-encryption-e2ee https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...
- VoodooJuJu 1y ago
  [dead]
- kotaKat 1y 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 https://ring.com/search-party
  - taneq 1y ago
    “Opt-in-by-default” is a lot of words to say “opt-out”.
    - jappgar 1y ago
      You opted-in by buying the product in the first place. People are buying these things out of fear anyways. I thought they'd be happy big brother is watching.
      - nrjames 1y ago
        When a man murdered a woman in front of my house last year, our Ring camera's photos of his car led to his arrest within 24 hours, so not entirely useless?
        arlcode 1y ago
        It's all trade offs. Even in the most dystopian sci-fi future where a hostile and totalitarian government watches everything everybody does, they would still use the information to investigate boring everyday crimes. The (non rethoric) question is, are people willing to pay the increasing price of non-crime related surveillance as we see diminished security margins.
everdrive 1y ago
George Orwell really never could have imagined that people would flock to purchase or otherwise use the methods of their own surveillance. (smart phones, social media, smart cameras, modern cars, etc) I think it paints government surveillance policies in something of a different light. There is definitely a constituency which believes that the evil central government is pushing for surveillance in a purely unilateral way. I'm not really pro-government, but modern surveillance capitalism really pushes against this view. Put to their own devices, the public will generally (and apparently) flock towards mass surveillance all on their own, and I think one possible implication is that the government surveillance policies are more popular then some folks in HN circles would suspect.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mihaaly 1y ago
  I already have problem with negligent people using products like Ring that is to surveil anyone around without control, with uncontrollable and unreliable level of standard handling collected data (no high hopes here). But when I find it very very hard and limited purchasing products that cannot spy on me - special mention here for smart phones and cars - that makes me mad to the next level. Even for the elevated level privacy concious folks the car and the smart phone bringing hostility for your private life is getting harder and harder to avoid. Not having the suitable time to do the tedious investigations and costly trials into the reliability of products with low surveillance risks, not to mention the constant need of keeping yourself up do date to everything involved in this regard! We need to live our life, cannot spend it on constant workarounds, hacks, and very reasonable paranoia. When logging into essential services are MANDATING the use of smart phones (i.e. MFA, but own apps sometimes, requiring specific vendors!!), not to mention the need of getting from A to B the way required (goods, children, time limits, navigation), but cannot procure a solution that will not expose you to adverse agents or even criminals (those getting in and out of systems nowadays like they live there) that makes me really really mad! This society is shit. I cannot do it, but feel the highly increasing need for becoming the real life Captain Fantastic [1]. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3553976/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3553976/
Aachen 1y ago
These are mappable in OpenStreetMap with the tags surveillance:type=camera + camera:mount=doorbell Data query around the Netherlands shows about a hundred are mapped so far as specifically doorbell cameras: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2dQw https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2dQw (the tag does not yet seem established in the USA). There are also many thousands of cameras mapped that are either not doorbell-mounted, or simply not tagged to such detail. This is a convenient map to see all of them: https://sunders.intri.cat/ https://sunders.intri.cat/
- mikkupikku 1y ago
  Seems like a fairly impractical thing to map unless you're getting volunteers to walk up to and inspect people's front doors. I know there is an app for a sort of gamified version of this where people take tasks to verify street signs or even how many stories a building has, I used that app for a while, but doorbell mapping seems a lot leas casual.
  - westmeal 1y ago
    Walk up to door with stack of papers with a stock photo of a puppy on it that says lost puppy. Check if there's a camera. If the owner comes outside, ask them if they have seen this puppy.
    - QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
      And then at door 125,000 you finally reach the home of the puppy that’s in the stock photo you printed. And they say “Why yes, we have seen this puppy. How did you know??”
      - namibj 1y ago
        So use one that you know to now be dead.
        roughly 1y ago
whatsupdog 1y ago
[flagged]
- lazyasciiart 1y ago
  [flagged]
- saubeidl 1y ago
  Immigrants with no criminal record now largest group in ICE detention: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/immigrants-criminal-record-ice-detention https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/immigrants-c... ICE Agents Rappel from Helicopter in Overnight Chicago Raid, Dragging Kids from Beds to U-Hauls: https://people.com/ice-agents-overnight-chicago-raid-11823082 https://people.com/ice-agents-overnight-chicago-raid-1182308... Feds detain WGN-TV staffer, slam into resident’s car in Lincoln Square: https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/10/feds-arrest-wgn-staffer-slam-into-residents-car-in-lincoln-square https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/10/feds-arr... We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days: https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-citizens-arrested-detained-against-will https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-... Videos of violent ICE interactions flood social media: https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/ice-agents-violent-video-arrests-trump-immigration-crackdown-rcna237373 https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/ice-agents-violent-...
  - mothballed 1y ago
    I and many other US citizens were brutally imprisoned by CBP/DHS under Biden and no one gave a shit, and at the time it wasn't the cool hot topic for lawyers so ACLU and none of the civil rights lawyers I contacted were interested. I even pointed it out here on HN, I was accused of having it coming, it wasn't until Trump came into power that anyone other than my own family actually believed the story about DHS imprisoning me, dragging me around the state in a prisoner van, and insanely getting a retroactive warrant all over a completely fabricated PC of an unnamed dog alerting an unnamed officer (that as far as I know, didn't even exist). Hopefully this will be a lesson to maybe start giving a shit about these things when they're being tested rather than when the heat gets cranked up against brown people.
statuslover9000 1y ago
Great job giving the government a live dossier of all the political volunteers canvassing out there. This makes me feel so much safer!
olex 1y ago
And this is why my setup will be using Reolink cameras integrated locally via HomeAssistant and Frigate. Detection runs locally on cameras and/or in Frigate, HA manages events and UI, and the only way to access any of it remotely is via VPN, no "cloud" anything. If the authorities come knocking with a warrant, or frankly, even a nicely-worded sensible request, sure, have at it. But ain't nobody accessing the footage unnoticed and without my approval.
- sterwill 1y ago
  I bought Reolink PoE cameras because they support standard RTSP and I could put them on their own VLAN where they can't get to the Internet. I can still use the Reolink app to view them when I'm on the LAN, or through Wireguard when I'm not. I use ffmpeg to save streams to a big disk. Works great.
  - olex 1y ago
    Yeah, this is my idea as well. Good to know that the Reolink app still works locally and via Wireguard, that means I'll have less UI to set up in HomeAssistant.
  - dhacks 1y ago
    I do the same and it works well. But do you see the Reolink app hammering domains of the form p#p#.reolink.com? I have to kill the app between uses it it drains my phone's battery because of this.
    - sterwill 1y ago
      I've never looked at what the Android app is doing on the network, but maybe I should. I usually just keep it open for a few minutes when I'm waiting for a delivery or I hear someone ring the doorbell, so I'm not too worried about it piping lots of video to Reolink HQ. I haven't noticed much of a battery drain having used it earlier in the day.
- normie3000 1y ago
  Don't Reolink cameras require the Reolink mobile app for setup?
shrubble 1y ago
When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house, you realize that the recent demo of Anduril's helmet that gives an information display that the soldier/cop wearing it can use to "see who is in the house" or "see around corners" etc. is not sci-fi but instead, something they can do today.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
  I hate that all our favorite sci-fi books were used as manuals for what to build next, instead of trying to avoid creating those futures in our real lives.
  - dv_dt 1y ago
    Read more Solarpunk? From a writers standpoint though, I suspect its easier to weave a dramatic plot through a dystopic background than a more optimistic one
    - red-iron-pine 1y ago
      all happy futures are the same, all terrible ones are terrible in their own, unique way
      - rollcat 1y ago
        Hard disagree. Yes, it's easier to captivate attention by evoking primal instincts - avoid predator, find food, reproduce, etc. These stories stick around in your head, the memetic survivors. They are easier to feed off. But "Happy" doesn't mean a perfect utopia. The entire "classic" Star Trek is set in a utopian future, yet with plenty of space for intrigue. Usually a commentary on a contemporary problem, with a "happy ending" that's supposed to show us the road to a better solution, rather than a bland "forever after". Even "First Contact" (a zombie/survival horror) is spun around the theme of "this is the history/future that we're saving". Bonus: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq4QY0LGOiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq4QY0LGOiI>
nbngeorcjhe 1y ago
I _hate_ walking down the block and hearing their dumb "Hi! You are being recorded!" jingle. Ffs if you're going to record me at least do it quiely
- kylehotchkiss 1y ago
  Me too, but these people probably aren't having their cars pilfered in the middle of the night.
  - Spivak 1y ago
    My solution to that is to just not keep anything valuable in the car and leave it unlocked. After getting my car window smashed in twice for the thieves to not find anything other than trash I decided this was a better system and haven't had a problem since. For all I know people have rummaged around my car but I don't have to deal with damages anymore. My ideal anti-theft device would be a mode where the car is unlocked but the alarm goes off if you try to open the door.
    - kylehotchkiss 1y ago
      Make sure your car’s jack kit is still there. Thieves want em
flanked-evergl 1y ago
Everybody is a libertarian when their political opposition has power.
- InsideOutSanta 1y ago
  The corollary is that, when in power, many "libertarians" are only concerned with their own rights and nobody else's, failing to understand that any rights they give up for others may soon be lost for them too. It's just the brown people who are put in detention centers, isn't it?
  - hopelite 1y ago
    Do you believe burglars have more rights in your home and to your things than you do? Then why do you apply that logic to others that then must suffer your abusive imposition of abuse? How about you just abuse yourself if you want to abuse. Why does in your mind a "brown person" that is a foreign national who broke the law in and of America by entering and/or remaining in the USA, have more rights to have a job, make money, and even receive public assistance in America than a non-"brown person" that is a legitimate citizen of the USA? What is worse, is that you don't even understand that your support of this kind of lawlessness is only for the purpose of allowing the rich to plunder the working and lower middle class, the real victims that through your words and actions hate with a passion. Sure, burglars also benefit from burglarizing, but that does not make it any better than foreign nationals benefitting while the rich also use them like some crime boss in control of a burglary ring. How do you think, e.g., the home builders who make ~30% gross profit on homes that are poorly built due to "immigrant labor" report triple digit billion dollar returns? You people baffle me that you cannot connect two dots as you at the same time lament that wages are too low, as you support floods of wage decreasing supply flooding "immigration". No one is targeting "brown people" they just happen to be the majority of brown people the ruling class loves importing to profit from at the expense of the indigenous people, just like when the British and Hispanics did it through slavery. You are no different than the slavery rationalizers of the 17th-19th century. Today the ruling class just figured out how to manipulate you into supporting importation of brown people to undermine the indigenous people, and you don't have the intellect or integrity to understand you are being manipulated.
agigao 1y ago
This is why I never bought anything Amazon owned, other than Kindles; and I have dropped the latter, too. I was always suspicious of Ring and never understood the people using it.
- gilfoy 1y ago
  My entire neighborhood came with ring doorbells pre installed and eero routers. I swapped out to the Logitech doorbell which I like better anyway
  - troyvit 1y ago
    So like it just came with the houses as they were built? If that's the case I wonder what kind of deal Ring make with the builders of new neighborhoods.
    - gilfoy 1y ago
      Yes, they were new build. They used it as part of the marketing too, calling them “smart homes”. There’s various other ring bits like motion detector and window/door sensors, alarm, etc. and some non-Amazon stuff like smart water meter, garage door opener. They had some kind of deal with Amazon surely because it came with some amount of time free.
  - Aachen 1y ago
    Here in the Netherlands, the government gave them away for free They're also illegal because you're not allowed to film public spaces without a good reason (it's up to the judge and case law to decide, e.g. if there has been arson in the area recently then it's reasonable to monitor your car that's parked at the kerb, for example). Nobody has yet gotten in trouble to my knowledge Gotta love hypocrisy
    - antonymoose 1y ago
      That the government gave them out has me wondering, do they make any kind of distinction between “government does it” versus “you doing it,” i.e. is the government claiming to be monitoring and not you? In America we have this concept that a police must have a real reason to pull over your car. Except they can just setup an arbitrary checkpoint and pull every driver over and this is magically different and acceptable to do, no violations of rights at all.
morwanger 1y ago
[dead]
pjmlp 1y ago
Look the outcomes from past history to understand how future will become. Sadly it is only going to get much worse before it gets better.
- hopelite 1y ago
  I am not sure how that would be helpful, regardless of how you mean that. Nothing in the past has ever even gotten remotely close to what even exists today, let alone what will exist in all of our lifetimes, no matter how old you are.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    I am quite sure there are a few lessons from the past that can be used to guess where current administration is going. Then is up for the citzens to let it happen or react.
  - danparsonson 1y ago
    Humans are basically the same, even if the technology is different. "History doesn't repeat itself but rhymes a lot" (or words to that effect). What is happening now in the US (and many other places) strongly echoes the events leading up to WW2.
