Reject Google Nest or Amazon Ring Corp Surveillance and a Dystopic Future
nbcnews.com
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You can achieve a privacy focused solution by doing the processing localy. I am looking forward to more HomeKit Secure Video compatible hardware becoming available. The idea is to process the video feed locally on an Apple TV or iPad, and then send notifications to your iPhone. An encrypted video can be uploaded to iCloud upon detecting some motion.
Also... with the photo library available on the Apple TV, I guess face detection in the video feed might be possible in the future.
Processing on local devices is slightly better but ultimately it’s cold comfort when those devices are locked down, closed source, and opaque to anyone but hackers.
From the end customer perspective, the only protection was Apple’s customer-focused business model, which is now slowly tilting from “sell slick technology products” to “monetize the user base.”
Another solution is needed. Since I created Dropcam (Nest cam), I am working on fixing this: send us a message at https://duffy.org if you want to learn more.
I've looked into flashing a CFW on a cheap Xaomi ip camera, running ZoneMinder and a NAS for storage and backups and whatnot, and while setting all this up is pretty trivial, I feel like I'd be better off just paying for a commercial system rather than administering my own. But then you look into the security practices in such systems and well, lets just say, off the shelf isn't really a great option either.
They—and dozens of other companies—use off-the-shelf commodity components from the Chinese corporation Aoni, and their camera is essentially the device linked below, but in a different case: http://anc.cn/ip-camera/smart-wireless-cube-camera/smart-wir...
Check the specs, as well as the general appearance of the thing from the front.
While inspecting the traffic coming in and out of this thing, I saw it making a ton of requests to really weird Chinese IP addresses and uploading a lot of data. It was encrypted, so I couldn't tell for sure what it was, but it presumably was video footage. I raised these concerns to others on my team, but besides a "huh, weird", none of them seemed to care enough to investigate further or properly escalate it. I was just a temp, so I didn't have the pull or influence that full-time employees had.
It was really concerning to me that this stuff wasn't properly addressed, but instead was swept under the rug, despite the fact that it's going to be pointed at babies and toddlers. There are some real disgusting folks out there who will take advantage of this, if they haven't already, especially since it has the same two-way audio that "Santa" used with the Ring cameras.
(If any of my former co-workers are reading this, I genuinely don't mean you any ill will in particular. But the company really needs to fix those issues, and not simply re-case commodity camera systems from surveillance states. There's obviously a backdoor, and if Aoni/China can access it, so can the aforementioned disgusting people.)
It's a pretty sad state of affairs when there are no real viable options for consumers if you care about security.
I absolutely agree that Ring products should have better security features like required 2FA. But I'm not sold on the idea of our society becoming a surveillance state because people have video doorbells. It seems like a stretch and one that is born out of a tendency for people to see all technology as "the thing" that will be what ends our society and ushers in a 1984-esque dystopia. I'm skeptical.
I don't have to be convinced that I shouldn't be trusting Amazon or Google with my best interests. But I don't see how security cameras, or at least the video doorbells, are more dangerous than all of the other things we've just already accepted, like constant tracking of our positions via smartphones and our online browsing habits.
Perhaps I'm wrong, I suppose time will tell.
That's a big difference from the smartphones tracking our location thing you mentioned—police need a warrant, companies don't actively work to make it easier for police to access that information without a warrant.
The current big tech companies have established a new business model based on two important facts: your time/attention/data are valuable to them, and you are encouraged to give them your time/attention/data for free. You should have the right to not do business with Amazon, in exactly the same way that you should have the right to not do business with, for example, a fast-food place you don't like. But anyone who lives near a Ring owner is going to be contributing to Amazon's business, whether they want to or not.
None of my neighbors have Rings yet. I'm going to have a talk with them the first time I see one get put up.
How though? What information could possibly be gleaned from a Ring camera that isn't already available? It's a unidirectional facing camera with limited range pointed at a public area. The amount of information it could possibly collect on passerby is miniscule, and is already information that is readily available via: smartphone tracking, satellite imaging, or literally anyone on the street with eyeballs, including law enforcement. I fail to see how a neighbor having a Ring doorbell meaningfully changes anything for their neighbors.
> anyone who lives near a Ring owner is going to be contributing to Amazon's business
Again, how? I fail to see how a person's Ring is going to generate anything in terms of usable data on their neighbors for Amazon to act on. It seems like jumping to the worst possible conclusion, on par with those who assume every new application of AI is one step closer to Skynet.
Amazon, on the other hand, has put a great deal of time and energy into facial recognition software. They will be able to identify virtually everybody that walks by - even if they don't know a person's name at first, Amazon will keep the facial data and build a profile for that person over time as it accrues more data. That data will be correlated with other businesses and facial recognition software, and Amazon/Google/FB will all profit from the data exchange (especially if they can sell it to advertisers and law enforcement). At no point did the person being recorded agree to have his/her information used for this purpose.
