9 ms·

Drop dead

117 points by _pius 12y ago

pavel_lishin 12y ago
I actually have my laptop set up to take a snapshot every 20 minutes (unless I'm connected to work wifi - never know when it might be pointed at confidential data on a whiteboard, and it felt unfair to opt all my coworkers into it.) It has definitely made me more mindful of situations like this. (It actually sporadically refuses to take a photo on the new laptop right now, so http://lishin.org/pavelcam.jpg http://lishin.org/pavelcam.jpg doesn't always get updated.)
- akent 12y ago
  Why do you do this to yourself?
  - tedks 12y ago
    I'd probably do that. Give the link to a few friends. It's pretty harmless, sort of an automatic snapchat. It'd definitely make me more conscious of when I'm being watched by my webcam, and I'd definitely want to have an opt-out when it was about to snap a picture. That aside, he seems to do this because it is pure nightmare fuel. This is the pic from right now: https://i.imgur.com/xuDp4Kk.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xuDp4Kk.jpg
    - pavel_lishin 12y ago
      There have been creepier once :P
  - bricestacey 12y ago
    My buddy wrote up a quick git hook that took one every time you made a commit. It's kind of fun.
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    Because we live in a surveillance society, and it's a way of reminding myself that privacy can be compromised. Some people put a bandaid over their camera, and forget about it; I always remember. Plus sometimes it snaps hilarious pictures.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
The 'oh' moment of data dissemination. Somethings are not good for the cloud, not only is there a picture of your buttocks in the cloud, its a lot easier to get a warrant to peek at Dropcam/Google's data than it is to get one to get a computer from your house and scan its hard drive. And if someone is fishing for a reason to get your attention, well getting snapshots inside your house is a lot easier than getting a search warrant for your house. I was looking at the comm vaults Comcast and others put into the ground where they are doing fiber pulls and realized that it wouldn't be that hard to put one in a back yard, or in a weird kind of data center (kind of like a cemetery but selling server vaults instead of burial plots) which would at least keep your data 'off site' in the sense that your house burning down wouldn't cause it to go away.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- kuyan 12y ago
  What are comm vaults? The little that Google yields does not tell much.
  - RyJones 12y ago
    A communication vault, built much like a burial vault (seriously, it's usually one company that casts both). It is made of thick concrete, buried underground, and (with a water intrusion alarm) fairly well protected from above-ground ills.
    - prawn 12y ago
      Like a data safe of some sort?
    - ChuckMcM 12y ago
      Pretty much, but the one Commcast was dropping in had an AC power feed, a set of lead acid battery boxes built into one side, and a moulded in space for holding about 40U of rack gear (telcom depth though so it looked like 12" not 40". Oh and a ladder in one side and a lockable lid. Very interesting kind of box.
Nux 12y ago
Of all ipcams in the world why the hell did he buy the one in 0.1% of them that uploads shit to the "cloud"?
- politekc 12y ago
  Of most IP cameras, Dropcam's form factor is enviable. The lack of local storage is not. I've been on the search for something inconspicuous and similarly-priced for a while.
  - voltagex_ 12y ago
    I wonder how hackable it is. Edit: http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/04/reverse-engineering-dropcam-rooting-the-device.html http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/04/reverse-engineering-..., http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/03/Reverse-Engineering-Dropcam-Communications.html http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/03/Reverse-Engineering-...
    - trimtab 12y ago
      I've been down this road a bit. There are many ip video cameras made in Asia that are locally controllable. The Dericam H502W is particularly hackable, but the content is not encrypted unless you add that at the internet router via stunnel or a VPN. But if you do that you have an encrypted 720p video feed that records on motion in the dark that you can fully control for less than $100 per camera. You can choose to use the other camera features like email, ftp or http photo alerts just realize that all that data will be "in the clear" as they travel past your router unless you encrypt them. NOTE: Simply using an SMTPS to Gmail SMTP server is not protecting your content. That's just wrapping your content up in a pretty box for direct delivery to Google.
- mahyarm 12y ago
  The automated analysis is pretty useful. How would you know if someone is robbing you until it's after the fact? I would like it as a stand alone program too.
