Amazon Workers May Be Watching Your Cloud Cam Home Footage | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Workers May Be Watching Your Cloud Cam Home Footage

bloomberg.com

Pretty misleading title in my opinion, considering this is only a possibility if people submit a clip for troubleshooting.

While Amazon should have been more explicit in telling people that submitting a clip means someone will watch it, it's not exactly unexpected.

The title suggests something much bigger.

Yeah it's buried way down the article that all the clips are user submitted. I don't like these cloud surveillance devices, but I like even less being lied to by the media.

Clickbait

From the first parra:

>”Teams in India and Romania use video snippets sent by customers for troubleshooting purposes and to train artificial intelligence algorithms.”

Very misleading.

Also, if you send someone email, your email may be read by someone!

"troubleshooting" is like a catch all description. What does that even mean?

It's like Google "to improve our services" phrases, basically we'll troubleshoot until we figure out to how to rip our customers off the best and get as much money as possible out of each single one of them.

> to train artificial intelligence algorithms

This implies your clip might be forever in Amazon's training dataset, potentially exposed to public. Not sure you'd sign up for that from the mere troubleshooting perspective.

I think webmail providers have used messages for ad targeting as well as SPAM (and malware) detection... so I think the comparison stands.

yes, unclear if the action (sent) is implicit or explicit

At this point, simply assume that any data that isn't encrypted with a key you only own can be read by anyone.

There is no privacy without strong encryption.

For those needing it (private mode or free article limit reached) : https://outline.com/4jYvjr

And this is why I'm doing DIY IOT.

It's just a little too personal to not be in control

What kind of tools/tech are you using to do this? I've been thinking of doing the same

Hass.io on a tinkerboard

Basically HomeAssistant

Should work fine on a raspberry too

What is the killer feature of these cams over a local camera setup that lets you check on your home from an app, but without uploading your data to a cloud service?

Compared to an Axis-style network webcam with recording to SD card, the Ring doorbell offers the following:

1. The Ring doorbell costs less. In my country, £89 for a basic Ring vs £203 for a basic Axis webcam.

2. The Ring is battery powered, which is only possible because it doesn't have to run its radio and CPU all the time in order to be a web server. Being battery-powered makes allows self-installation by a much wider audience.

3. If someone steals your webcam with microsd recording, they steal the video of themselves doing it at the same time; with the Ring that is not the case.

4. IoT devices are famously insecure, and network webcams famous for being inadvertently made public. The Ring doorbell doesn't need you to open a port in your firewall (exposing it to the public internet) to be remotely monitored.

With that said, personally I still wouldn't buy a Ring doorbell.

One could always send video files to their own cloud. Nextcloud instance, sftp, rsync, etc. Rsyncd supports write-only. SFTP could write to an append-only directory (via xattrs) so even if they figure out how to use the ssh key, it won't matter.

I also would never use the ring doorbell. Not only is that a security risk, but it also provides eyes on neighbors across the street. Legal, sure, but dodgy.

Not having to be a HN reader to set it up?

Aren't there any businesses that offer such a privacy conscious solution in a convenient form?

UniFi NVR[1] and the newer UniFi Protect are pretty easy to set up and allow you to store all camera recordings on premises – even on your own hardware if desired.

1: https://www.ui.com/unifi-video/unifi-nvr/

What local camera setups will let me check on my home from an app without uploading the video somewhere?

Maybe a service that on event would proxy a stream from the camera and push a notification to your phone (or whatever you're using as a client).

On notification you could choose whether or not to record the stream and save it as a file on the client.

Said service could provide a guarantee that all data passing through its servers will not be recorded, persisted or even decrypted.

A Synology NAS with its built-in/free camera software, and cameras of your choice. Recordings live on the local NAS, you figure out how to get Synology's DS Cam app access to the local network. (I just use Synology's dynamic DNS service.)

What do you mean "without uploading the video somewhere" ?

If you are viewing it while not physically present it must be uploaded somewhere - otherwise it couldn't be on your phone right ?

MotionEye. Runs on anything from Raspberry Pis to regular computer. Handles multiple cameras, store locally/Dropbox/gdrive etc.

I run a NEST Hello and Nest Cam Indoor/Outdoor IQ system. Everything is streamed to the cloud. I was able to catch the local criminal breaking into homes.

One of the neighbours has an 12 camera setup with a NVR. They just took the NVR.

the NVR had stream/data replication to the Cloud ?

“Google Workers May Be Watching Your Home Footage Submitted to YouTube” - future Bloomberg article.

I always had a lot of sympathy for telemarketers as that seems like a soul deadening job that I lie to friends and family about doing just because I need a job and have bills to pay. I think if I had to write these articles, I would also be really sad and disappointed in myself.

Recently I saw the news about the Hikvision cameras being blacklisted. This came after a time where my office just installed cameras throughout our office.

Firstly, do they phone home with data like this? Secondly, is there an open source system that could manage these cameras that anyone can recommend?

Some Hikvision cameras do seem to connect to the aptly named hik-connect.com https://medium.com/@evstykas/hackvision-8f50924e56d

Open source solutions include https://zoneminder.com/ https://www.ispyconnect.com/ https://www.bluecherrydvr.com/

Hikvision cameras typically support the common ONVIF standard even if it needs to be turned on https://securitycamcenter.com/enable-onvif-hikvision-cameras...

The correct way to setup security cameras is to slap them on their own segregated network, completely disconnected from the internet. Your IPVMS appliance has two NICs, one to connect to the camera network, and one to connect to your main network / the internet.

Open source IPVMS: https://zoneminder.com/

Paid ($90 per cam for lifetime license): https://digital-watchdog.com/productdetail/DW-Spectrum-IPVMS...

(Not affiliated, have just installed hundreds of cameras on DW systems and have never had a bad experience.)

Company: "Here's an awesome cloud service, you can send all of your data to us!"

Me: "They're gonna snoop on your webcams."

Everyone: "Don't be silly, they would never do that!"

Company: does that

Everyone: collective gasp

Every. Time.

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