Also they can be hacked and used for harassment, too. We already have the tech to prevent this - it's called "closed circuit".
It's not "readily available". It's distributed across multiple parties that rarely talk with one and another, and each of them is collecting different types of information. In particular, you can't easily turn "literally anyone on the street with eyeballs" into a searchable database of information.
What makes information useful is it being collected, preferably by a single party, in an aggregate that can be searched and can have analysis run on top of it. Ring checks all of these boxes, and is provided by a company that has already proven to not pay particular attention to ethics or customer well-being if more profit can be made this way.
Since the poor security practices have led to people getting spied upon and harassed, those poor security practices are clearly related to dystopic surveillance concerns.
The article also directly addresses larger issues than poor security practices. Two examples:
"And Amazon's surveillance doorbell cameras are just the start: The company is selling a multitude of other gadgets equipped with microphones, cameras and sensors, all designed to gather enormous amounts of data, which Amazon refines -- like crude oil -- into power and profit. Alexa, the company's "home assistant," is constantly listening and explosive investigations revealed that Amazon employees have also listened, via Alexa, not just to private conversations, but also to deeply intimate moments such as couples having sex or kids singing in the shower. Amazon even marketed its microphone-enabled Echo Dot Kids directly to children."
"Amazon devices aren't just giving hackers and Amazon employees an eye or an ear into our homes. The company has also partnered with more than 600 police departments across the country to tap into the surveillance network its customers are creating for them, developing a seamless process for government agents to request footage from tens of thousands of Ring cameras without warrants or any judicial oversight."
Typically, these dystopias generally imply state surveillance on an unwilling or unsuspecting populace. Yes, hackers can gain access to your indoor security cameras, but that only affects people willingly installing security cameras inside their own homes and adhering to bad security practices. Doorbell cameras aren't compelling targets for hackers, which is why all of the stories we hear are about cameras installed in someone's bedroom. And I don't see how this differentiates Ring's products in any way from having your bank account hacked, or your email, or any other personal data. Problematic and worth consideration? Yes. Dystopic? Not really.
> "And Amazon's surveillance doorbell cameras are just the start: The company is selling a multitude of other gadgets equipped with microphones, cameras and sensors, all designed to gather enormous amounts of data, which Amazon refines -- like crude oil -- into power and profit. Alexa, the company's "home assistant," is constantly listening and explosive investigations revealed that Amazon employees have also listened, via Alexa, not just to private conversations, but also to deeply intimate moments such as couples having sex or kids singing in the shower. Amazon even marketed its microphone-enabled Echo Dot Kids directly to children."
Entirely valid complaints, regarding Alexa devices. Its unrelated to Ring, and especially doorbell cameras. Unless people are having numerous and long private conversations in front of their doorbell, it seems again like those concerns don't apply here.
> The company has also partnered with more than 600 police departments across the country to tap into the surveillance network its customers are creating for them, developing a seamless process for government agents to request footage from tens of thousands of Ring cameras without warrants or any judicial oversight.
Can someone verify this? Because I was under the impression that customers had to opt in. And regardless, I still fail to see what people might be concerned about regarding doorbell cams. They aren't capturing anything that isn't readily available.
Perhaps these are arguments against putting Ring security cameras in your house, but I still am not seeing the end of the world scenarios these articles are prophesying resulting from doorbell cameras.
They will be when people discover creative new ways to abuse them, but it doesn't even needs to be a "compelling target". Some people simply think browsing cameras on the internet is fun.
First, you say "I don't see how security cameras, or at least the video doorbells, are more dangerous than all of the other things we've just already accepted, like constant tracking of our positions via smartphones and our online browsing habits."
Then, you say "Entirely valid complaints, regarding Alexa devices. Its unrelated to Ring, and especially doorbell cameras."
They're not unrelated, you explained the relationship yourself (that they're both "dangerous" examples of pervasive corporate surveillance), and the article quite explicitly argues that we SHOULDN'T "just accept" these "devices that constantly monitor, track and record us simply for our own convenience or a sense of safety".
> Can someone verify this? Because I was under the impression that customers had to opt in.
Opt-in to what? Opt-in to fulfilling the request, or opt-in to receiving the request? It appears to be the former, not the latter: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kga3/amazon-is-coaching...
> They aren't capturing anything that isn't readily available.
In 1984, Big Brother monitors both public and private spaces, but in V for Vendetta I believe the roving vans and stuff only monitor public spaces. Am I interpreting you correctly that scenario like V for Vendetta but with CCTV, where the government monitors everyone's public movements and interactions at all times, you would fail to see anything wrong with?
There are reasons to worry about incursions into our privacy by corporations and the government. I'm not convinced Ring doorbells qualify.