- danielweber 12y ago
_Adam 12y ago
Except that image isn't accessible to anyone except the owner, or MAYBE the NSA. But I'm pretty sure the NSA doesn't care about looking at some random guy's ass. In the unlikely case that they do need to investigate the ass for national security reasons, they aren't going to disseminate the picture to the world, similar to how they don't disseminate intelligence data. Which means the ONLY way the public will see the ass-picture is if: a) The ass is of interest to national security AND b) The ass is of such concern to national security it is stored in the NSA's internal ass-database AND c) There exists some kind of ass-Snowden that leaks all the asses in the NSA arsenal. ...why does anyone care about this?
- Voltage 12y ago
  This picture will remain in the cloud for eternity. When assial recognition software becomes more prevalent, they can use this image to match his identity to future crimes (in which he leaves an ass print behind).
- vectorpush 12y ago
  > Except that image isn't accessible to anyone except the owner Good point, it's true that cloud servers containing personal information are never hacked, this is probably because most companies take security very seriously. > But I'm pretty sure the NSA doesn't care about looking at some random guy's ass. Exactly! It's not as if NSA employees have ever been known to abuse their power for personal or purely entertainment purposes! > they aren't going to disseminate the picture to the world, similar to how they don't disseminate intelligence data. Agreed, rest assured that your private photos and correspondences are safe in the hands of professionals who would never be interested in leaking personal or embarrassing data about innocent law abiding citizens.
  - drdaeman 12y ago
    > who would never be interested Rephrasing Hanlon's razor, there's no need for malice where a simple fuck-up would suffice ;) They don't need to be interested in leaking personal data, they just have to make a mistake that would allow such leak. And introducing bugs isn't not something unheard of, even for pros.
serve_yay 12y ago
Funny. We're all so (justifiably) afraid of NSA and Google violating our privacy that we don't even consider the ways we do it to ourselves.
- shittyanalogy 12y ago
  Somepeople
- PavlovsCat 12y ago
  You can't "violate your own privacy" though. It's like wondering why someone who likes to eat a lot of strawberries might frown on being forced to eat even a single strawberry, or why someone who is perfectly fine with some permutations of the letters of the alphabet would protest others. "But I did the same thing that other guy just did, I just arranged some letters! Oh, the irony." Well no, details and context matter.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- shittyanalogy 12y ago
  The article is about not having control of your data, not being worried about a censored photo. Now that the data is in someone else's control there are no guarantees whatsoever as far as who has it and if it's been deleted.
imgabe 12y ago
Ultimately though, what are the negative consequences of some random stranger, or even the general public, seeing your naked ass? Pretty much nothing.
- shittyanalogy 12y ago
  You've taken this too literally.
ossreality 12y ago
Seriously? lol
sysk 12y ago
What do you mean by "web accessible"? Did Google decide to publicly publish all dropcam's customer pictures?
- matt-attack 12y ago
  I'm sure they're accessible via a customer account. That's sort of the point of this system - you can be on vacation and peek into your home. Web accessible doesn't mean not password-protected.
akkp 12y ago
To paraphrase: "The device functioned as intended so now I hate It". The developers of this product don't deserve this blog post, especial when the feature in question is a paid extra that requires setup.
- andreasvc 12y ago
  The blog post illustrates that applications of technology can have unforeseen, unintended consequences (even though it may appear obvious in hindsight). Regardless of whether the device works as intended, the non-technical but human question of whether it should function that way in the first place is a valid question to pose.
- devindotcom 12y ago
  That's a pretty poor paraphrase. He has realized some troubling implications of using this type of device and wrote about it.
raldi 12y ago
1. Visit google.com 2. Search for [erase dropcam video] 3. Click first result
- duiker101 12y ago
  it might say "erase dropcam video" but it really means "erase indexing of dropcam video"
  - raldi 12y ago
    Are you claiming that, when Dropcam says it erased your video, it's lying? That they're secretly keeping a copy around? If so, come out and make that accusation explicitly. It would be quite a story, especially if you had a reference to cite.
    - duiker101 12y ago