idiotsecant 1y ago
Stop paying companies to put spyware in your house. Don't connect your smart TV to the network, don't buy cloud cameras, and above all don't run a phone with an OS that they phone company gives you.
BaudouinVH 1y ago
My first thought : Orwell's 1984 Telescreen is happening.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  In 1984 I can't remember if they prostrated themselves so fully, purchasing the screens that would spy on them, and did it all come about because they were sucking on the tit of "free" shipping that costs $139/year?
linuxftw 1y ago
Keep voting for politicians that spend our money on weapons and violence, this is the stuff we'll keep getting. This applies to both major political parties in the US.
- hopelite 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - red-iron-pine 1y ago
    u /hopelite is a 4 month old account with ~40 karma who mostly posts about european immigration low-effort agit-prop bot
    - hopelite 1y ago
      Ok narcissistic, dehumanizing deranged stalker. Speaking about European people’s moral right to exist and be free and their clearly organized eradication through sick people as yourself who stalk people and then make dehumanizing statements about them and are whipping up a genocide frenzied against the people who have produced everything humanity has, including this website and every dependency on it, is maybe beyond your deranged and sick little brainwashed mind, but I have concern for humanity because of little sickos like you; including Europeans that put absolutely hate because you are evils! You are evil! You are deranged! You are sick and dehumanizing! You will cause humanity’s ruin if you continue in your deranged ways.
scottydelta 1y ago
Flock is funded and supported by YC. Not sure how YC sees this.
- badgersnake 1y ago
  If it brings in ARR it makes an exit more likely and that makes them happy. They're "investors, not bosses" - https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/ https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/
  - reaperducer 1y ago
    They're investors, not bosses Being an investor is not an excuse. It makes you amoral, too. "I didn't build the bomb, I just funded the company that built it."
    - Refreeze5224 1y ago
      That's the beauty of capitalism, its very foundation allows you to act immorally or amorally, and pretend that it's ok because of "the market", "invisible hands", "revealed preferences", etc. If it's immoral but done in pursuit of maximizing shareholder value, it's magically allowed.
      - orthecreedence 1y ago
        > done in pursuit of maximizing shareholder value, it's magically allowed. Not even allowed, sometimes legally required ("fiduciary duty").
- red-iron-pine 1y ago
  why do you think YC have any more morals than Ring? or Palantir?
- buellerbueller 1y ago
  This is YC. In case you haven't noticed, the surveillance state is 100% YC adjacent.
femiagbabiaka 1y ago
This is the logical conclusion to the state of irrational fear that Americans perpetually live in, that causes them to feel they need 24/7 surveillance of their homes, no matter the consequences.
- dormento 1y ago
  "Land of the free". I struggle to reconcile.
  - pear01 1y ago
    A line from George Carlin comes to mind... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-54c0IdxZWc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-54c0IdxZWc
- troupo 1y ago
  Unfortunately this is contagious. During the last election cycle in Sweden the Moderate party (third-largest in parliament, and part of the government) literally ran ads like "More cameras on our streets for safety" Edit: added country
  - nielsbot 1y ago
    We need a competent counter-narrative but no one (few) figures in the federal government are offering one. The media also loves to report on crime. Etc. I hope people will join their local community groups.
- xysix 1y ago
  It’s about control, not fear. Nobody is consenting to it out of fear.
  - Noaidi 1y ago
    I disagree. Fear is the tool authoritarians use to control people. First they make you fear the other, then they make you fear their force. When your fear the other the consent is internal.
tommaho 1y ago
I’m surprised to not see more noise about Rings new “search party” features, for… Finding dogs?
Jupe 1y ago
So, rather than Big Brother being government-imposed monitoring paid for by all taxpayers, the concerned citizenry is flipping the bill for the devices, network connectivity and electricity. Fascinating.
- chronci739 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - estimator7292 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - downrightmike 1y ago
      They are a bot: user: chronci739 created: 8 days ago
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- downrightmike 1y ago
  always, flock just charges local governments and then charges the police too to get access. They get us coming and going, and yet most crimes and murders go unsolved still. If a cop can track his Ex through hundreds of cams, why aren't the solve rates better? (Its not about crime)
- charcircuit 1y ago
  Tax payers and citizenry are largely the same. It's not really flipping the bill.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- ErigmolCt 1y ago
  Yep, it's like we speedran 1984 but made it a startup
PaulHoule 1y ago
Flock is controversial in my area https://transparency.flocksafety.com/ithaca-city-ny-pd https://transparency.flocksafety.com/ithaca-city-ny-pd
- macNchz 1y ago
  Not clear to me what the "External organizations with access" actually means or who decided which organizations to add to the list, but it's curious to me that the campus patrol for a college 250 miles away (SUNY Old Westbury) has access to camera data from Ithaca.
  - FireBeyond 1y ago
    (Ex Flock Employee) It's as simple as that agency saying "Hey, can we have access to your camera data?" and the originating agency saying "Sure". Flock (deliberately, IMHO) has no verification on whether said agencies are allowed by law or regulation or whatever to have that access, it's just a free-for-all.
- Noaidi 1y ago
  Louis Rossmann has been going of a lot about Flock lately, and not only in Austin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQxQpzNSNZU&pp=0gcJCfwJAYcqIYzv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQxQpzNSNZU&pp=0gcJCfwJAYcqI...
- MereInterest 1y ago
  And actively ignoring state law in others, then violating cease-and-desist orders when told to remove the cameras. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45382434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45382434 (discussion from 2025-09-26)
righthand 1y ago
People need devices that will protect them from this mass surveillance. Plausible deniability needs to be restored. Some sort of jamming tech or scrambling tech. There’s no reason to lock everyone into a surveillance state when we should be fighting it. Fighting through legislation isn’t tenable anymore.
xbar 1y ago
With the stroke of a key, 100 million customer-installed cameras become part of the surveillance state.
- AlexandrB 1y ago
  This was always the end game for Ring. I think people were saying this since before the Amazon acquisition. The acquisition itself always struck me as Amazon attempting to reduce "shrinkage" - brick and mortar stores have their "loss prevention" team and Amazon has Ring. The bottom line with technology is that you either host and control it yourself or you're at the whims of the vendor's business strategy.
  - an0malous 1y ago
    This is also the end game for LLMs
  - grafmax 1y ago
    Unfortunately you can’t opt out. The surveillance network blankets virtually everyone - friends, family, all of society.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Official post: https://blog.ring.com/about-ring/ring-expands-community-requests-to-additional-community-safety-partners/ https://blog.ring.com/about-ring/ring-expands-community-requ...
prayerie 1y ago
Having tried to do this already to no avail, does anyone know if as an owner of one of these Ring devices if it's possible to take it offline and handle everything locally? I'm usually against these types of "smart" devices, but only bought it because my house got burgled as a student (whilst I was asleep!), so I got pretty shaken up and got the cheapest thing I could find. Currently, I do have it connected to a local HA instance, but I'm pretty sure that relies on Ring's online services to access it, unless I'm mistaken.
- baby_souffle 1y ago
  Ring has better than typical device security. If you’re not looking to reverse engineer a brand new exploit, there are other devices that do the same thing but are designed to be local first. Google for rtsp doorbell and you’ll find many discussion threads
- foobarian 1y ago
  Unfortunately MAC addresses are hard to mask. With a DIY camera you could customize the MAC address, but it would still be visible. To truly hide it I suppose you'd need to use a wired interface. Ubiquiti used to make 700MHz WiFi adapters but I don't think those are a thing any longer
- Noaidi 1y ago
  Why not just get rid of it? Your anxiety is triggered from the past, not the present. We have lived without these devices in perfect safety and security for a long time. Simplify and be free!
deleted 1y ago
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account_1234 1y ago
I worked in a Ring back in 2017. In the Ukraine office. All the things you read about their privacy were right. All private things, like access for employees to people's data, are right. This is an absolutely evil company. I don't understand why people in the first place in the USA are buying it.
theturtle 1y ago
[dead]
tamimio 1y ago
To control the public, just play on the fear or safety part, and they will just follow mindlessly.
msie 1y ago
Doesn't matter, cops will raid a home on no more info than intuition.
Noaidi 1y ago
Some serious boycotts need to be happening, and soon. I do not care if this was an R or a D administration, this has been out of control and just getting worse. This is us against the oligarchs, not us against each other. And something makes me worried that there is an impending recession/depression and that these surveillance devices will be use to quell any dissent. (I say this because of the insane rise in the price of gold) I, for one, am canceling my Amazon Prime account and avoiding amazon as much as I can in this dystopia where it is the only place you can buy many goods anymore.
JeremyHerrman 1y ago
Unifi G4 Doorbell Pro [0] is a great self-hosted option. I've been very happy with mine over the last year, but I was already bought into the unifi ecosystem with a UDM Pro SE and U6 mesh APs. 0: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cameras-doorbells/collections/pro-store-doorbells-chimes/products/uvc-g4-doorbell-pro https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cameras-doorbells/collec...
- IT4MD 1y ago
  I just installed mine (last weekend) and use a Unifi stack at home. 100% recommended alternative.
- nerdsniper 1y ago
  Alternatively, the Reolink Doorbell cameras for anyone who doesn't want to be on the Unifi/Ubiquiti platform. Also I believe all these cameras provide a generic RTSP feed which can be consumed by any computer running Frigate[0], an open-source NVR/AI platform. 0: https://frigate.video https://frigate.video (Reolink, Unifi/Ubiquiti, and Frigate are all good solutions for anyone who is not interested in supporting the proliferation of a police-state)
  - jdyer9 1y ago
    If it matters to you, Reolink is a Chinese owned company. Not passing judgement one way or another, but if avoiding Unifi over the remote incident matters, I could see this factoring in as well.
    - WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
      > If it matters to you, Reolink is a Chinese owned company. It does matter to me. Because I am an American, my greatest risks (actual and theoretical) are from American entities. Conversely, China has little actual power to negatively impact my life. I am most comfortable (and arguably safer) with Chinese gear.
    - davkan 1y ago
      Separate vlans for iot devices with strict firewall rules is generally enough to mitigate the threat of most iot devices phoning home i think. We’re already in the territory of hobbyists who should be able to manage that with these suggestions like ubiquity and frigate.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 1y ago
However, AI-powered technology used by law enforcement has been proven to exacerbate racial biases. This is a little misleading. Flock is primarily an ALPR that can identify make/model/color/identifying-feature of vehicles. It's not facial recognition. It doesn't itself have a racial component. The modal "proactive" Flock intervention (as opposed to investigative searches after crimes) is to flag a moving vehicle as stolen. But in practice, the outcomes of deploying Flock are racialized, because the hot lists states keep of stolen vehicles aren't accurate enough for real-time enforcement, so recovered vehicles stay on the lists and false-positive. You're disproportionately likely to have a vehicle on a hot list if you live in a low-income neighborhood. Even then: it's not clear how any of this is apposite to a Ring/Flock partnership. You can't use a Ring camera to do realtime ALPR flagging of cars. Presumably, this supports Flock's "single pane of glass" product; they just want police going to Flock for all their video needs. Police already canvass Ring and Nest cameras during investigations.
- gigel82 1y ago
  They're a lot more than "license plate readers", they're complete AI surveillance systems: https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_License_Plate_Readers https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_License_Plate_Readers
  - tptacek 1y ago
    They're license plate readers, make/model/identifying-feature databases, and search engines. I didn't say they were just "license plate readers".
    - puppycodes 1y ago
      have you seen this? https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-dfr https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-dfr much much more dystopian...
      - tptacek 1y ago
        What's your point? Obviously we wouldn't allow something like this to be deployed in our community. But what does that have to do with Flock providing an interface to police departments for collecting Ring camera footage? I don't think that's a good thing --- I think PDs should continue to manually canvass for footage and specifically ask residents for footage when they need it, I think that's actually the right public policy and we don't need to innovate past it. But good or bad, it has nothing to do with Flock's "AI".
giantg2 1y ago
Zoneminder is a good alternative
beaker52 1y ago
This combined with all the price increases makes me hate the fact I bought a ring doorbell.
buellerbueller 1y ago
It was only a matter of time.
jajuuka 1y ago
I think Amazon hired the bizarro team to run Ring. Because they just keep giving reasons NOT to get a Ring device.
dbg31415 1y ago
They do have an end to end encryption option. Wonder if that helps any. https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-end-encryption-e2ee https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...
- SteveNuts 1y ago
  Without solid third party verification that promise isn’t worth the HTML it’s written in.
- TechRemarker 1y ago
  On that page though it looks like most all the features are not available with E2EE, event timeline, person detection, search you name it. So imagine few if any use it, since alternative options that can locally do all that and still have E2EE.
- some_furry 1y ago
  The security of pretty much everything Amazon boils down to KMS. KMS access is based on IAM policies. If law enforcement wants access to your KMS keys, they'll compel IAM, not KMS, to give them access. If you ask KMS about it, they'll play dumb.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  It depends if Amazon has any way to access to the encryption key that supposedly protects the content.
klodolph 1y ago