With a phone, I can at least make the choice whether to track myself or not (by using the phone). With a doorbell cam, now you’re involving everyone in your neighborhood. They don’t have a choice.
I have no doubt someone is going to say that those people are in a public space, but there there is a huge difference between the theoretical concept of being in public, and the actual reality of public spaces being under video surveillance 24x7.
Have you not heard that Amazon has been partnering with local law enforcement to give them access to a bunch of cameras? It’s not about just giving your data to Amazon or Google anymore.
Also, in the US, there is the Third Party Doctrine. Any data you give to a third party can be given to the government without any Fourth Amendment protections. By using these services you are giving up your Constitutional rights.
> With a doorbell cam, now you’re involving everyone in your neighborhood. They don’t have a choice. With a phone, I can at least make the choice whether to track myself or not (by using the phone). With a doorbell cam, now you’re involving everyone in your neighborhood. They don’t have a choice. I have no doubt someone is going to say that those people are in a public space, but there there is a huge difference between the theoretical concept of being in public, and the actual reality of public spaces being under video surveillance 24x7.
I'll say it. There is nothing being tracked that isn't public information. There is no information being revealed other than the fact that someone was walking by house A at time Y, which is information anyone looking at the street at that time would have. What is the meaningful difference between the "theory" of being in public, and a particular area being under surveillance 24x7?
> Also, in the US, there is the Third Party Doctrine. Any data you give to a third party can be given to the government without any Fourth Amendment protections. By using these services you are giving up your Constitutional rights.
Again, what is the worry about the data a doorbell cam generates falling into the hands of the government? I do not argue that it can be dangerous to serve up private information and data in a way that can be obtained by undesired third parties and the government. I argue that a doorbell cam doesn't generate any data of the kind people need to worry about. Hence, why these articles are largely sensationalism in my view.
Only if the slope isn't actually slippery.
Increasingly, I see the slippery slope fallacy being used to advocate against paying attention to or correcting very clear, observable trends.
Of course not all slopes are slippery, but I think people should be more cautious about this kind of argument. It's easy to forget that absent friction, this universe tends to preserve motion.
Things add up, that's all.
Before, you had the danger to personally be tracked in an area around you and listened to.
Now you add a device that can get sound, image and movement of anybody in a zone, and possibly extrapolate their position and potentially face recognition.
The phone story is bad, very bad. But at least we can switch it off, not take it with us, etc. When you walk in the street in front of those camera, you have no choice but to be spied on.
The sum of all the phones + smart speakers + e-health devices + Ring-like products has a deadly potential for democracy. Their coverage is monumental.
Right now we feel like the benefits are huge, and the cost minimal: most people are not affected in their daily life by the surveillance, or at least not in a way that is annoying enough. So we accept it.
But the issue is not about what it does right no. Just like climate change, it's about what it can do in the future.
If the police can access them without warrant and even promote the devices on their twitter accounts? I am completely sold on it.
I am more skeptical about calling door bells with cameras a technological innovation or progress.
> things we've just already accepted, like constant tracking of our positions via smartphones and our online browsing habits.
I don't think people have accepted being tracked 24/7. I know plenty of people that actively use guards against these practices and that isn't restricted to technically inclinded personalities. It is just that legislative powers seem to be sleeping. But accepting invasions of privacy as inevitable is certainly a dystopian development.
Nothing personal, but I can't fathom such naive viewpoints in this day & age, specially as a parent. One of the many stories: "Man hacks Ring camera in 8-year-old girl's bedroom, taunts her: 'I'm Santa Claus' " https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-hacks-ring-camera-8...
Any device that compromises the privacy of you/others without your/their permission is dangerous, as is a video doorbell for your street and neighbors, a voice assistant secretly used for persona marketing, or even a webcam on your laptop. A false sense of security with a huge potential for misuse.
I won't go into details, but my past gov projects tell me it's better to be safe than sorry.
They've seldom had access to their own data at all (or at least a clear view of it), nor have most suffered with snoopy busybodies with access to it... nor have they had that data about other people.
But for Cameras that record video (and maybe sound) people have a much more visceral understanding of the privacy consequences even though audio/video is often _less_ of a wide scale privacy problem than web access data, location, or phone/email metadata (because of the logistics about manipulating and analyzing that data).
But whatever. Just because people should care a lot more about their other (web/geo/meta)data than they do, doesn't mean that A/V privacy isn't a huge deal. If we, as technologists and experts, can manage to motivate the public on this issue we should do so. Advancement on this front will make success easier on others. Failure on this front-- where people do have an innate understanding of the privacy problems will bode very poorly for areas where they do not.
You wouldn’t want to be filmed sneaking into your lovers house in such an area, and you really wouldn’t want to be overheard.
In the west, it’s much more a question of what you want companies to know about you, than what you have to hide. But we haven’t always been free. Imagine planning a revolution to overthrow a despot with the current level of surveillance.
