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