All this hand-wringing about surveillance powers is not keeping up with how quickly our ability to surveil people is expanding. The fourth amendment seems kind of like a wet fart in a timeline where private companies can surveil the public and then simply choose to share their data with law enforcement. I had to buy a surveillance camera recently, but I made sure mine doesn’t connect to the internet in any way.
- Fnoord 1y ago
  I mean the feed has to be written to a storage and this storage I immediately backup off-site in the case someone is clever enough to immediately go for such (e.g. burglary).
  - klodolph 1y ago
    I think one of the traps we fall into is imagining that an attacker is somehow intelligent (someone who can immediately attack video storage) but simultaneously uncreative (doesn’t think of some way to make the surveillance footage irrelevant). I’ve decided that I’m not a high-profile target for covert operatives, but I am a target of opportunity for people who have access to my data once that data is outside of my control. The decisions I make based on that are decisions like, “No surveillance feed goes into cloud services operated by companies I don’t trust,” but “I don’t need to encrypt my NAS”.
    - Fnoord 1y ago
      Stupid burglars get caught. It is only a matter of time till burglars learn to combat this. For example, a MITM on the camera. Thing is, neighbors also got one. If I get threatened to remove the video, I will oblige. If everything gets destroyed in a fire due to cobra's, there's a backup. That's my threat model. And silent data corrupt on the camera feed storage could also occur.
- yannyu 1y ago
  How does your total solution work? Today, there's a lot of convenience with Nest. Is there an equivalent experience that doesn't involve exposing your data to megacorps?
bloqs 1y ago
this article with 1 comment is top of the front page for me, how come?
- portaouflop 1y ago
  I believe they changed the algorithm a lot in the last 12+ months; I think bots and automation are becoming more and more of an issue - like everywhere else
Squeeeez 1y ago
Slight tangent: on top of that, I just read an article yesterday (which of course I can't find again right now) about how false automatic alarms from such cameras will incur a fee from the owners when the Police comes to check it out. It was from somewhere in Texas.
- dylan604 1y ago
  That's pretty common with any alarm system not just Ring. I know you get the first false alarm with a response for free. After that, fines/tickets are issued. It might have been 2 free can't remember as it's been a long time since the alarm was installed and info was provided. This was in Dallas specifically before I go painting with too broad of a brush. Even further back, I had an alarm system installed, but never paid for monitoring. They also warned about fines after too many false reports, and that was a tiny town waaaay outside of Dallas.
  - Squeeeez 1y ago
    Nothing against that per se, false alarms should be kept in check. If you have a system where, as I understand it, the main point is to check who is standing in front of your door, and that system now is one automatic update away from dipping into your bank account... How long until the police departments figure out that donations to a specific company could be very profitable?
gilfoy 1y ago
I commented on a similar post earlier, but my entire neighborhood, hundreds of houses, came with them preinstalled. Can’t even leave my house without being surveilled. Some people have the setting on where it starts announcing stuff any time it sees a person, which it does all the way to the sidewalk. So you go on a walk and get yelled at through a super shitty speaker several times. And it’s about as dystopian as you can imagine with people posting recordings constantly on the neighborhood Facebook group and arguing. I swapped to HomeKit secure video because of no additional subscription, included in the iCloud one I’m paying anyway. Allegedly end to end encrypted too.
- gleenn 1y ago
  The police chumminess is super dystopian. I definitely went with E2E encrypted cameras because I also think it's so crazy people just hand all that data over without realizing how powerful it is and how much personal privacy they are throwing out the window.
  - nik282000 1y ago
    E2E encryption but what are the ends? If one is your camera and the other is a cloud service then you aren't really protecting anything.
    - Spoom 1y ago
      You could additionally use encryption at rest where the key is only ever on the client.
    - gilfoy 1y ago
      Apple at least claims to not have keys for their E2EE, such as when you turn on Advanced Protection (or whatever it’s called) it has this whole spiel about how screwed you are if you lose your recovery ability
- hypeatei 1y ago
  > came with them preinstalled That's concerning. Now we have to worry about spyware coming pre installed on houses. I wonder how much the developers got paid to install those?
nik282000 1y ago
One of the many reasons to host your own stuff. It costs about 0.75CAD per day to run my server and PoE switch. For my 20 bucks a month I get cameras, a media server, password manager, push notifications, file sharing, and a dozen other services, all without handing my data over to business or governments. Is it as secure as a cloud service? Depends on what you consider secure. I closely monitor access logs and use strong passwords, Amazon has billions to spend on encryption, apps, and datacenters but they also have thousands of employees that can access your data at any time for any reason. I would love it if some commercial host-it-yourself product were released but that goes against the pay to play model that has been chosen for all modern tech.
- rogerrogerr 1y ago
  I fear ISPs have made a commercial host-it-yourself product near impossible. Imagine selling a product, getting no ongoing revenue, and then being on the hook - forever - to support average people trying to connect to something inside their home network from their phone. Nightmare material. If anyone is having trouble understanding the support load, start by traveling to your local assisted living home and explaining to everyone static vs. dynamic IP address assignment. You can do it fairly easily by bouncing off a server you control... aaaand we're right back where we started.
  - nerdsniper 1y ago
    Tailscale
  - Liftyee 1y ago
    I think something like Tailscale's technology could resolve this and many other self hosting access cases. Already, I don't open any ports - just use Tailscale to connect to my PC at home. If this was integrated into the "camera app", it could be seamless - only authentication required. Since the traffic goes directly point to point, the cost of hosting this service isn't too large either.
    - nik282000 1y ago
1970-01-01 1y ago
I'm willing to bet $$$ anyone will be able to call themselves a 'local security agency' before proper controls are implemented.
- nik282000 1y ago
  Likely a form followed by a "Do you promise you didn't lie" checkbox at the bottom is all that will separate a user from access.
jamestimmins 1y ago
By this point, we should assume that all companies with sensitive data that could theoretically help solve crime will be accessed by the government as a rule. That's just being a realistic technology user in 2025.
- dmix 1y ago
  The only real solution is strong privacy laws around gov usage and strong courts willing to enforce it. Expecting consumer choice or regulations to prevent that data from ever existing is mostly a fools errand IMO, there's just too much of it and it's everywhere.
  - deelowe 1y ago
    > The only real solution is strong privacy laws around gov usage and strong courts willing to enforce it. I don't think this is a solution, personally.
    - encrypted_bird 1y ago
      Care to elaborate? You can't just say "I disagree" without explaining why you disagree.
  - anigbrowl 1y ago
    Based on what? There's no constitutional right to privacy, while courts have consistently expanded the scope of government powers and immunities and consistently hollowed out the Bill of Rights. It's gonna require a new legal paradigm.
    - WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
      > There's no constitutional right to privacy, Being secure in my person, house, papers, and effects is my privacy in action.
      - anigbrowl 1y ago
hooverd 1y ago
how cheap is rolling your own with a little mini PC running an Ultralytics model?
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
Orwell didn't foresee that people would voluntarily pay for their own surveillance, out of fandom for a company that charges $15/month for "free" shipping. That they also actually do give away for free if you can wait a few extra days rather than treating every purchase as an impulse buy. Reality has become more stupid than even visionaries could have predicted.
- nik282000 1y ago
  He never mentioned if the screens in every house had a monthly fee or if you could pay more to skip adds. We could still be right on track to war with East Asia.
Xca129sby 1y ago
Security cameras could already be hacked and have their feed altered by using Toka services. Toka was founded by Ehud Barak (also of Carbyne fame, with Epstein) and a16z: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/06/a16z-backed-toka-wants-to-help-us-agencies-hack-into-security-cameras-and-other-iot-devices/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/06/a16z-backed-toka-wants-to-...
black_13 1y ago
[dead]
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614713
forrestthewoods 1y ago
Unpopular Opinion: good? I mean I like wish all the people who steal packages and break into cars in my neighborhood would get arrested.
monkaiju 1y ago
Wild how if a government does this directly most folks agree its dystopian and flip out, but let companies do it and, even if it ends up in the governments hands, people install it themselves...
anigbrowl 1y ago
It's not that long ago that people used to talk about East Germany as a dystopian hellhole of state surveillance, and yet the US is now far more surveilled than the DDR ever was. It's amazing to me how easily this country was propagandized and its inhabitants persuaded to establish an authoritarian state of their own.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  As VC backed startups run out of ideas that meet their return requirements, they pivot to government. The whole flock thing is brilliant as the FBI is the sales force through their grant programs.
- anaisbetts 1y ago
  Ironically, because of East Germany, cameras like this are now extremely illegal here. Any camera that can see public or even semi-public property (i.e. a camera that can see out into your building's courtyard or hallway) are disallowed. Even ones that strictly are inside your own home are subject to rules around audio recording and a sign must be posted at all entrances.
browningstreet 1y ago
I have a friend who's been extolling this open source alternative: https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/
- ssl-3 1y ago
  Home Assistant is very flexible. It's kind of like a common meeting ground where all the things come together in one spot, and they can thereafter be programmatically automated. Cameras? NVRs? A sea of IoT light bulbs, switches, and sensors that all variously speak Zigbee or Matter or Thread or Wifi or Z-Wave or Bluetooth or some clown connection or whatever? Almost all of it works fine with HA. It's very flexible. If anything, it may be too flexible. It can be rough getting started with it. (I use it in "Home Assistant OS" form in a VM on a light-weight x86 box that only cost me $50, wherein: Performance is quite lovely, and updates haven't hosed anything up [yet] that required me to go poking at it to keep it going. It's also right at home on bare-metal x86, or an ARM SBC like a Raspberry Pi, or in containers, or [...]. Did I mention that it's flexible?)
- glitchcrab 1y ago
  Home assistant just connects to the devices; you still need the devices to make it useful.
beej71 1y ago
Get a Chinese knockoff that transmits everything to Chinese servers. Good luck to the US government getting your data out of there. :)
- gubicle 1y ago
  they'd get it before it gets to china
mgh2 1y ago
https://archive.is/7fMPK https://archive.is/7fMPK
DanOpcode 1y ago
I wonder how many existing Ring owners would have bought the camera had they known they would eventually give third parties access to the camera footage.
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
So so late. But just so vile, so reprehensible to see such a corrupt fallen disagreeable state of the world march over us. I am stricken with fear over the control and manipulation by the Chinese state. A dominance over people without respect or regard, a self certainty and pomp that denies life & possibility. But what the West is letting happen here, the limitless post-state open-for-anyone surveillance Flock & others are offering has seemingly even less bounds, less respect, less purpose, less direction. These people, this enterprise is clearly the worst possible thing we could do, the most awful accrual & misuse of the world against its people's. To spy on everyone & to without regard sell that days to everyone is a crime against all. Flock is truly the #HostisHumaniGeneris. Woe & (all too expectable) disappointment to see Amazon giving up all their data to fascist pro ICE losers who, were we a descent society, we would run out of the world.
maybezzzz76 1y ago
Didn't someone a while ago make those QR codes which played with the facial recognition algorithms. I wonder where they are today... Sound like fashion could play a role here.
bob1029 1y ago
These cameras are a big part of why I recently moved. They're a canary for something deeper. The area I was in was like the Korean DMZ with regard to flock cameras. I had one at the only entrance to my neighborhood. A trip to the grocery store would put me in their database 12 times at last count. I still have to worry about the standardized fleet of cameras at Home Depot and a few other retailers, but it's not nearly as bad out here. Location is a big part of the dystopia. It is not evenly distributed. Fighting back at the municipal and HOA level can make a massive difference. Some areas seem hopeless though. You're better off finding something that already mostly works and trying hard to keep it that way. The general fear level of the local population seems to be the biggest factor in all of this. I went from a place where people would do the quadruple check car lock routine when walking into the grocery store, to a place where many leave their unlocked vehicles idling in the parking lot. I don't even think about locking my doors at home now. It almost feels silly to do it around here. It's amazing the difference that ~65 miles can make.
- ErigmolCt 1y ago
  Even a short distance can feel like crossing from panopticon to peace and quiet
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >The general fear level of the local population seems to be the biggest factor in all of this. I went from a place where people would do the quadruple check car lock routine when walking into the grocery store, to a place where many leave their unlocked vehicles idling in the parking lot. I don't even think about locking my doors at home now. It almost feels silly to do it around here. It's amazing the difference that ~65 miles can make. It's not even that. The real shitholes full o' crime have scant cameras because you don't need them for "real" investigations of "real" crime. You only need a traffic cameras to establish what you need for a murder investigation or whatever, pair the images with cell time stamps and presto. Cameras are for making it cheap to enforce the long tail of petty deviance that doesn't actually matter. Karen calls up bitching that some guy did something, normally that would be discarded because it's not worth it. But with a camera system they can query it and maybe fine the guy from their desks. They're not using the system to go after someone for stealing from parked cars except perhaps to walk back in time and add charges to someone they already got (same reason they ask for serial numbers of electronics and the like when doing theft investigations they won't follow up on).
ErigmolCt 1y ago
This is one of those stories that reads like a Black Mirror episode but is just... real life now. What’s especially concerning is the normalization of this kind of surveillance creep...