This is particularly ironic because Bezos, now part owner of Ring.com, is facing a multi-billion $ divorce bill for doing exactly this and getting caught.
In any case, Google, Amazon and the like are chipping away at peoples desire for privacy and soon, I imagine privacy will be viewed as a quaint notion from the past. All this just to sell us more stuff.
This has been going on for some time. Do you imagine a respectable person from the past allow his wife to be groped by a stranger before entering the train? Yet, this is totally acceptable with airplanes.
The average person can't really do anything about the TSA, at least not in the moment. The choice is: allow yourself to be groped or don't fly. That's a really bad choice.
I’m not saying I endorse either (I personally do neither), but folks to seem to get more out of these cameras and social media sites than just the return the companies providing them get.
Also, if you are going to make an argument, I would hope it would be more substantial than a pithy argument from 300 years ago. Otherwise, you fall into the same category as those who argue against climate change/evolution using bible verses.
I wish, however, there was an affordable DIY solution to home cameras. And yet, I still couldn't find a setup that is completely open-source and/or provides me enough freedom. Has anyone started digging into this?
https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-cam-video-streaming-we...
I guess the one drawback (when I was using it) was that it didn't record audio, and that its UI was relatively unpolished. Having said that, setting up motion sensing on the cameras in Zoneminder was far better than a lot of other solutions that I had tried.
"Because it's convenient" is the main excuse I hear for excessive plastic packaging, disposable everything, taking a 3 hr drive instead of a 4 hr train/transit ride, posting to Facebook instead of your own blog, placing voice-"activated" spy devices in your home.
I'm coming to despise that word.
I also have a Smart TV. Of Vu brand - https://www.vutvs.com - quite famous in India and apparently a California company. I don't even know whether they listen in the background. I tried looking for documents related to that and talking to the customer care but they were clueless. They would get stuck at repeating "do you want to schedule a repair?".
No company is going to train their first-, second- or even third-line support to answer a question being asked of 0.00001% of their customers.
I do many "inconvenient" things these days. It takes more time to make better and more informed decisions about products you use/buy or organizations you support rather than simply buy by habit.
It can be more expensive to buy locally produced and environmentally friendly products rather than something mass-produced or coming from the other side of the world.
It is more inconvenient to carry your own bags and bottles rather than simply buying single-use items and throwing them away.
And on and on.
I'm happy to make these compromises but the system we've built where the better choices are more inconvenient certainly doesn't help us reach the goals we need.
The baby monitor they make is actually pretty great. 2.4Ghz propriety not-WiFi. I was pretty impressed.
- To monitor the animals in the house
- To get alerts if a smoke alarm goes off
- In case of break in, to capture the person's face and get a notification
- Access historical and real-time feed to check when <event> happened
- Etc
In an apartment with no other security system, a single indoors camera can do these. (In a house, you're better off with a complete security system since you have control over both indoor and outdoor configuration of your residence.)
The alternative is time consuming and potentially less secure, though much more fun to play with:
- Set up a raspberry pi-based camera system that can be scaled to multiple cameras and sensors
- Set up an raspberry pi NextCloud instance for the cameras to save their feeds to
- Set up an ML algorithm to recognize faces, animals, and types of noises
- Set up a Twilio instance to send SMS notifications
- Set up a mail server to send email notifications
- Set up a back up system in case the sdcard on one of the raspberry pis gets corrupted
- Set up a Home Assistant instance to control the cameras etc
- Set up an Auth mechanism for your residents and guests to control the IoTs
- Harden any systems that are exposed to the internet as a result of this set up
as predicted by william gibson, corporations are becoming more powerful than states and the oppressive state in 1984 is more likely to be a corporation as time progresses
also the "violent" is redundant as "state" already includes some form of violence
At this point, we're better off rolling our own with cheap CMOS camera modules, IR LEDs, 3d printed enclosures, arduinos, and rpis. Perhaps there's room in the market for a few people to do this as a side hustle, and sell completed boxes with software for those who don't have time to build their own, but likely not much more than that.
Alternatively, any decent A/V store will still sell you wired cameras and base stations that don't connect to the Internet at all. Then your inconvenience is fishing coax or cat5 through the walls of your house.
You could market to adjacent fears, like "being hacked", "your videos go to the police", etc.
Companies like Lifelock seem to do well.
btw did you know that grep (as in the unix tool) is in the dictionary? it even says it comes from the operating system.
You can't even pronounce it. People will only hear "this topic" or something like that.
I think there's a market for an upgrade that uses recognition software to see the home owners, then omit them from tracking.
Only the bad guys get 'tracked'. Sounds better.
Can be regulated, it is regulated in many places already (like, you can't store recordings for more than 15 days, or you can ask for your images to be removed).
>companies like Amazon in particular are actively seeking to aid law enforcement access to all these devices
Good.