      No reference, absolutely, I don't want to accuse anyone of anything but as his(or anyone's) video/image/anything is now "in the cloud" I feel like there really very little control over what we have there and what is not. Sure, they might be telling the truth that they deleted it, but can you be 100% sure that there have been no copies made? backups? OP mentions that he received an email, what about that? will it be deleted too? Any cached copies somewhere?
    - kybernetyk 12y ago
      > Are you claiming that, when Dropcam says it erased your video, it's lying? That they're secretly keeping a copy around? Why should you trust them? Because they say so? And even if they intend to really delete the data instead of just setting the hidden flag - how do you know that one of their employees isn't a "bad seed" and has some weird hobbies like scanning through the Dropcam servers for nudes? A little paranoia and mistrust isn't a bad thing when it comes to personal data. You can't really control the whole chain so your only option to keep data private that should be kept private is not to hand it out in the first place.
    - lambda 12y ago
ubertaco 12y ago
The principle of the matter and all, I know, but you've got to love his response here: "now there's a web-accessible picture of me naked! Here, it's this picture: <insert web-accessible image>"
- gsg 12y ago
  He stuck a black bar on that one (and references that in the post). Although that might seem a trivial difference, that there is an edit implies the author's knowledge of and control over the image. That makes all the difference.
joshavant 12y ago
I have a Dropcam in my garage for miscellaneous reasons. I, too, have wondered the implications of providing the Google/NSA complex video evidence of my comings and goings... It'd be nice if Dropcams were more hacker friendly, and allowed recording to personally-owned devices, instead of forcing you to use their (fairly expensive) cloud recording service. (Not to mention the ~100ish GB/mo bandwidth savings to stream this video, which is a fairly nontrivial requirement.)
- andrewchambers 12y ago
  It could easily be done, but that's how they make money, so it won't.
  - GuiA 12y ago
    And that's a great sum up of the state of technology in 2014.
  - Vendan 12y ago
    Foscam has a bunch of models that do just this
kybernetyk 12y ago
> It’s at this point you ask yourself if having a net-connected camera for monitoring your house was a good idea after all. It's a good idea but you probably shouldn't buy the fancy "cloud" version. Just set up your own FTP server ...
ggchappell 12y ago
I'm missing something here. If you don't want naked pictures of yourself taken, then you don't undress in front of a running video camera, right? Seems kinda obvious. This fellow put together a setup that automatically takes pix of whatever happens and uploads them to a company's server and ... he's shocked when it does what it's supposed to? I don't get it. -------- EDIT. Been pondering this. Perhaps he began with a misconception akin to that of a politician who wants a backdoor for the good guys to use, but who doesn't understand that if the good guys can use it, then so can the bad guys. Then the e-mail and his resulting thoughts showed him that he wasn't thinking about the world properly; thus his feeling of shock.
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  You make a good point, but perhaps you're being slightly unfair to the author. My take on his piece wasn't that he was "shocked" when the camera did what it's supposed to do. Rather, he realized -- upon seeing a very jarring stimulus -- that he has no idea who else can see what he sees, or what they do with that information. A general consumer assumption with devices like these is that only the end user sees the footage. That's a naive assumption. But psychologically, it's understandable. We believe that the walls of our homes are "privacy shields" -- Faraday cages, of a sort, that somehow prevent anyone outside from seeing in, or anything inside from leaking out. At the same time, we bring connected devices (including cameras) into those homes. Few of us consciously put two and two together. Seeing himself naked was sort of a wake-up call for the author. He'd always known the camera was connected to the cloud. But then he became cognizant of who's on the other end of that cloud. I think it's fair to recoil upon coming to that realization, regardless of who the company might be (Google or otherwise). Consumers are embracing the "cloud," but they really have no idea what the "cloud" is, or what it can mean. Again: naive, certainly. But still an interesting thing to consider.
  - mdonahoe 12y ago
    This happened to me, and "wake-up call" is exactly right. I set up the camera to check my cats when I was away, and found myself realizing I walk around naked a lot.
hellbanner 12y ago