581 points by gman83 1y ago

sriram_malhar 1y ago

Of course they are.

c0balt 1y ago
I'm surprised they weren't already, if one discards the ethical and moral issues (like one would expect from an Amazon product), they do have a lot of opportunities for working with each others data.
- hopelite 1y ago
  This is just the systemization, scaling of what existed previously. It's a rather predictable pattern at this point in America. Introduction through innocuous means, expansion through a combination of convenience and fear, then systematic expansion once the slaves have become accustomed to the new state of things. It's a rather common ratcheting normalization staircase. Even public information clearly describes how it is the "CIAs" one trick pony, whether it's orchestrating a "color revolution" for "democracy", instigating conflicts and war to feign innocent self-defense, implementing social engineering and Constitutional subversion, or implementing mass surveillance specifically. It's the same wife-beater and child rapist type pattern of grooming abuse that then feigns innocence and deflects blame to anything and anyone else. Most people are really not all that different than any run of the mill battered wife (even if only in the making), psychologically. I get it a lot when I point out what a trap and an illegitimate, enemy entity that the EU is (not to pick on the EU, because it also applies to the US and many other places, but it's far more pronounced with the "EU-cultists")... You get the constant predictable defenses of the love-bombing "abusive boyfriend"/wife beater in the making responses. "you don't understand", "the EU really loves me", "you never want anything good for me", "he showers me with all kinds of benefits and slick marketing", "we are going to be happy forever". It's sad, and as someone that has watched that cycle unfold even in my own family, it's really kind of demoralizing and somewhat depressing to know exactly where it's heading and being unable to counter the forces that have roots a long long time ago, forces of nature. So, the US and the EU will have to suffer that which is predictable and was preventable, no matter how much they wanted to see the world through rose colored glasses. Maybe for humanity's sake, China can free the world of the scourge of this cycle and the psychopathic, narcissistic, maniacal group of people that causes it all... if they don't just kill all life on the planet because if they can't be in control then no one can be in control.

touwer 1y ago

Big tech is nothing different from the German industrialists one hundred years ago

