Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

All accesses to customers data should require multiple people not by policy but by mandatory access controls.

The fact that employees could hack their employer is true and not meaningful.

The number willing to commit felonies is less than the number willing to risk termination.

There are also locks on e.g. cell doors in prisons. Those are pretty essential to the function of the cell, and tend to survive anything prisoners might try to do to them.

There are also locks (specifically, interlocks) on e.g. dam spillways, or on the airlocks on submarines. (For these, the "key" is a button somewhere else that's not necessarily itself secured, but it is still very crucial that they keep things out when that button has not been pushed.) They hold up pretty well—even against malicious infiltrators—mostly because they fail closed and have no UI components mechanically linked to the locking mechanism.

I think the gp is not 'absolutely not true'.. I have a fair amount of hobby interest experience dealing with petty thieves / criminals for the past couple decades; studying them locally and through polls and news articles... stories about locked up thieves admitting they will generally skip houses that have big dogs and security systems for example.

Certainly there are certain types of people to take into consideration from what you are mentioning, and petty criminals vary from locale to locale in significant ways sometimes. From what I understand places like frisco often have car hoppers busting out windows of cars on a regular basis, however in my area they generally only check for doors to be locked or unlocked when choosing to rummage through a car. A portion of the criminals around here will make an exception and bust a window if they see a purse or briefcase, but generally move on to the next without making too much noise, for example.

In most neighborhoods seeing someone crouched down playing with a door lock would attract attention and likely calls to the police. Kicking in a door would also create an amount of noise that brings attention the average criminal does not want to deal with.

Sure if a delivery person has seen you have a box of gold and sapphires next to the door (or notice your vintage guitar collection hanging on the walls while trick or treating) - they may target you with a door kick / other means of juice that is worth the squeeze..

but most of the thieves in my area will skip the locked houses and move to the next softer target. (often ringing the doorbell to see if anyone is home first)

I don't think most petty thieves are willing to learn lock-picking, even though it's easier to learn today than it was 20 years ago.. The added time it takes is not really worth it. (for most in most situations)

It's easier to find a neighbor that has a window air conditioner that can be pushed in with ease (at least around here, this technique in Minnesota may not be used as often)

The only place I can think of in regards to "establishes a particular legal status of the property behind the doors, with associated consequences for unlawful entry." would be Kennesaw, Ga - every person who lives there has a gun - there, the legal status of kicking in a locked door and it's associated consequences are proportionally different than most apartments in NY.

Some of the street thugs know that robbing with tools (that can be labeled burglary tools) carries an extra charge, just like robbing with a loaded gun is different time for the crime of stealing using threat of other force..

I do agree that certain situations / threats make "The additional, secondary role of a lock is being a trivial inconvenience. Not enough to deter a thief determined to rob your place, but enough for a thief determined to rob a place to skip yours and pick a different one." true - but that does not make the above statement absolutely not true.

I think you are both right.

Your wouldn't need anything much more powerful than a Pi4B to do that part for a couple of cams, but I guess this keeps the cost down for a security-unconscious public.

The "decryption key" can be a password-like object rather than an AES key, though that does require some security, and browsers are, if not quite ready to decrypt a stream and then render it as a video file, getting pretty close to that.

However, any client provided to the user by the video company itself, web or app, has the risk of exfiltrating the key back up to the video company, and I don't think the market will support a video company where you have the inconvenience of being required to get a third-party client to use it.

"However, worse, features that use AI to detect movement/people/etc can't be implemented without access to the underlying video stream."

The hardware to do this locally isn't that expensive, but again, the market would have a hard time standing for it, because this is inevitably going to be more expensive than the competition.

Either carry it with them or enter a passphrase (for use with a key derivation function; I guess/hope that Ring requires some passphrase to view video via their website anyway). That's a rather common problem.

As for "AI", depending on what you mean by that, it can be implemented in the device itself (unless it's something particularly fancy, requiring more resources than viable to dedicate there).

It's indeed easier and slightly more convenient to not care about security, but that's also a general/common case.

But yeah, I imagine you'd have a passphrase/key that can be found on a new device, perhaps via a QR code, and then signing into a new client device would require you have access to the old device to approve it/allow the private keys to transfer between the two, etc.

Ring's biggest product is their doorbell and I'd be willing to bet that a big chunk of their customer base isn't that concerned if somebody accesses their doorbell video. I'm not sure I'd care...

If it's just you with a local server, then I only have to worry about you. If it's going to someone else's server, then I have to worry about them as well. And in the case of Ring specifically, that someone else is Amazon -- which is even more concerning.

> shouldn't people have the right to set up surveillance on their own house for protection and deterrence?

Sure, I never said otherwise. I have a surveillance system myself (on my own local servers), but I take great pains to ensure that no cameras are capturing anything that isn't my property.

> It's a deterrent and doesn't necessarily mean high crime.

I never said that it automatically means a high crime area. It's just highly suggestive of it. If it's a low crime area, far fewer people would feel the need for this sort of thing.

> if you live in Major City like I have my whole life, it's just a fact of life that you're going to want stuff like this.

No, it's not. I've lived in a number of major cities, and have never felt the need to point cameras at my neighbor's houses or the street.