The blog's subtitle is "doing it wrong". Naked in front of a camera and pondering implications of Internet of Things backed by private corporations? Yes, you are doing it wrong.
kentdev 12y ago
I may have to spend the weekend messing with my raspberry pi to make a local dropcam. Just found a link to a guide: http://www.sonsoftone.com/?page_id=287 http://www.sonsoftone.com/?page_id=287
tlrobinson 12y ago
Assuming you do want off-site backups of your security footage, but only accessible to you (i.e. strongly encrypted), what are your options? What if you want a remote live stream? Linux or OS X, please.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Well, in principle you could toss your public key on that camera. In practice, I don't know if anyone does this as anything remotely approaching off-the-shelf.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    Sounds like a good project for a raspberry pi.
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      It does.
knodi123 12y ago
On the one hand, "If you don't want naked pictures of yourself in the cloud, don't take naked pictures of yourself and put them in the cloud." But this is like saying "If you don't want to get scammed, then don't respond to scammy emails." That is, it's perfectly good advice, which is fine for people who visit Hacker News, but maybe not sufficient for the vast majority of people who aren't aware of the ins and outs of our rapidly advancing technology. There are whole communities of people devoted to the practice of finding women who accidentally configured their phones to upload all pictures to a publicly accessible cloud storage server. The women whose nudes are distributed this way may not realize their pics are being mirrored- or they may assume it's to a private site (because why the hell isn't that the default?!?)- or they may have shared these pics with a dude who made the same mistakes. But regardless, the point remains- any individual is easily capable of being immune to this problem. But there's a whole population of vulnerable victims who don't even know they're being victimized. And that is a real problem.
shittyanalogy 12y ago
I think you guys are missing the point a little on this one. It's not that there is a picture of this dudes bare ass somewhere online and he's upset about it, it's that no matter what he did or tried he could be guaranteed in absolutely no way that the data was removed or under his control. Once it's in the pipes, it may or may not be there, there's no way to know. Anything you put online, in all sorts of incidental ways be it from giving your TV voice commands, sending your location to google maps, or your net connected security devices, becomes someones property other than just yours. Not that it's legal, or that people are spying on everything you do, but that you have no way of knowing about or controlling the data once it's there. This isn't supposed to be scary, just a reminder that you can lose control easily. This is a complex issue and if you think it goes away by saying things like "well then don't stand in front of the camera naked." then you are missing the point.
- joshkpeterson 12y ago
  This dude is Matt Haughey, founder of Metafilter. He wrote another piece about accidentally spying on his house-sitter that I think is more interesting. https://medium.com/@mathowie/every-data-point-is-sacred-e0bd2ec66ce8 https://medium.com/@mathowie/every-data-point-is-sacred-e0bd...
anigbrowl 12y ago
Much as I care about privacy and the exploitation of people's data for commercial gain, I find this a bit histrionic. If you put the automated camera inside your house and you are the sort of person who sometimes wanders around naked, then the two are eventually bound to collide (which is why I don't have automated cameras inside the house). On the plus side, everybody has an ass and this one is so far into the background of the picture that the only conclusions I can reach about the subject are 'Mathowie is quite pale' and 'he has an ass like every other member of the human race.' In other words, this isn't really awkward enough to serve as a cautionary tale to anyone else. Now if he had been dressed up as a lobster that would be quite a different kettle of fish.
jaxbot 12y ago
I have a device similar to a Dropcam but by D-Link, and have it configured to transmit data to my NAS, rather than the cloud. I can then SSH in to view the images on it. If you want a camera monitoring your home, but don't want it stored on someone elses' system, it's pretty easy to roll your own with a variety of configurations.
thrillgore 12y ago
This certainly gives me pause about buying a Dropcam, even if the only place its going to observe is near my front door.
rwallace 12y ago
What would bother me about this is that picture is far too small and blurry to identify a criminal. Is that the best this product can do? If so, are there any competing products that do better?

