Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

For outdoor monitoring, where my privacy concerns are minimal and where my security concerns are maximized, it's pretty straightforward: plug in a camera, get a many-days-history high-res video feed with alerting. What's not to understand?

On my neighborhood Facebook groups, people need help just getting Nest and Ring cams set up. The idea that they were going to set up their own local DVR camera systems is pretty silly.

I don't understand why people install speaker systems (like Alexa) and cameras in their houses; I wouldn't trust third party, even Google, to manage a feed of audio or video from inside my four walls. But outside, the privacy/security tradeoff is radically different, and the devices have been (for us) super valuable.

View on HN

Eh, I don't know about privacy concerns being minimal at the places where ring devices are installed.

The ring doorbell is installed at your front door. It records pretty much all movement to and from your house. It records audio at the doorstep, so if you're having a conversation with anyone at your doorstep, that gets recorded too. If you have a porch and are sitting on it and speaking with people, etc etc etc.

I referred to the privacy/security "tradeoff", not an absence of privacy concerns. But for similar reasons, I'm unlikely to have an especially sensitive conversation at my doorstep anyways: my neighbors will be able to hear it. Obviously, they can also see who's coming and going at my house, as could anyone else who cared to watch.

Meanwhile, the devices have been super valuable for spotting and reporting criminal attempts.

Agree one selling point of the devices is ease of use, however for someone like me who is equally concerned about privacy, streaming video from my front door is a non-starter. In your scenario, "anyone else who cared to watch" includes anyone with an internet connection, versus some random prowler at high risk of being spotted casing your place due to their physical proximity.

If some rando gets my ring doorbell footage and figures out where I live, that's hard to undo. If someone steals my stuff and gets away with it because I didn't have a ring doorbell, that's annoying but much easier to recover from. We are talking about the difference between an insurance claim and moving house.

The right product for me may not exist yet, but I'd love to have a video doorbell system that I self-host. If I need remote backup I already have that covered, I'm on gigabit FTTH and use client-side encryption for data backups. I'm pretty nerdy and would enjoy setting this up but can't make it a priority now.

Neither your points nor OP's conflict, I think you each just have different criteria and values for privacy and security.

Sure. I think the perspective I have on this is a lot more common than the "this is too scary to deploy" perspective; these devices are extremely popular in my neighborhood, and cost/convenience is the only thing keeping them from being universal.

Seeing when you come and go to your house (pattern or not) would allow someone to do a good job of planning a burglary or some other crime, no?

The subtext here being that a burglar is going to see that you have an always-logging remote security camera, somehow obtain unauthorized access to the feed, and use that as a more convenient way to plan a burglary than simply staking the house out? Respectfully, I think that's pretty silly.

Well no. Say I am a burglar and simply try to find out in a particular geographic area cameras that I can gain access to and then monitor those cameras in some way.

Let's say further I get some mechanical turk like crew to monitor (stop laughing I can hear you ..) w/o telling them why I am doing this. I social engineer the reason and pay them to tell me for 'market research' etc or some other stupid cover story.

Anyway my point is that you had said you didn't care if people heard what you are saying. That assumes then that you think it's possible for someone to hear you and gain access. Now you may be thinking that person is not close enough to do you harm but is that a safe assumption?

At the office we have a full NVR system and multiple cameras. Fwiw the professional installer left that wide open to the point where we don't even allow any access (other than the stuff that the Chinese have already enabled that probably is sending things out). The default setup was insecure out of the box and nobody has had the time to look or lock it down.

If you’re a rare art dealer or other high-value target, maybe, but then you have tons of things like drones, etc. to worry about. For 99.9999…% of the population, your house probably isn’t getting burgled by someone like that, if at all. The addicts and bored teenagers are just going to walk down the street at a time when most people are at work and look for obvious signs of life — they don’t care about you in particular and are just going to pick an easy target where they can get in easily and without attracting much attention.

I live in DC and basically all of the reported videos are some dude walking down the street before racing up to grab an amazon delivery or casually knocking on the door (and checking whether it’s locked). They get caught after a few weeks and there’s a lull before the next person with poor decision making abilities gets a couple of grand & jail time. Unlesss you’re doing something which involves storing a lot of cash – don’t brag about your Bitcoin trove – that’s the likely threat.

You are violating the privacy of anyone coming to your door, without them having the option to say no. You have made this "tradeoff" for them, thinking that for you, this is fine.

Yes, normally anyone camping outside your house would be able to see it too. Now you are also recording it though, which changes the story significantly.