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
If history has thought us anything, it has to be that capitalists have absolutely no spine and only think about profits, no matter what.
- themafia 1y ago
  We used to know this inherently and we spent half a century passing really well thought out and actionable laws designed to thwart the darker side of capitalism while still allowing it's benefits to accrue to the masses. Since then we've forgotten how to enforce anti monopoly and media ownership rules. Similarly we've somehow completely turned campaign financing into an open competition for bribes.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    So, in this situation when a large company cooperates with intrusive policing, you think the problem is that the company is too large and that enforcement of laws should have taken place? To prevent this collaboration with law enforcement?
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      It's a much bigger problem when a company with >50% market share connects all the cameras to law enforcement than if a company with 0.5% market share does that, but the first one can't happen if there are no companies with a double digit market share. And when there are more companies it's easier to tell people to buy a different one because that one is doing something shady. When Amazon does it, you recommend that unsophisticated people do what, use a Chinese camera which is presumably shunting the feeds to that government?
      - 1y ago

gitfan86 1y ago

To all the people talking about government surveillance do you not realize the government already can track you by your cell phone?

themafia 1y ago
I have deniability with the phone. I can also just leave it at home if I want or turn it off entirely. That access should also be illegal without a warrant; however, this is far worse than cellular "metadata" tracking.
- gitfan86 1y ago
  I don't understand why you assume that the government is following all the laws when it comes to cell phones and cloud data but won't when it comes to ring data?
  - sailingparrot 1y ago
    What laws do you suppose they have to follow, exactly? Cops need a warrant to track your phone, check which tower it connected to or tail your car for extended period of time. Cops do not need a warrant to use Flock system. They have an app where they can simply put your license plate and they will get a path showing every move of your car as tracked by the flock cameras, and there are a looot of them (e.g. near San Jose: https://deflock.me/map#map=16/37.335318/-121.881316 https://deflock.me/map#map=16/37.335318/-121.881316). And thats without the integration of ring. This essentially allows them to GPS tag anyone, with no warrant, while "following the laws". So no, it's not all the same.
  - night862 1y ago
    Well, they don't. They definitely need to follow the law when they get it from the Telco, but Cops can use their CSS/IMSI catcher all they want, theres almost no way to tell. But they can not then go to court and say "Yeah—we listened to their phone call and searched the car." With this its no problem. No Hailstorm to buy for the entire force and there isn't any federal oversight on this sort of thing as near as I can tell. If you think police don't do crimes I've got a bridge to sell you.

bryancoxwell 1y 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-end-encryption-e2ee https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...

VoodooJuJu 1y ago
[dead]
kotaKat 1y 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 https://ring.com/search-party
- taneq 1y ago
  “Opt-in-by-default” is a lot of words to say “opt-out”.
  - jappgar 1y ago
    You opted-in by buying the product in the first place. People are buying these things out of fear anyways. I thought they'd be happy big brother is watching.
    - nrjames 1y ago
      When a man murdered a woman in front of my house last year, our Ring camera's photos of his car led to his arrest within 24 hours, so not entirely useless?
      - arlcode 1y ago
        It's all trade offs. Even in the most dystopian sci-fi future where a hostile and totalitarian government watches everything everybody does, they would still use the information to investigate boring everyday crimes. The (non rethoric) question is, are people willing to pay the increasing price of non-crime related surveillance as we see diminished security margins.

everdrive 1y ago

George Orwell really never could have imagined that people would flock to purchase or otherwise use the methods of their own surveillance. (smart phones, social media, smart cameras, modern cars, etc) I think it paints government surveillance policies in something of a different light. There is definitely a constituency which believes that the evil central government is pushing for surveillance in a purely unilateral way. I'm not really pro-government, but modern surveillance capitalism really pushes against this view. Put to their own devices, the public will generally (and apparently) flock towards mass surveillance all on their own, and I think one possible implication is that the government surveillance policies are more popular then some folks in HN circles would suspect.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mihaaly 1y ago
I already have problem with negligent people using products like Ring that is to surveil anyone around without control, with uncontrollable and unreliable level of standard handling collected data (no high hopes here). But when I find it very very hard and limited purchasing products that cannot spy on me - special mention here for smart phones and cars - that makes me mad to the next level. Even for the elevated level privacy concious folks the car and the smart phone bringing hostility for your private life is getting harder and harder to avoid. Not having the suitable time to do the tedious investigations and costly trials into the reliability of products with low surveillance risks, not to mention the constant need of keeping yourself up do date to everything involved in this regard! We need to live our life, cannot spend it on constant workarounds, hacks, and very reasonable paranoia. When logging into essential services are MANDATING the use of smart phones (i.e. MFA, but own apps sometimes, requiring specific vendors!!), not to mention the need of getting from A to B the way required (goods, children, time limits, navigation), but cannot procure a solution that will not expose you to adverse agents or even criminals (those getting in and out of systems nowadays like they live there) that makes me really really mad! This society is shit. I cannot do it, but feel the highly increasing need for becoming the real life Captain Fantastic [1]. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3553976/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3553976/

Aachen 1y ago

These are mappable in OpenStreetMap with the tags surveillance:type=camera + camera:mount=doorbell Data query around the Netherlands shows about a hundred are mapped so far as specifically doorbell cameras: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2dQw https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2dQw (the tag does not yet seem established in the USA). There are also many thousands of cameras mapped that are either not doorbell-mounted, or simply not tagged to such detail. This is a convenient map to see all of them: https://sunders.intri.cat/ https://sunders.intri.cat/

mikkupikku 1y ago
Seems like a fairly impractical thing to map unless you're getting volunteers to walk up to and inspect people's front doors. I know there is an app for a sort of gamified version of this where people take tasks to verify street signs or even how many stories a building has, I used that app for a while, but doorbell mapping seems a lot leas casual.
- westmeal 1y ago
  Walk up to door with stack of papers with a stock photo of a puppy on it that says lost puppy. Check if there's a camera. If the owner comes outside, ask them if they have seen this puppy.
  - QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
    And then at door 125,000 you finally reach the home of the puppy that’s in the stock photo you printed. And they say “Why yes, we have seen this puppy. How did you know??”
    - namibj 1y ago
      So use one that you know to now be dead.
      - roughly 1y ago

whatsupdog 1y ago

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lazyasciiart 1y ago
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saubeidl 1y ago
Immigrants with no criminal record now largest group in ICE detention: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/immigrants-criminal-record-ice-detention https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/immigrants-c... ICE Agents Rappel from Helicopter in Overnight Chicago Raid, Dragging Kids from Beds to U-Hauls: https://people.com/ice-agents-overnight-chicago-raid-11823082 https://people.com/ice-agents-overnight-chicago-raid-1182308... Feds detain WGN-TV staffer, slam into resident’s car in Lincoln Square: https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/10/feds-arrest-wgn-staffer-slam-into-residents-car-in-lincoln-square https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/10/feds-arr... We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days: https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-citizens-arrested-detained-against-will https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-... Videos of violent ICE interactions flood social media: https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/ice-agents-violent-video-arrests-trump-immigration-crackdown-rcna237373 https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/ice-agents-violent-...
- mothballed 1y ago
  I and many other US citizens were brutally imprisoned by CBP/DHS under Biden and no one gave a shit, and at the time it wasn't the cool hot topic for lawyers so ACLU and none of the civil rights lawyers I contacted were interested. I even pointed it out here on HN, I was accused of having it coming, it wasn't until Trump came into power that anyone other than my own family actually believed the story about DHS imprisoning me, dragging me around the state in a prisoner van, and insanely getting a retroactive warrant all over a completely fabricated PC of an unnamed dog alerting an unnamed officer (that as far as I know, didn't even exist). Hopefully this will be a lesson to maybe start giving a shit about these things when they're being tested rather than when the heat gets cranked up against brown people.

statuslover9000 1y ago

Great job giving the government a live dossier of all the political volunteers canvassing out there. This makes me feel so much safer!

olex 1y ago

And this is why my setup will be using Reolink cameras integrated locally via HomeAssistant and Frigate. Detection runs locally on cameras and/or in Frigate, HA manages events and UI, and the only way to access any of it remotely is via VPN, no "cloud" anything. If the authorities come knocking with a warrant, or frankly, even a nicely-worded sensible request, sure, have at it. But ain't nobody accessing the footage unnoticed and without my approval.

sterwill 1y ago
I bought Reolink PoE cameras because they support standard RTSP and I could put them on their own VLAN where they can't get to the Internet. I can still use the Reolink app to view them when I'm on the LAN, or through Wireguard when I'm not. I use ffmpeg to save streams to a big disk. Works great.
- olex 1y ago
  Yeah, this is my idea as well. Good to know that the Reolink app still works locally and via Wireguard, that means I'll have less UI to set up in HomeAssistant.
- dhacks 1y ago
  I do the same and it works well. But do you see the Reolink app hammering domains of the form p#p#.reolink.com? I have to kill the app between uses it it drains my phone's battery because of this.
  - sterwill 1y ago
    I've never looked at what the Android app is doing on the network, but maybe I should. I usually just keep it open for a few minutes when I'm waiting for a delivery or I hear someone ring the doorbell, so I'm not too worried about it piping lots of video to Reolink HQ. I haven't noticed much of a battery drain having used it earlier in the day.
normie3000 1y ago
Don't Reolink cameras require the Reolink mobile app for setup?

shrubble 1y ago

When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house, you realize that the recent demo of Anduril's helmet that gives an information display that the soldier/cop wearing it can use to "see who is in the house" or "see around corners" etc. is not sci-fi but instead, something they can do today.