117 points by _pius 12y ago

I actually have my laptop set up to take a snapshot every 20 minutes (unless I'm connected to work wifi - never know when it might be pointed at confidential data on a whiteboard, and it felt unfair to opt all my coworkers into it.) It has definitely made me more mindful of situations like this. (It actually sporadically refuses to take a photo on the new laptop right now, so http://lishin.org/pavelcam.jpg http://lishin.org/pavelcam.jpg doesn't always get updated.)

akent 12y ago
Why do you do this to yourself?
- tedks 12y ago
  I'd probably do that. Give the link to a few friends. It's pretty harmless, sort of an automatic snapchat. It'd definitely make me more conscious of when I'm being watched by my webcam, and I'd definitely want to have an opt-out when it was about to snap a picture. That aside, he seems to do this because it is pure nightmare fuel. This is the pic from right now: https://i.imgur.com/xuDp4Kk.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xuDp4Kk.jpg
  - pavel_lishin 12y ago
    There have been creepier once :P
- bricestacey 12y ago
  My buddy wrote up a quick git hook that took one every time you made a commit. It's kind of fun.
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  Because we live in a surveillance society, and it's a way of reminding myself that privacy can be compromised. Some people put a bandaid over their camera, and forget about it; I always remember. Plus sometimes it snaps hilarious pictures.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

The 'oh' moment of data dissemination. Somethings are not good for the cloud, not only is there a picture of your buttocks in the cloud, its a lot easier to get a warrant to peek at Dropcam/Google's data than it is to get one to get a computer from your house and scan its hard drive. And if someone is fishing for a reason to get your attention, well getting snapshots inside your house is a lot easier than getting a search warrant for your house. I was looking at the comm vaults Comcast and others put into the ground where they are doing fiber pulls and realized that it wouldn't be that hard to put one in a back yard, or in a weird kind of data center (kind of like a cemetery but selling server vaults instead of burial plots) which would at least keep your data 'off site' in the sense that your house burning down wouldn't cause it to go away.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
kuyan 12y ago
What are comm vaults? The little that Google yields does not tell much.
- RyJones 12y ago
  A communication vault, built much like a burial vault (seriously, it's usually one company that casts both). It is made of thick concrete, buried underground, and (with a water intrusion alarm) fairly well protected from above-ground ills.
  - prawn 12y ago
    Like a data safe of some sort?
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    Pretty much, but the one Commcast was dropping in had an AC power feed, a set of lead acid battery boxes built into one side, and a moulded in space for holding about 40U of rack gear (telcom depth though so it looked like 12" not 40". Oh and a ladder in one side and a lockable lid. Very interesting kind of box.

Nux 12y ago

Of all ipcams in the world why the hell did he buy the one in 0.1% of them that uploads shit to the "cloud"?

politekc 12y ago
Of most IP cameras, Dropcam's form factor is enviable. The lack of local storage is not. I've been on the search for something inconspicuous and similarly-priced for a while.
- voltagex_ 12y ago
  I wonder how hackable it is. Edit: http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/04/reverse-engineering-dropcam-rooting-the-device.html http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/04/reverse-engineering-..., http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/03/Reverse-Engineering-Dropcam-Communications.html http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/03/Reverse-Engineering-...
  - trimtab 12y ago
    I've been down this road a bit. There are many ip video cameras made in Asia that are locally controllable. The Dericam H502W is particularly hackable, but the content is not encrypted unless you add that at the internet router via stunnel or a VPN. But if you do that you have an encrypted 720p video feed that records on motion in the dark that you can fully control for less than $100 per camera. You can choose to use the other camera features like email, ftp or http photo alerts just realize that all that data will be "in the clear" as they travel past your router unless you encrypt them. NOTE: Simply using an SMTPS to Gmail SMTP server is not protecting your content. That's just wrapping your content up in a pretty box for direct delivery to Google.
mahyarm 12y ago
The automated analysis is pretty useful. How would you know if someone is robbing you until it's after the fact? I would like it as a stand alone program too.
danielweber 12y ago

