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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> “If there is the infrastructure, if there is the channel by which police can request footage without a warrant or consent of the user, under what circumstances they get it is out of our control. I worry that because it’s decided by the police and by somebody at Ring, there will be temptation to use that for increasingly less urgent situations.”

Many people (I would argue anybody with common sense) predicted Ring would get used as a surveillance tool. This quote correctly states the nearly-inevitable next step, which will also be ignored.

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So moved into a newly built house, by default everyone gets a smart doorbell in this house. They looked at me like I was crazy when I said I didn't want it or any of the other the "smart" devices.

This was the exact reason.

To be fair... If you carry around a smart phone or have a smart watch or a laptop you're at just as much risk. The ring is just one more device.

Well, no, not exactly.

The ring is an always-on camera. My phone is not that. My phone may leak some information about me, and its basic job (cell phone) provides a record of location data, but that's not the same thing as forcibly making a home security device into part of a police state panopticon.

Are you sure your phone microphone isn't always on? At the very least your voice assistant is listening all the time to detect the trigger word (does this send the voice to the cloud for AI assisted detection?). Also if you search for articles about Ultrasonic Beacons, they imply adware tech is listening all the time too.

I disabled voice assistant and trigger word on my android. I hate talking to machines.

I am, in part because I don't use the trigger word functionality.

It's wild to me you think someone using the phrase "police state panopticon" would have an always on voice assistant enabled.

My smart phone is not recording video all the time and uploading it to somebody else's computer. It does send location pings to the cell tower when turned on... However, I can easily turn my smart phone off, or leave it home or somewhere else. Security cameras and thermostats and refrigerators aren't so easy to just turn off.

It's listening and recording audio at all time.

There are billions of smart phones out there, and hundreds of thousands of technical minds both working at the companies who make them, and owning and checking them for these things.

Please provide a singular credible source for your statement.

I guess if you don’t have prowler or package theft problems, they aren’t really necessary. I personally have found my Nest cameras indispensable. Ironically, if police would just do their job on property crime, they wouldn’t be so needed.

There are alternative cameras that don't have the same privacy concerns.

Yup. I absolutely love my cameras. I wouldn't have set them up without a home server to isolate them, though.

The problem with those is they're easily stolen during a home invasion.

Can you recommend some?

Eufy, which records locally. Doesn't have as much "AI" though.

I have several Eufy cams and while their hardware is excellent, the software leaves much to be desired.

My biggest gripe right now is when you get a notification and tap it on Android, you get such a cut down UI, it doesn't even have a scrubber and you can't fast forward or rewind. Just a completely barebones player you can't control. Once you exit that and go to the camera history, you get a normal player with controls. Makes no sense to me whatsoever.

The logitech circle view ones are pretty good

Anything the integrates with homekit secure video will be e2e encrypted

UniFi cameras are amazing. Superb video quality (better then so called "professional" cameras from the regular security companies), easy to setup (but still an order of magnitude more work then a Ring), self hostable, and from my experience highly reliable.

Agreed. I have a UniFi Protect setup and almost all of the equipment is top notch. I don't appreciate the lock-in inherent in the system (Protect NVR only works with Protect cameras, cameras only work with their NVR, and you can't self-host the NVR on your own hardware), but I'll gladly take it in trade for excellent spousal-approval-factor.

The one exception I've found so far is that the UNVR-4 system software in older models is stored on a very cheap USB flash drive, and I believe they write logs to it too. Mine failed a few months before warranty expired so I just replaced it with an SSD and SATA->USB 3 adapter I had laying around. Works great, is snappy, and should hopefully last quite a bit longer.

For what it's worth you can use RSTP streams from the cameras in most open source NVRs but you can only enabled it from the UniFi NVR thus requiring UniFi NVR hardware to begin with.

The streams don't come from the cameras in that scenario either, they get proxied by the NVR.

Synology has some fairly strong products in this space.

