A Super Bowl ad for Ring security cameras boasting how the company can scan neighborhoods for missing dogs has prompted some customers to remove or even destroy their cameras.
Online, videos of people removing or destroying their Ring cameras have gone viral. One video posted by Seattle-based artist Maggie Butler shows her pulling off her porch-facing camera and flipping it the middle finger.
Butler explained that she originally bought the camera to protect against package thefts, but decided the pet-tracking system raised too many concerns about government access to data.
“They aren’t just tracking lost dogs, they’re tracking you and your neighbors,” Butler said in the video that has more than 3.2 million views.
I went with industry standard localized cameras that I could rider python on two of my servers at home for. Id love to try to hack up a ring , see if I could extract out what makes it “evil” and leave the rest, to even a relay to another server or something.
Things I think about.
Why would you wire your house up to this shit anyway.
Maybe next time they’re thinking of spending $8M on a Super Bowl ad, they can save themselves some money and pay me half that amount. I’m perfectly happy to tell everyone how Ring cameras are a privacy nightmare and recommend Reolink instead.
They’ve backed off this and ended the partnership, claim Flock never got any footage, which I think is a total lie.
They’ll re-partner when the heat is off, or just do it silently, Amazon shouldn’t be trusted. Explain why to your friends and neighbors.
Where did you hear they ended the partnership? (Even if you supply a source, I probably won’t believe it.)
Edit: nm. found it. https://www.engadget.com/home/ring-calls-off-partnership-with-police-surveillance-provider-flock-safety-031717605.html
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This isn’t referring to the flock thing, they put out a commercial in the Superbowl about creating a cam-network to help find lost pets.
“They aren’t just tracking lost dogs, they’re tracking you and your neighbors,”
Uh, yeah. You didn’t get the news about them sharing with ICE?
I think the majority of people don’t even have tech conversations with their friends and coworkers, they just talk about sports or gambling or whatever else normal people do.
Talking trivia instead of consequential stuff…
If I could figure out how to engage with your nonsense I would.
During Superbowl I was talking with a software guy working for a big shopping ( data) company, he was telling us how every interaction on their website is recorded for data analysis, and his own wife was shocked. It came up after I prompted for that conversation, talking about the license plate tracking in parking lots (which she didn’t know about).
People seem suprised when they find out that they capture where their mouse moves, where their finger swipes, the duration, the speed. Everything is a metric.
I don’t talk sports ball, I only talk tech. Want to be friends?
does anyone have a link to the original superbowl ad?
Found it: https://youtu.be/hiaIHLwJvPQ?t=1449
WiFi connected cameras were a mistake. Although, if people are going to use these mass surveillance devices, using it to find dogs is great. It needs cat detection too.
Running cables is not possible in lots of homes and there are plenty of wired cameras that send video to corporate clouds. The mistake is allowing those corporations access to those videos. Camera output should be encrypted and only usable for the camera owner unless they choose to opt in to the corporate spy network.
WiFi connected cameras were a mistake.
Double so, when people are doing auto thefts in neighborhoods, they’re using wifi jammers to block out the footage
Why? They finally woke up to the fact they were being spied on and that they pay money for the privilege of doing so…
In regards to flock I wonder if there’s any material we can use on our dash or license plate that the cameras cannot see. I think I saw something like that but unsure if it’s effective.
Ben Jordan has several videos on flock cameras on YouTube. Excellent series of videos. Here’s one where he uses modified license plates to fuck with them.
just get a Chinese one like tapo so that the Chinese government can spy on you instead
Or hear me out,
Buy one that stores its data only on your local network and does not rely on corporate cloud or servers in any way or form.
This counts for all most all consumer home technology.
People should think about a NASS or Home servers like they do about owning a vehicle.
People should think about a NASS or Home servers like they do about owning a vehicle.
I wholeheartedly agree. Hell, home server/nas should be more common than cars, I don’t drive every day, but my data is used every minute of every day.
Build a server….in this economy? With these component prices?
I just installed Linux on my old laptop, added a 4Tb SSD and some HDDs connected with a docking bay and voilà, I have a server. Getting into the software side, now that’s a bit harder but manageable.
I recommend proxmox!
You can get an old HP microserver on eBay for less than 100 bucks. Still runs fine. I threw debian on it. Great for starting out… I use mine for backups, services and Jellyfin. It gave my beloved 870 a home. :,)
Yeah right. Next you’ll be telling people to get off corporate owned social media and use something without an algorithm.
use something without an algorithm.
Lemmy uses an algorithm.
Technically yes, but unlike e.g. Facebook it isn’t specifically calibrated to prioritise engagement over anything like truth or sanity. https://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/machinelearningtimes/five-points-for-anger-one-for-a-like-how-facebooks-formula-fostered-rage-and-misinformation/12344/
Which is actually better because the chinese have no jurisdiction in the USA.
Yet…
President Xi, my people yearn for freedom.