_Adam 12y ago

Except that image isn't accessible to anyone except the owner, or MAYBE the NSA. But I'm pretty sure the NSA doesn't care about looking at some random guy's ass. In the unlikely case that they do need to investigate the ass for national security reasons, they aren't going to disseminate the picture to the world, similar to how they don't disseminate intelligence data. Which means the ONLY way the public will see the ass-picture is if: a) The ass is of interest to national security AND b) The ass is of such concern to national security it is stored in the NSA's internal ass-database AND c) There exists some kind of ass-Snowden that leaks all the asses in the NSA arsenal. ...why does anyone care about this?

Voltage 12y ago
This picture will remain in the cloud for eternity. When assial recognition software becomes more prevalent, they can use this image to match his identity to future crimes (in which he leaves an ass print behind).
vectorpush 12y ago
> Except that image isn't accessible to anyone except the owner Good point, it's true that cloud servers containing personal information are never hacked, this is probably because most companies take security very seriously. > But I'm pretty sure the NSA doesn't care about looking at some random guy's ass. Exactly! It's not as if NSA employees have ever been known to abuse their power for personal or purely entertainment purposes! > they aren't going to disseminate the picture to the world, similar to how they don't disseminate intelligence data. Agreed, rest assured that your private photos and correspondences are safe in the hands of professionals who would never be interested in leaking personal or embarrassing data about innocent law abiding citizens.
- drdaeman 12y ago
  > who would never be interested Rephrasing Hanlon's razor, there's no need for malice where a simple fuck-up would suffice ;) They don't need to be interested in leaking personal data, they just have to make a mistake that would allow such leak. And introducing bugs isn't not something unheard of, even for pros.

serve_yay 12y ago

Funny. We're all so (justifiably) afraid of NSA and Google violating our privacy that we don't even consider the ways we do it to ourselves.

shittyanalogy 12y ago
Somepeople
PavlovsCat 12y ago
You can't "violate your own privacy" though. It's like wondering why someone who likes to eat a lot of strawberries might frown on being forced to eat even a single strawberry, or why someone who is perfectly fine with some permutations of the letters of the alphabet would protest others. "But I did the same thing that other guy just did, I just arranged some letters! Oh, the irony." Well no, details and context matter.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

shittyanalogy 12y ago
The article is about not having control of your data, not being worried about a censored photo. Now that the data is in someone else's control there are no guarantees whatsoever as far as who has it and if it's been deleted.

imgabe 12y ago

Ultimately though, what are the negative consequences of some random stranger, or even the general public, seeing your naked ass? Pretty much nothing.

shittyanalogy 12y ago
You've taken this too literally.

ossreality 12y ago

Seriously? lol

sysk 12y ago

What do you mean by "web accessible"? Did Google decide to publicly publish all dropcam's customer pictures?

matt-attack 12y ago
I'm sure they're accessible via a customer account. That's sort of the point of this system - you can be on vacation and peek into your home. Web accessible doesn't mean not password-protected.

akkp 12y ago

To paraphrase: "The device functioned as intended so now I hate It". The developers of this product don't deserve this blog post, especial when the feature in question is a paid extra that requires setup.

andreasvc 12y ago
The blog post illustrates that applications of technology can have unforeseen, unintended consequences (even though it may appear obvious in hindsight). Regardless of whether the device works as intended, the non-technical but human question of whether it should function that way in the first place is a valid question to pose.
devindotcom 12y ago
That's a pretty poor paraphrase. He has realized some troubling implications of using this type of device and wrote about it.