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
I hate that all our favorite sci-fi books were used as manuals for what to build next, instead of trying to avoid creating those futures in our real lives.
- dv_dt 1y ago
  Read more Solarpunk? From a writers standpoint though, I suspect its easier to weave a dramatic plot through a dystopic background than a more optimistic one
  - red-iron-pine 1y ago
    all happy futures are the same, all terrible ones are terrible in their own, unique way
    - rollcat 1y ago
      Hard disagree. Yes, it's easier to captivate attention by evoking primal instincts - avoid predator, find food, reproduce, etc. These stories stick around in your head, the memetic survivors. They are easier to feed off. But "Happy" doesn't mean a perfect utopia. The entire "classic" Star Trek is set in a utopian future, yet with plenty of space for intrigue. Usually a commentary on a contemporary problem, with a "happy ending" that's supposed to show us the road to a better solution, rather than a bland "forever after". Even "First Contact" (a zombie/survival horror) is spun around the theme of "this is the history/future that we're saving". Bonus: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq4QY0LGOiI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq4QY0LGOiI>

nbngeorcjhe 1y ago

I _hate_ walking down the block and hearing their dumb "Hi! You are being recorded!" jingle. Ffs if you're going to record me at least do it quiely

kylehotchkiss 1y ago
Me too, but these people probably aren't having their cars pilfered in the middle of the night.
- Spivak 1y ago
  My solution to that is to just not keep anything valuable in the car and leave it unlocked. After getting my car window smashed in twice for the thieves to not find anything other than trash I decided this was a better system and haven't had a problem since. For all I know people have rummaged around my car but I don't have to deal with damages anymore. My ideal anti-theft device would be a mode where the car is unlocked but the alarm goes off if you try to open the door.
  - kylehotchkiss 1y ago
    Make sure your car’s jack kit is still there. Thieves want em

flanked-evergl 1y ago

Everybody is a libertarian when their political opposition has power.

InsideOutSanta 1y ago
The corollary is that, when in power, many "libertarians" are only concerned with their own rights and nobody else's, failing to understand that any rights they give up for others may soon be lost for them too. It's just the brown people who are put in detention centers, isn't it?
- hopelite 1y ago
  Do you believe burglars have more rights in your home and to your things than you do? Then why do you apply that logic to others that then must suffer your abusive imposition of abuse? How about you just abuse yourself if you want to abuse. Why does in your mind a "brown person" that is a foreign national who broke the law in and of America by entering and/or remaining in the USA, have more rights to have a job, make money, and even receive public assistance in America than a non-"brown person" that is a legitimate citizen of the USA? What is worse, is that you don't even understand that your support of this kind of lawlessness is only for the purpose of allowing the rich to plunder the working and lower middle class, the real victims that through your words and actions hate with a passion. Sure, burglars also benefit from burglarizing, but that does not make it any better than foreign nationals benefitting while the rich also use them like some crime boss in control of a burglary ring. How do you think, e.g., the home builders who make ~30% gross profit on homes that are poorly built due to "immigrant labor" report triple digit billion dollar returns? You people baffle me that you cannot connect two dots as you at the same time lament that wages are too low, as you support floods of wage decreasing supply flooding "immigration". No one is targeting "brown people" they just happen to be the majority of brown people the ruling class loves importing to profit from at the expense of the indigenous people, just like when the British and Hispanics did it through slavery. You are no different than the slavery rationalizers of the 17th-19th century. Today the ruling class just figured out how to manipulate you into supporting importation of brown people to undermine the indigenous people, and you don't have the intellect or integrity to understand you are being manipulated.

agigao 1y ago

This is why I never bought anything Amazon owned, other than Kindles; and I have dropped the latter, too. I was always suspicious of Ring and never understood the people using it.

gilfoy 1y ago
My entire neighborhood came with ring doorbells pre installed and eero routers. I swapped out to the Logitech doorbell which I like better anyway
- troyvit 1y ago
  So like it just came with the houses as they were built? If that's the case I wonder what kind of deal Ring make with the builders of new neighborhoods.
  - gilfoy 1y ago
    Yes, they were new build. They used it as part of the marketing too, calling them “smart homes”. There’s various other ring bits like motion detector and window/door sensors, alarm, etc. and some non-Amazon stuff like smart water meter, garage door opener. They had some kind of deal with Amazon surely because it came with some amount of time free.
- Aachen 1y ago
  Here in the Netherlands, the government gave them away for free They're also illegal because you're not allowed to film public spaces without a good reason (it's up to the judge and case law to decide, e.g. if there has been arson in the area recently then it's reasonable to monitor your car that's parked at the kerb, for example). Nobody has yet gotten in trouble to my knowledge Gotta love hypocrisy
  - antonymoose 1y ago
    That the government gave them out has me wondering, do they make any kind of distinction between “government does it” versus “you doing it,” i.e. is the government claiming to be monitoring and not you? In America we have this concept that a police must have a real reason to pull over your car. Except they can just setup an arbitrary checkpoint and pull every driver over and this is magically different and acceptable to do, no violations of rights at all.

morwanger 1y ago

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pjmlp 1y ago

Look the outcomes from past history to understand how future will become. Sadly it is only going to get much worse before it gets better.

hopelite 1y ago
I am not sure how that would be helpful, regardless of how you mean that. Nothing in the past has ever even gotten remotely close to what even exists today, let alone what will exist in all of our lifetimes, no matter how old you are.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  I am quite sure there are a few lessons from the past that can be used to guess where current administration is going. Then is up for the citzens to let it happen or react.
- danparsonson 1y ago
  Humans are basically the same, even if the technology is different. "History doesn't repeat itself but rhymes a lot" (or words to that effect). What is happening now in the US (and many other places) strongly echoes the events leading up to WW2.

idiotsecant 1y ago

Stop paying companies to put spyware in your house. Don't connect your smart TV to the network, don't buy cloud cameras, and above all don't run a phone with an OS that they phone company gives you.

BaudouinVH 1y ago

My first thought : Orwell's 1984 Telescreen is happening.

add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
In 1984 I can't remember if they prostrated themselves so fully, purchasing the screens that would spy on them, and did it all come about because they were sucking on the tit of "free" shipping that costs $139/year?

linuxftw 1y ago

Keep voting for politicians that spend our money on weapons and violence, this is the stuff we'll keep getting. This applies to both major political parties in the US.

hopelite 1y ago
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- red-iron-pine 1y ago
  u /hopelite is a 4 month old account with ~40 karma who mostly posts about european immigration low-effort agit-prop bot
  - hopelite 1y ago
    Ok narcissistic, dehumanizing deranged stalker. Speaking about European people’s moral right to exist and be free and their clearly organized eradication through sick people as yourself who stalk people and then make dehumanizing statements about them and are whipping up a genocide frenzied against the people who have produced everything humanity has, including this website and every dependency on it, is maybe beyond your deranged and sick little brainwashed mind, but I have concern for humanity because of little sickos like you; including Europeans that put absolutely hate because you are evils! You are evil! You are deranged! You are sick and dehumanizing! You will cause humanity’s ruin if you continue in your deranged ways.

scottydelta 1y ago

Flock is funded and supported by YC. Not sure how YC sees this.

badgersnake 1y ago
If it brings in ARR it makes an exit more likely and that makes them happy. They're "investors, not bosses" - https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/ https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/
- reaperducer 1y ago
  They're investors, not bosses Being an investor is not an excuse. It makes you amoral, too. "I didn't build the bomb, I just funded the company that built it."
  - Refreeze5224 1y ago
    That's the beauty of capitalism, its very foundation allows you to act immorally or amorally, and pretend that it's ok because of "the market", "invisible hands", "revealed preferences", etc. If it's immoral but done in pursuit of maximizing shareholder value, it's magically allowed.
    - orthecreedence 1y ago
      > done in pursuit of maximizing shareholder value, it's magically allowed. Not even allowed, sometimes legally required ("fiduciary duty").
red-iron-pine 1y ago
why do you think YC have any more morals than Ring? or Palantir?
buellerbueller 1y ago
This is YC. In case you haven't noticed, the surveillance state is 100% YC adjacent.

femiagbabiaka 1y ago

This is the logical conclusion to the state of irrational fear that Americans perpetually live in, that causes them to feel they need 24/7 surveillance of their homes, no matter the consequences.

dormento 1y ago
"Land of the free". I struggle to reconcile.
- pear01 1y ago
  A line from George Carlin comes to mind... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-54c0IdxZWc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-54c0IdxZWc
troupo 1y ago
Unfortunately this is contagious. During the last election cycle in Sweden the Moderate party (third-largest in parliament, and part of the government) literally ran ads like "More cameras on our streets for safety" Edit: added country
- nielsbot 1y ago
  We need a competent counter-narrative but no one (few) figures in the federal government are offering one. The media also loves to report on crime. Etc. I hope people will join their local community groups.
xysix 1y ago
It’s about control, not fear. Nobody is consenting to it out of fear.
- Noaidi 1y ago
  I disagree. Fear is the tool authoritarians use to control people. First they make you fear the other, then they make you fear their force. When your fear the other the consent is internal.

tommaho 1y ago

I’m surprised to not see more noise about Rings new “search party” features, for… Finding dogs?

Jupe 1y ago

So, rather than Big Brother being government-imposed monitoring paid for by all taxpayers, the concerned citizenry is flipping the bill for the devices, network connectivity and electricity. Fascinating.

chronci739 1y ago
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- estimator7292 1y ago
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  - downrightmike 1y ago
    They are a bot: user: chronci739 created: 8 days ago
- deleted 1y ago
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downrightmike 1y ago
always, flock just charges local governments and then charges the police too to get access. They get us coming and going, and yet most crimes and murders go unsolved still. If a cop can track his Ex through hundreds of cams, why aren't the solve rates better? (Its not about crime)
charcircuit 1y ago
Tax payers and citizenry are largely the same. It's not really flipping the bill.
- deleted 1y ago
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ErigmolCt 1y ago
Yep, it's like we speedran 1984 but made it a startup

PaulHoule 1y ago

Flock is controversial in my area https://transparency.flocksafety.com/ithaca-city-ny-pd https://transparency.flocksafety.com/ithaca-city-ny-pd

macNchz 1y ago
Not clear to me what the "External organizations with access" actually means or who decided which organizations to add to the list, but it's curious to me that the campus patrol for a college 250 miles away (SUNY Old Westbury) has access to camera data from Ithaca.
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  (Ex Flock Employee) It's as simple as that agency saying "Hey, can we have access to your camera data?" and the originating agency saying "Sure". Flock (deliberately, IMHO) has no verification on whether said agencies are allowed by law or regulation or whatever to have that access, it's just a free-for-all.
Noaidi 1y ago
Louis Rossmann has been going of a lot about Flock lately, and not only in Austin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQxQpzNSNZU&pp=0gcJCfwJAYcqIYzv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQxQpzNSNZU&pp=0gcJCfwJAYcqI...
MereInterest 1y ago
And actively ignoring state law in others, then violating cease-and-desist orders when told to remove the cameras. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45382434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45382434 (discussion from 2025-09-26)

righthand 1y ago

People need devices that will protect them from this mass surveillance. Plausible deniability needs to be restored. Some sort of jamming tech or scrambling tech. There’s no reason to lock everyone into a surveillance state when we should be fighting it. Fighting through legislation isn’t tenable anymore.

xbar 1y ago

With the stroke of a key, 100 million customer-installed cameras become part of the surveillance state.