A fairly cheap NAS from them for local storage, and then basically any ip camera you can find will mostly just work. (NAS I'm using: https://www.amazon.com/Synology-Bay-DiskStation-DS220-Diskle...)

They offer surveillance station (https://www.synology.com/en-us/surveillance) as a free app for most of their models.

My entire setup (3 cameras, NAS, hdds, POE switch) cost me under $1000, and I get pretty much every feature that most of these cloud camera services offer.

- Remote viewing on my phone (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.synology.D...)

- Activity alerts and optional triggers for recording

- Viewing through any browser

- Multiple user accounts

Plus if I want it, Surveillance station has a whole host of other features that I currently don't need, but are nice to have (ex: automated cloud backups, offsite storage, CMS, Action rules, etc)

As a nice little bonus - I pay zero in monthly costs for this outside of the power to run the cameras & NAS

My initial setup cost ran slightly higher than something like Nest or Google Home (ex: I paid 1k vs the roughly 400 it would have cost to buy the cameras from a cloud service) but 4 years in I'm now in the positive on the investment, since I don't have a recurring 14/month subscription charge.

So long story short - It's still my data, it's costing me less over time, and I get feature parity.

The downside is it requires a little more configuration and setup.

I actually own a Synology NAS. Weird. Never cared about the app but is sounds really nice. Thank you. I'll check it out.

Reolink have cameras which keep the video local, but support RTSP and can upload video to an FTP server (old school, I know) of your choice. I run my own FTP server and keep the video streams in DigitalOcean spaces with a 24 hours object expiration policy, fairly cheap NVR.

Reolink can work with Synology, I believe.

Nest has the best experience as far as I can tell. The person recognition works fairly well, so I’m not getting alerts for every rabbit or blown tree branch that wanders into view.

Nest is also my favorite. I just wish they didn't completely abandon the main Nest app and didn't force the inferior and convoluted Google Home app as the mandatory app necessary for the latest gen cameras. Such a squandered opportunity.

Where the hell do you all live where this is a common problem? Out of all of my friend and relatives, 100s of people, none of them have ever complained about vandalism/theft.

I live in a big city and package theft is fairly common here, happens to me a few times a year. The shipping company always replaces though, this has never cost me anything and so there's not much pressure on me to contribute to the police surveillance apparatus over it.

I was in a similar situation until a rash of thefts began happening around my apartment complex a little over 10 months ago. Something changed, whether some porch pirates moved in to the complex, or some crime ring decided to start exploiting our area. The police and apartment management had no answer, and it turns out their security cameras are absolutely useless.

Yeah a similar thing happened at a rental property we own. Someone in the neighborhood learned the code to get into the building and started stealing packages. Changing the code would help for a few days and then it would happen again. I haven't heard about the issue in a few months, so it seems like they've fixed whatever the problem was. My guess is someone was watching people input the code and then using it later to get in. Another owner recently moved out, so maybe they were the weak link? Who knows.

Probably any large metropolis.

I have friends in NYC, Boston, Houston, Dallas, and Seattle and they have never mentioned package theft or vandalism. Maybe I'm wrong in assuming that since they don't mention it that it must not be a problem for them.

I'm sure we could pull up ring footage of thieves in each of those cities as anecdata, but it would just be pedantry. At least here in LA, the looting of our train cars got so bad that some companies just started bypassing the city.

Personally, I live in the valley (SFV of LA) and haven't had issues, but I live in a low-middle class area full of russian/persian immigrants. I wonder if wealthier areas are targeted?

> I wonder if wealthier areas are targeted?

Maybe, but it's also probably still extremely rare and internet discussions oversample people who have been victims. I've only known one person here in LA who's had any of their packages stolen in the past few years, and that one turned out to be due to a bizarre personal vendetta.

Lower class neighborhoods usually have a lot of safe guards built up over time because “they are used to the problems” whereas middle and upper-middle class neighborhoods are just getting their first taste of the problem in the last few years and are still pretty soft as targets. If you are a package their, go after the rich people who are less likely to have some kind of protection.