raldi 12y ago

1. Visit google.com 2. Search for [erase dropcam video] 3. Click first result

duiker101 12y ago
it might say "erase dropcam video" but it really means "erase indexing of dropcam video"
- raldi 12y ago
  Are you claiming that, when Dropcam says it erased your video, it's lying? That they're secretly keeping a copy around? If so, come out and make that accusation explicitly. It would be quite a story, especially if you had a reference to cite.
  - duiker101 12y ago
    No reference, absolutely, I don't want to accuse anyone of anything but as his(or anyone's) video/image/anything is now "in the cloud" I feel like there really very little control over what we have there and what is not. Sure, they might be telling the truth that they deleted it, but can you be 100% sure that there have been no copies made? backups? OP mentions that he received an email, what about that? will it be deleted too? Any cached copies somewhere?
  - kybernetyk 12y ago
    > Are you claiming that, when Dropcam says it erased your video, it's lying? That they're secretly keeping a copy around? Why should you trust them? Because they say so? And even if they intend to really delete the data instead of just setting the hidden flag - how do you know that one of their employees isn't a "bad seed" and has some weird hobbies like scanning through the Dropcam servers for nudes? A little paranoia and mistrust isn't a bad thing when it comes to personal data. You can't really control the whole chain so your only option to keep data private that should be kept private is not to hand it out in the first place.
  - lambda 12y ago

ubertaco 12y ago

The principle of the matter and all, I know, but you've got to love his response here: "now there's a web-accessible picture of me naked! Here, it's this picture: <insert web-accessible image>"

gsg 12y ago
He stuck a black bar on that one (and references that in the post). Although that might seem a trivial difference, that there is an edit implies the author's knowledge of and control over the image. That makes all the difference.

joshavant 12y ago

I have a Dropcam in my garage for miscellaneous reasons. I, too, have wondered the implications of providing the Google/NSA complex video evidence of my comings and goings... It'd be nice if Dropcams were more hacker friendly, and allowed recording to personally-owned devices, instead of forcing you to use their (fairly expensive) cloud recording service. (Not to mention the ~100ish GB/mo bandwidth savings to stream this video, which is a fairly nontrivial requirement.)

andrewchambers 12y ago
It could easily be done, but that's how they make money, so it won't.
- GuiA 12y ago
  And that's a great sum up of the state of technology in 2014.
- Vendan 12y ago
  Foscam has a bunch of models that do just this

kybernetyk 12y ago

> It’s at this point you ask yourself if having a net-connected camera for monitoring your house was a good idea after all. It's a good idea but you probably shouldn't buy the fancy "cloud" version. Just set up your own FTP server ...

ggchappell 12y ago

I'm missing something here. If you don't want naked pictures of yourself taken, then you don't undress in front of a running video camera, right? Seems kinda obvious. This fellow put together a setup that automatically takes pix of whatever happens and uploads them to a company's server and ... he's shocked when it does what it's supposed to? I don't get it. -------- EDIT. Been pondering this. Perhaps he began with a misconception akin to that of a politician who wants a backdoor for the good guys to use, but who doesn't understand that if the good guys can use it, then so can the bad guys. Then the e-mail and his resulting thoughts showed him that he wasn't thinking about the world properly; thus his feeling of shock.

jonnathanson 12y ago
You make a good point, but perhaps you're being slightly unfair to the author. My take on his piece wasn't that he was "shocked" when the camera did what it's supposed to do. Rather, he realized -- upon seeing a very jarring stimulus -- that he has no idea who else can see what he sees, or what they do with that information. A general consumer assumption with devices like these is that only the end user sees the footage. That's a naive assumption. But psychologically, it's understandable. We believe that the walls of our homes are "privacy shields" -- Faraday cages, of a sort, that somehow prevent anyone outside from seeing in, or anything inside from leaking out. At the same time, we bring connected devices (including cameras) into those homes. Few of us consciously put two and two together. Seeing himself naked was sort of a wake-up call for the author. He'd always known the camera was connected to the cloud. But then he became cognizant of who's on the other end of that cloud. I think it's fair to recoil upon coming to that realization, regardless of who the company might be (Google or otherwise). Consumers are embracing the "cloud," but they really have no idea what the "cloud" is, or what it can mean. Again: naive, certainly. But still an interesting thing to consider.
- mdonahoe 12y ago
  This happened to me, and "wake-up call" is exactly right. I set up the camera to check my cats when I was away, and found myself realizing I walk around naked a lot.