AlexandrB 1y ago
This was always the end game for Ring. I think people were saying this since before the Amazon acquisition. The acquisition itself always struck me as Amazon attempting to reduce "shrinkage" - brick and mortar stores have their "loss prevention" team and Amazon has Ring. The bottom line with technology is that you either host and control it yourself or you're at the whims of the vendor's business strategy.
- an0malous 1y ago
  This is also the end game for LLMs
- grafmax 1y ago
  Unfortunately you can’t opt out. The surveillance network blankets virtually everyone - friends, family, all of society.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Official post: https://blog.ring.com/about-ring/ring-expands-community-requests-to-additional-community-safety-partners/ https://blog.ring.com/about-ring/ring-expands-community-requ...

prayerie 1y ago

Having tried to do this already to no avail, does anyone know if as an owner of one of these Ring devices if it's possible to take it offline and handle everything locally? I'm usually against these types of "smart" devices, but only bought it because my house got burgled as a student (whilst I was asleep!), so I got pretty shaken up and got the cheapest thing I could find. Currently, I do have it connected to a local HA instance, but I'm pretty sure that relies on Ring's online services to access it, unless I'm mistaken.

baby_souffle 1y ago
Ring has better than typical device security. If you’re not looking to reverse engineer a brand new exploit, there are other devices that do the same thing but are designed to be local first. Google for rtsp doorbell and you’ll find many discussion threads
foobarian 1y ago
Unfortunately MAC addresses are hard to mask. With a DIY camera you could customize the MAC address, but it would still be visible. To truly hide it I suppose you'd need to use a wired interface. Ubiquiti used to make 700MHz WiFi adapters but I don't think those are a thing any longer
Noaidi 1y ago
Why not just get rid of it? Your anxiety is triggered from the past, not the present. We have lived without these devices in perfect safety and security for a long time. Simplify and be free!

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account_1234 1y ago

I worked in a Ring back in 2017. In the Ukraine office. All the things you read about their privacy were right. All private things, like access for employees to people's data, are right. This is an absolutely evil company. I don't understand why people in the first place in the USA are buying it.

theturtle 1y ago

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tamimio 1y ago

To control the public, just play on the fear or safety part, and they will just follow mindlessly.

msie 1y ago

Doesn't matter, cops will raid a home on no more info than intuition.

Noaidi 1y ago

Some serious boycotts need to be happening, and soon. I do not care if this was an R or a D administration, this has been out of control and just getting worse. This is us against the oligarchs, not us against each other. And something makes me worried that there is an impending recession/depression and that these surveillance devices will be use to quell any dissent. (I say this because of the insane rise in the price of gold) I, for one, am canceling my Amazon Prime account and avoiding amazon as much as I can in this dystopia where it is the only place you can buy many goods anymore.

JeremyHerrman 1y ago

Unifi G4 Doorbell Pro [0] is a great self-hosted option. I've been very happy with mine over the last year, but I was already bought into the unifi ecosystem with a UDM Pro SE and U6 mesh APs. 0: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cameras-doorbells/collections/pro-store-doorbells-chimes/products/uvc-g4-doorbell-pro https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cameras-doorbells/collec...

IT4MD 1y ago
I just installed mine (last weekend) and use a Unifi stack at home. 100% recommended alternative.
nerdsniper 1y ago
Alternatively, the Reolink Doorbell cameras for anyone who doesn't want to be on the Unifi/Ubiquiti platform. Also I believe all these cameras provide a generic RTSP feed which can be consumed by any computer running Frigate[0], an open-source NVR/AI platform. 0: https://frigate.video https://frigate.video (Reolink, Unifi/Ubiquiti, and Frigate are all good solutions for anyone who is not interested in supporting the proliferation of a police-state)
- jdyer9 1y ago
  If it matters to you, Reolink is a Chinese owned company. Not passing judgement one way or another, but if avoiding Unifi over the remote incident matters, I could see this factoring in as well.
  - WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
    > If it matters to you, Reolink is a Chinese owned company. It does matter to me. Because I am an American, my greatest risks (actual and theoretical) are from American entities. Conversely, China has little actual power to negatively impact my life. I am most comfortable (and arguably safer) with Chinese gear.
  - davkan 1y ago
    Separate vlans for iot devices with strict firewall rules is generally enough to mitigate the threat of most iot devices phoning home i think. We’re already in the territory of hobbyists who should be able to manage that with these suggestions like ubiquity and frigate.

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tptacek 1y ago

However, AI-powered technology used by law enforcement has been proven to exacerbate racial biases. This is a little misleading. Flock is primarily an ALPR that can identify make/model/color/identifying-feature of vehicles. It's not facial recognition. It doesn't itself have a racial component. The modal "proactive" Flock intervention (as opposed to investigative searches after crimes) is to flag a moving vehicle as stolen. But in practice, the outcomes of deploying Flock are racialized, because the hot lists states keep of stolen vehicles aren't accurate enough for real-time enforcement, so recovered vehicles stay on the lists and false-positive. You're disproportionately likely to have a vehicle on a hot list if you live in a low-income neighborhood. Even then: it's not clear how any of this is apposite to a Ring/Flock partnership. You can't use a Ring camera to do realtime ALPR flagging of cars. Presumably, this supports Flock's "single pane of glass" product; they just want police going to Flock for all their video needs. Police already canvass Ring and Nest cameras during investigations.

gigel82 1y ago
They're a lot more than "license plate readers", they're complete AI surveillance systems: https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_License_Plate_Readers https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_License_Plate_Readers
- tptacek 1y ago
  They're license plate readers, make/model/identifying-feature databases, and search engines. I didn't say they were just "license plate readers".
  - puppycodes 1y ago
    have you seen this? https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-dfr https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-dfr much much more dystopian...
    - tptacek 1y ago
      What's your point? Obviously we wouldn't allow something like this to be deployed in our community. But what does that have to do with Flock providing an interface to police departments for collecting Ring camera footage? I don't think that's a good thing --- I think PDs should continue to manually canvass for footage and specifically ask residents for footage when they need it, I think that's actually the right public policy and we don't need to innovate past it. But good or bad, it has nothing to do with Flock's "AI".

giantg2 1y ago

Zoneminder is a good alternative

beaker52 1y ago

This combined with all the price increases makes me hate the fact I bought a ring doorbell.

buellerbueller 1y ago

It was only a matter of time.

jajuuka 1y ago

I think Amazon hired the bizarro team to run Ring. Because they just keep giving reasons NOT to get a Ring device.

dbg31415 1y ago

They do have an end to end encryption option. Wonder if that helps any. https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-end-encryption-e2ee https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...

SteveNuts 1y ago
Without solid third party verification that promise isn’t worth the HTML it’s written in.
TechRemarker 1y ago
On that page though it looks like most all the features are not available with E2EE, event timeline, person detection, search you name it. So imagine few if any use it, since alternative options that can locally do all that and still have E2EE.
some_furry 1y ago
The security of pretty much everything Amazon boils down to KMS. KMS access is based on IAM policies. If law enforcement wants access to your KMS keys, they'll compel IAM, not KMS, to give them access. If you ask KMS about it, they'll play dumb.
Terr_ 1y ago
It depends if Amazon has any way to access to the encryption key that supposedly protects the content.

klodolph 1y ago

All this hand-wringing about surveillance powers is not keeping up with how quickly our ability to surveil people is expanding. The fourth amendment seems kind of like a wet fart in a timeline where private companies can surveil the public and then simply choose to share their data with law enforcement. I had to buy a surveillance camera recently, but I made sure mine doesn’t connect to the internet in any way.

Fnoord 1y ago
I mean the feed has to be written to a storage and this storage I immediately backup off-site in the case someone is clever enough to immediately go for such (e.g. burglary).
- klodolph 1y ago
  I think one of the traps we fall into is imagining that an attacker is somehow intelligent (someone who can immediately attack video storage) but simultaneously uncreative (doesn’t think of some way to make the surveillance footage irrelevant). I’ve decided that I’m not a high-profile target for covert operatives, but I am a target of opportunity for people who have access to my data once that data is outside of my control. The decisions I make based on that are decisions like, “No surveillance feed goes into cloud services operated by companies I don’t trust,” but “I don’t need to encrypt my NAS”.
  - Fnoord 1y ago
    Stupid burglars get caught. It is only a matter of time till burglars learn to combat this. For example, a MITM on the camera. Thing is, neighbors also got one. If I get threatened to remove the video, I will oblige. If everything gets destroyed in a fire due to cobra's, there's a backup. That's my threat model. And silent data corrupt on the camera feed storage could also occur.
yannyu 1y ago
How does your total solution work? Today, there's a lot of convenience with Nest. Is there an equivalent experience that doesn't involve exposing your data to megacorps?

bloqs 1y ago

this article with 1 comment is top of the front page for me, how come?

portaouflop 1y ago
I believe they changed the algorithm a lot in the last 12+ months; I think bots and automation are becoming more and more of an issue - like everywhere else

Squeeeez 1y ago

Slight tangent: on top of that, I just read an article yesterday (which of course I can't find again right now) about how false automatic alarms from such cameras will incur a fee from the owners when the Police comes to check it out. It was from somewhere in Texas.

dylan604 1y ago
That's pretty common with any alarm system not just Ring. I know you get the first false alarm with a response for free. After that, fines/tickets are issued. It might have been 2 free can't remember as it's been a long time since the alarm was installed and info was provided. This was in Dallas specifically before I go painting with too broad of a brush. Even further back, I had an alarm system installed, but never paid for monitoring. They also warned about fines after too many false reports, and that was a tiny town waaaay outside of Dallas.
- Squeeeez 1y ago
  Nothing against that per se, false alarms should be kept in check. If you have a system where, as I understand it, the main point is to check who is standing in front of your door, and that system now is one automatic update away from dipping into your bank account... How long until the police departments figure out that donations to a specific company could be very profitable?