At the rate this is going, you may be saying this seriously soon
I mean if we already have a dictator anyway, how about some infrastructure to go with it?
High speed rail… mmmmm…
i have 5 tapo cameras because they’re cheap and work well in HA and frigate and they aren’t allowed on the internet and only communicate with the app during onboarding and…
okay i’ll get rid of them
For anyone not liking Tapo, a good alternative is Reolink. They offer about the same features, but use cameras with higher megapixels.
And can be configured to only communicate within your network.
what is ha and frigate
HA = Home Assistent, to manage your smart home Frigate = Self Hosted Webcam Server
How do you manage remote viewing without internet?
2 methods
home assistant (installed on mini pc thru proxmox) via the tapo: camera controls integration
frigate(installed on a dsm 7.2 synology) via go2rtc (mini pc)
also i’ve set my routers firewall settings so all the wifi cameras can only see eachother (and the mini pc)
edit: oh and tailscale
A file server by Synology will have built-in software for this, or you can get a free one by not using a Synology server
Seance or crystal ball, mainly
Why not?
Imagine spending millions of dollars on an ad that costs your company millions more in lost sales
And reduced usage by existing customers, reduced network effect, etc…
I honestly didn’t know what they were thinking with that commercial. Why would you proudly advertise that you’ve built a massive surveillance network, during one of the most-watched yearly televised events too for that matter? Did they seriously believe that there wouldn’t be a major backlash? I mean I appreciate the blunt honesty in that commercial so I’ll give them credit for that.
My guess is that since Ring has a history of well-known collaborations with police and ICE, they wanted to re-frame their evil surveillance network as a way to save a puppy. Instead, lots of uninformed normies suddenly realized what those cameras are capable of, and had a huge negative reaction given the state of things.
These people are so fucking out of touch that it’s ridiculous
Tbh I think the people at the top still haven’t caught up with the rapid changing sentiments among the population. My zero-tech-savy retired mother in-law was talking to me about Palantir the other day.
People are really fucking stupid to buy their products in the forst place. So that’s what they were thinking and they were right.
I honestly didn’t know what they were thinking with that commercial. Why would you proudly advertise that you’ve built a massive surveillance network
Presumably because most end users are in deep with the “if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about” crowd … and besides it can find a lost dog /s.
They brought these sorts of intrusive cameras in the first place so privacy was not top of mind, or even in 2nd or 3rd place.
I would also put a good bit of the blame on executives and marketing people being way out of touch with the average person.
Presumably because most end users are in deep with the “if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about” crowd
I agree with other comments that this is probably an Executive issue. Decision-makers operating with missing information can make misinformed decisions. Whether or not end users actually are in that crowd is less relevant than whether the people making such decisions think the users are in that crowd.
In a game-theory framing, it’s a game with incomplete information. What you assume about others, including what you assume about their assumptions, influences your decisions. The sheer amount of players makes it a lot harder to model or predict.
Because in 3 weeks most people will forget about it. It’s brazen. They’ll still be the biggest doorbell company in America
They product does exactly what their customers want. Just the latter had not realised the implications for their own privacy, before the commercial, apparently.
I put Google cameras on my house years ago out of convenience and this is it, I’m spending the money on a PoE system where my footage stays on my own hardware.
Reolink is decent
Very happy with my Reolink cameras and NVR. Works better than the rings ever did.
I don’t even have their NVR and am impressed that the camera works both in an NVR / LAN / and direct to PC
What does PoE have to do with it?
He’s talking about a cheap NVR with poe built in. The only thing on the network is the NVR.
Check out frigate.
My only regret is that I can’t smash one because was never stupid enough to trust these things to begin with.
My friend, have you heard of Flock cameras?
Yes and I hate them cause it’s a pain in the ass having to route all my drives around them. Some trips take me 3x as long as they should cause of that stupid privacy-invading bullshit.
Well, I wouldn’t suggest doing crimes to physically break them, but you can break their little AI brains with a bit of adversarial noise and someone with a printer that can print on some sort of clear backing.
Benn Jordan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
I clicked the link just to get a brief look at this video and ended up watching the whole thing and subscribing to Benn Jordan. Thank you for sharing!
I did the same thing. The one about ‘gifts for people who don’t trust the government’ is what got me when someone posted it here or in c/privacy. I’m glad I could pass it along!
I like his viewpoint, he always has interesting projects and his music background adds a nice little touch to the production values of his content.
e: Also, if you’re into math and physics check out 3Blue1Brown (Neural Networks math: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk) and Art of the Problem (Explaining how energy can turn into rocks, physics explainer: https://youtu.be/f8O3XMrC8hg)
Paintball
Don’t buy one just so you can smash it! I know it’s satisfying to hear the plastic crack and see its tiny lens pop free like a smooshed eyeball. Yeah. That I guess would be good. But don’t.
You can just break the ones that others have bought. It’s even more satisfying.