Is the cloud necessary for the convenience though? That’s my hangup with so many of these devices. I don’t want the bulk of the data leaving the premises.

We would have to totally change the way devices are developed and marketed to actually keep data local but it seems technically possible.

Also, has a Ring doorbell somehow prevented a theft or just helped you know what happened?

I'd say, yes. I've been able to watch that many people see the ring (they see the camera), and they back right off the porch. It's been awesome in this respect, people simply ring it less. As far as the cloud stuff; I'm willing to make that sacrifice so that it can call my phone and i can see/talk to the person at the door. For family I get to literally let them in, and for others I can pretend to be home but uninterested.

I see the benefit of off-site access but is the cloud a requirement for that? It seems we have conflated the idea of “network enabled” and “cloud based”.

From a technical stand point I agree. But the unit needs to open a connection to my phone, which is going to require reaching beyond my home network. It's hard to deliver a product to an end user this way, so in these cases the cloud means 'we manage the hard part for you'. So the cloud isn't a requirement, for well... us? But the average consumer, yes. I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here. I'd love a version of Ring where I could easily eliminate the middle man; but I recognize the value in what they've done. How we protect privacy sometimes seems to be an argument of confidence (Our own home network security VS a vendors), there are arguments to be made about centralizing some of it?

I do agree there is an argument to be made for partial centralization. Right now everything is centralized, even some things that I don't think need to be. From a purely technical perspective it seems to me that notification and configuration can be delegated to a third party but the actual video data can remain local.

Yes, because of NAT and needing to setup port forwarding, which most people won’t do.

It's very common for would-be thieves to see the doorbell camera and leave. Cameras, by the nature of the fact that someone could be watching, are a natural deterrent.

Sure that makes total sense. But is there anything special about Ring or other cloud cameras in their ability to deter theft over any other camera?

As opposed to what? Setting up a local storage server? Only message board nerds are going to do that. I am 10000% more concerned about the privacy of my email than I am about footage of the outside of my house, which you yourself could obtain simply by driving to my block. And, like a majority of people on this privacy-conscious message board, I happily delegate my email to Google Mail.

I’m not attacking your decision to use a security camera and I understand the trade offs you made.

I’m simply asking if it would be possible to sell a product that has feature party with Ring but doesn’t use the cloud.

Before Ring setting up a home security system was also something only message board nerds would do. Why can’t the same be done for a local server?

I believe Microsoft actually marketed a home server back around the turn of the century. That didn’t go anywhere but they had a lot of ideas that were either ahead of their time or good but poorly executed. The original surface comes to mind. Or what weird kitchen computer that is basically an Echo with a screen.

Sure, you definitely could; you'd sell the same cameras Ring sells, and a local server appliance maybe the size of a wireless router that they'd link to, sort of like how you buy Hue bulbs and also a Hue router.

You'd likely lose the following features:

* Access to the camera from your phone

* The ability to talk to people near the camera

* The "people detection" image classification stuff

* The ability to highlight a range of video and get a shareable link for it

* Access to the camera from your phone

A sane-default DNS configuration could get around this automatically. The default can be some managed thing like your-preferred-name.cameraservice.com and if you're particularly adventurous could be camera.yourdomain.com. IPv6 would greatly simplify the NAT complications here. A device that can double as a firewall or talk to one to auto configure would go a long way.

* The ability to talk to people near the camera

I don't see how the cloud is necessary for this other than slightly simplifying notification. Can't the box at your house just shoot off a text message with a link? A centralized notification service could be used here that contains only a message along the lines of "there is activity at your camera" and the phone app can initiate the stream directly.

* The "people detection" image classification stuff

How hard is this really? Once the model/algorithm is in place the actual computation is easy right? Do they really have to run in the cloud?

* The ability to highlight a range of video and get a shareable link for it

This can be done with either a share-to-youtube link for videos you don't mind making public or simply direct links to your device for small audiences.

if your data is stored in Ukraine with open access to your password, wifi, email account for ring as well as IP address it really wouldn't be hard to hack into your gmail. Ring's employees have access to all of that.

I always create separate, single-use email accounts for these purposes. Other email services also allow you to create aliases.

There are quite a few videos on YouTube where the owner (I assume, via an alert that the motion sensor is triggered) starts speaking though the device remotely "put that down" or "get out of here" and the would-be thieves usually drop the package and hurry off.

EDIT: I should add that a video circulated recently in my neighborhood showing someone stealing the camera. So there's that risk. I'm sure the thieves will be disappointed when they find out about the monthly fee.

"Put that cookie down! Down!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com