gilfoy 1y ago

I commented on a similar post earlier, but my entire neighborhood, hundreds of houses, came with them preinstalled. Can’t even leave my house without being surveilled. Some people have the setting on where it starts announcing stuff any time it sees a person, which it does all the way to the sidewalk. So you go on a walk and get yelled at through a super shitty speaker several times. And it’s about as dystopian as you can imagine with people posting recordings constantly on the neighborhood Facebook group and arguing. I swapped to HomeKit secure video because of no additional subscription, included in the iCloud one I’m paying anyway. Allegedly end to end encrypted too.

gleenn 1y ago
The police chumminess is super dystopian. I definitely went with E2E encrypted cameras because I also think it's so crazy people just hand all that data over without realizing how powerful it is and how much personal privacy they are throwing out the window.
- nik282000 1y ago
  E2E encryption but what are the ends? If one is your camera and the other is a cloud service then you aren't really protecting anything.
  - Spoom 1y ago
    You could additionally use encryption at rest where the key is only ever on the client.
  - gilfoy 1y ago
    Apple at least claims to not have keys for their E2EE, such as when you turn on Advanced Protection (or whatever it’s called) it has this whole spiel about how screwed you are if you lose your recovery ability
hypeatei 1y ago
> came with them preinstalled That's concerning. Now we have to worry about spyware coming pre installed on houses. I wonder how much the developers got paid to install those?

nik282000 1y ago

One of the many reasons to host your own stuff. It costs about 0.75CAD per day to run my server and PoE switch. For my 20 bucks a month I get cameras, a media server, password manager, push notifications, file sharing, and a dozen other services, all without handing my data over to business or governments. Is it as secure as a cloud service? Depends on what you consider secure. I closely monitor access logs and use strong passwords, Amazon has billions to spend on encryption, apps, and datacenters but they also have thousands of employees that can access your data at any time for any reason. I would love it if some commercial host-it-yourself product were released but that goes against the pay to play model that has been chosen for all modern tech.

rogerrogerr 1y ago
I fear ISPs have made a commercial host-it-yourself product near impossible. Imagine selling a product, getting no ongoing revenue, and then being on the hook - forever - to support average people trying to connect to something inside their home network from their phone. Nightmare material. If anyone is having trouble understanding the support load, start by traveling to your local assisted living home and explaining to everyone static vs. dynamic IP address assignment. You can do it fairly easily by bouncing off a server you control... aaaand we're right back where we started.
- nerdsniper 1y ago
  Tailscale
- Liftyee 1y ago
  I think something like Tailscale's technology could resolve this and many other self hosting access cases. Already, I don't open any ports - just use Tailscale to connect to my PC at home. If this was integrated into the "camera app", it could be seamless - only authentication required. Since the traffic goes directly point to point, the cost of hosting this service isn't too large either.
  - nik282000 1y ago

1970-01-01 1y ago

I'm willing to bet $$$ anyone will be able to call themselves a 'local security agency' before proper controls are implemented.

nik282000 1y ago
Likely a form followed by a "Do you promise you didn't lie" checkbox at the bottom is all that will separate a user from access.

jamestimmins 1y ago

By this point, we should assume that all companies with sensitive data that could theoretically help solve crime will be accessed by the government as a rule. That's just being a realistic technology user in 2025.

dmix 1y ago
The only real solution is strong privacy laws around gov usage and strong courts willing to enforce it. Expecting consumer choice or regulations to prevent that data from ever existing is mostly a fools errand IMO, there's just too much of it and it's everywhere.
- deelowe 1y ago
  > The only real solution is strong privacy laws around gov usage and strong courts willing to enforce it. I don't think this is a solution, personally.
  - encrypted_bird 1y ago
    Care to elaborate? You can't just say "I disagree" without explaining why you disagree.
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  Based on what? There's no constitutional right to privacy, while courts have consistently expanded the scope of government powers and immunities and consistently hollowed out the Bill of Rights. It's gonna require a new legal paradigm.
  - WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
    > There's no constitutional right to privacy, Being secure in my person, house, papers, and effects is my privacy in action.
    - anigbrowl 1y ago

hooverd 1y ago

how cheap is rolling your own with a little mini PC running an Ultralytics model?

add-sub-mul-div 1y ago

Orwell didn't foresee that people would voluntarily pay for their own surveillance, out of fandom for a company that charges $15/month for "free" shipping. That they also actually do give away for free if you can wait a few extra days rather than treating every purchase as an impulse buy. Reality has become more stupid than even visionaries could have predicted.

nik282000 1y ago
He never mentioned if the screens in every house had a monthly fee or if you could pay more to skip adds. We could still be right on track to war with East Asia.

Xca129sby 1y ago

Security cameras could already be hacked and have their feed altered by using Toka services. Toka was founded by Ehud Barak (also of Carbyne fame, with Epstein) and a16z: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/06/a16z-backed-toka-wants-to-help-us-agencies-hack-into-security-cameras-and-other-iot-devices/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/06/a16z-backed-toka-wants-to-...

black_13 1y ago

[dead]

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614713

forrestthewoods 1y ago

Unpopular Opinion: good? I mean I like wish all the people who steal packages and break into cars in my neighborhood would get arrested.

monkaiju 1y ago

Wild how if a government does this directly most folks agree its dystopian and flip out, but let companies do it and, even if it ends up in the governments hands, people install it themselves...

anigbrowl 1y ago

It's not that long ago that people used to talk about East Germany as a dystopian hellhole of state surveillance, and yet the US is now far more surveilled than the DDR ever was. It's amazing to me how easily this country was propagandized and its inhabitants persuaded to establish an authoritarian state of their own.

Spooky23 1y ago
As VC backed startups run out of ideas that meet their return requirements, they pivot to government. The whole flock thing is brilliant as the FBI is the sales force through their grant programs.
anaisbetts 1y ago
Ironically, because of East Germany, cameras like this are now extremely illegal here. Any camera that can see public or even semi-public property (i.e. a camera that can see out into your building's courtyard or hallway) are disallowed. Even ones that strictly are inside your own home are subject to rules around audio recording and a sign must be posted at all entrances.

browningstreet 1y ago

I have a friend who's been extolling this open source alternative: https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/

ssl-3 1y ago
Home Assistant is very flexible. It's kind of like a common meeting ground where all the things come together in one spot, and they can thereafter be programmatically automated. Cameras? NVRs? A sea of IoT light bulbs, switches, and sensors that all variously speak Zigbee or Matter or Thread or Wifi or Z-Wave or Bluetooth or some clown connection or whatever? Almost all of it works fine with HA. It's very flexible. If anything, it may be too flexible. It can be rough getting started with it. (I use it in "Home Assistant OS" form in a VM on a light-weight x86 box that only cost me $50, wherein: Performance is quite lovely, and updates haven't hosed anything up [yet] that required me to go poking at it to keep it going. It's also right at home on bare-metal x86, or an ARM SBC like a Raspberry Pi, or in containers, or [...]. Did I mention that it's flexible?)
glitchcrab 1y ago
Home assistant just connects to the devices; you still need the devices to make it useful.

beej71 1y ago

Get a Chinese knockoff that transmits everything to Chinese servers. Good luck to the US government getting your data out of there. :)

gubicle 1y ago
they'd get it before it gets to china

mgh2 1y ago

https://archive.is/7fMPK https://archive.is/7fMPK

DanOpcode 1y ago

I wonder how many existing Ring owners would have bought the camera had they known they would eventually give third parties access to the camera footage.

jauntywundrkind 1y ago

So so late. But just so vile, so reprehensible to see such a corrupt fallen disagreeable state of the world march over us. I am stricken with fear over the control and manipulation by the Chinese state. A dominance over people without respect or regard, a self certainty and pomp that denies life & possibility. But what the West is letting happen here, the limitless post-state open-for-anyone surveillance Flock & others are offering has seemingly even less bounds, less respect, less purpose, less direction. These people, this enterprise is clearly the worst possible thing we could do, the most awful accrual & misuse of the world against its people's. To spy on everyone & to without regard sell that days to everyone is a crime against all. Flock is truly the #HostisHumaniGeneris. Woe & (all too expectable) disappointment to see Amazon giving up all their data to fascist pro ICE losers who, were we a descent society, we would run out of the world.

maybezzzz76 1y ago

Didn't someone a while ago make those QR codes which played with the facial recognition algorithms. I wonder where they are today... Sound like fashion could play a role here.

bob1029 1y ago

These cameras are a big part of why I recently moved. They're a canary for something deeper. The area I was in was like the Korean DMZ with regard to flock cameras. I had one at the only entrance to my neighborhood. A trip to the grocery store would put me in their database 12 times at last count. I still have to worry about the standardized fleet of cameras at Home Depot and a few other retailers, but it's not nearly as bad out here. Location is a big part of the dystopia. It is not evenly distributed. Fighting back at the municipal and HOA level can make a massive difference. Some areas seem hopeless though. You're better off finding something that already mostly works and trying hard to keep it that way. The general fear level of the local population seems to be the biggest factor in all of this. I went from a place where people would do the quadruple check car lock routine when walking into the grocery store, to a place where many leave their unlocked vehicles idling in the parking lot. I don't even think about locking my doors at home now. It almost feels silly to do it around here. It's amazing the difference that ~65 miles can make.

ErigmolCt 1y ago
Even a short distance can feel like crossing from panopticon to peace and quiet
potato3732842 1y ago
>The general fear level of the local population seems to be the biggest factor in all of this. I went from a place where people would do the quadruple check car lock routine when walking into the grocery store, to a place where many leave their unlocked vehicles idling in the parking lot. I don't even think about locking my doors at home now. It almost feels silly to do it around here. It's amazing the difference that ~65 miles can make. It's not even that. The real shitholes full o' crime have scant cameras because you don't need them for "real" investigations of "real" crime. You only need a traffic cameras to establish what you need for a murder investigation or whatever, pair the images with cell time stamps and presto. Cameras are for making it cheap to enforce the long tail of petty deviance that doesn't actually matter. Karen calls up bitching that some guy did something, normally that would be discarded because it's not worth it. But with a camera system they can query it and maybe fine the guy from their desks. They're not using the system to go after someone for stealing from parked cars except perhaps to walk back in time and add charges to someone they already got (same reason they ask for serial numbers of electronics and the like when doing theft investigations they won't follow up on).

ErigmolCt 1y ago

This is one of those stories that reads like a Black Mirror episode but is just... real life now. What’s especially concerning is the normalization of this kind of surveillance creep...