hellbanner 12y ago

The blog's subtitle is "doing it wrong". Naked in front of a camera and pondering implications of Internet of Things backed by private corporations? Yes, you are doing it wrong.

kentdev 12y ago

I may have to spend the weekend messing with my raspberry pi to make a local dropcam. Just found a link to a guide: http://www.sonsoftone.com/?page_id=287 http://www.sonsoftone.com/?page_id=287

tlrobinson 12y ago

Assuming you do want off-site backups of your security footage, but only accessible to you (i.e. strongly encrypted), what are your options? What if you want a remote live stream? Linux or OS X, please.

dllthomas 12y ago
Well, in principle you could toss your public key on that camera. In practice, I don't know if anyone does this as anything remotely approaching off-the-shelf.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Sounds like a good project for a raspberry pi.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    It does.

knodi123 12y ago

On the one hand, "If you don't want naked pictures of yourself in the cloud, don't take naked pictures of yourself and put them in the cloud." But this is like saying "If you don't want to get scammed, then don't respond to scammy emails." That is, it's perfectly good advice, which is fine for people who visit Hacker News, but maybe not sufficient for the vast majority of people who aren't aware of the ins and outs of our rapidly advancing technology. There are whole communities of people devoted to the practice of finding women who accidentally configured their phones to upload all pictures to a publicly accessible cloud storage server. The women whose nudes are distributed this way may not realize their pics are being mirrored- or they may assume it's to a private site (because why the hell isn't that the default?!?)- or they may have shared these pics with a dude who made the same mistakes. But regardless, the point remains- any individual is easily capable of being immune to this problem. But there's a whole population of vulnerable victims who don't even know they're being victimized. And that is a real problem.

shittyanalogy 12y ago

I think you guys are missing the point a little on this one. It's not that there is a picture of this dudes bare ass somewhere online and he's upset about it, it's that no matter what he did or tried he could be guaranteed in absolutely no way that the data was removed or under his control. Once it's in the pipes, it may or may not be there, there's no way to know. Anything you put online, in all sorts of incidental ways be it from giving your TV voice commands, sending your location to google maps, or your net connected security devices, becomes someones property other than just yours. Not that it's legal, or that people are spying on everything you do, but that you have no way of knowing about or controlling the data once it's there. This isn't supposed to be scary, just a reminder that you can lose control easily. This is a complex issue and if you think it goes away by saying things like "well then don't stand in front of the camera naked." then you are missing the point.

joshkpeterson 12y ago
This dude is Matt Haughey, founder of Metafilter. He wrote another piece about accidentally spying on his house-sitter that I think is more interesting. https://medium.com/@mathowie/every-data-point-is-sacred-e0bd2ec66ce8 https://medium.com/@mathowie/every-data-point-is-sacred-e0bd...

anigbrowl 12y ago

Much as I care about privacy and the exploitation of people's data for commercial gain, I find this a bit histrionic. If you put the automated camera inside your house and you are the sort of person who sometimes wanders around naked, then the two are eventually bound to collide (which is why I don't have automated cameras inside the house). On the plus side, everybody has an ass and this one is so far into the background of the picture that the only conclusions I can reach about the subject are 'Mathowie is quite pale' and 'he has an ass like every other member of the human race.' In other words, this isn't really awkward enough to serve as a cautionary tale to anyone else. Now if he had been dressed up as a lobster that would be quite a different kettle of fish.

jaxbot 12y ago

I have a device similar to a Dropcam but by D-Link, and have it configured to transmit data to my NAS, rather than the cloud. I can then SSH in to view the images on it. If you want a camera monitoring your home, but don't want it stored on someone elses' system, it's pretty easy to roll your own with a variety of configurations.

thrillgore 12y ago

This certainly gives me pause about buying a Dropcam, even if the only place its going to observe is near my front door.

rwallace 12y ago

What would bother me about this is that picture is far too small and blurry to identify a criminal. Is that the best this product can do? If so, are there any competing products that do better?