I live in a big metropolis (Birmingham, UK), and have had no issues, The place I had it worst was when I lived in a cute 17th century village in the Oxford countryside. Had several packages stolen in the year I lived there.

Yeah, maybe it's more of certain problem people. It probably takes one bad apple to create a culture of theft.

Currently a huge problem in San Jose, where I suspect a lot of people here post from.

Bikes are stolen often here in Southern California. There is a camera system here, but thieves wear hoodies/hats/look-down, and in any case no one bothers chasing after them anyway.

All the biggest cities in the UK and the USA suffer increasingly severe property theft problems and lack of interest from the police in prosecuting them

Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. We don’t have it as bad as some other neighborhoods (like Bitter Lake or Queen Anne, or anywhere South Seattle), and the part of Ballard I live in is pretty nice for the nearby area, but property crime is still a huge problem. It was worse last year when there was a huge encampment set up at the Ballard commons.

I’ve been hearing similar problems in many big cities as well (Portland, SF, LA, Austin, …) but you might be more immune to the trend if you live in a suburb instead (eg Bellevue or Kirkland rather than Seattle, but thefts are beginning to intrude even there).

It’s mostly Ballard. You won’t experience the level of these problems in much of South Seattle. Neighborhoods such as Seward Park, Mt Baker, Madrona, Leschi, and Columbia City are quiet and low on property crime. Never had a car break in or heard of a package theft in a decade of living on the south end.

what is a prowler. how does a camera prevent package theft? you get information about who took it but it doesn't prevent them from taking it, or get it back. deterrence only?

from your comment, it doesn't sound like anyone was deterred.

yeah my personal view is that these cameras do nothing except widen police surveillance capacity but I'm somewhat interested in what the people who buy them think they are doing.

I expect people who buy them haven't personally witnessed what it looks like to report property crime—even fairly major property crime—to the police. Which is to say, they don't realize that there's almost no chance they'll do anything about it at all except issue a report for insurance (if you want one, and probably for a fee just to add insult to injury) even if you come to them with all kinds of evidence, up to and including clear video of faces and license plates. They probably imagine it going very differently from how it actually goes.

My personal experience from a home invasion where the individual caused a not insignificant amount of damage to the home resulted in nothing more than the police merely filing in a form and handing me a receipt.

My personal experience from coming home to a burgled also ended with the same situation. The police came, waited from crime lab to take prints, prints were not recoverable, no follow up. This was even after several attempts at providing the assigned detective detailed information from the bank on how the criminal's attempted to use a stolen checkbook to withdraw money from a bank account. The detective later explained that he's too busy to look at information provided via email.

Yep. I've seen (and personally experienced) individuals and small businesses suffer property crime ranging from low thousands to upper five figures. Not once has any amount of evidence, including the aforementioned faces-and-license-plates video evidence, or in another case multiple credit card transactions at places that assuredly have cameras covering both the register and parking lot (and at least once at a hotel, which means they made a copy of an ID, even though it may have been fake), convinced the cops to do anything whatsoever aside from offer to issue a report for insurance (for a fee, the assholes). I've even seen a case of this plainly being an ongoing spree with video placing the same people and vehicles multiple places. Cops didn't care, even though the criminals were still working and hitting places every day or two.

Middle-class white people in every case, just to eliminate any race angle. Maybe richer folks have a better time, IDK. This isn't even the allegedly-lawless-hellhole of San Francisco or anything remotely like that.

Cops in my area did a sting operation to find out who was putting trash into one of the municipality's wealthy benefactor's trash bins at night. They also did a six month investigation to catch some high school kid who spray painted "BLM" on a street, but completely ignored whoever wrote "WLM 2" next to it the next day.

The police know who they work for, and they will expend all the resources they have to go after people they simply just don't like, no matter how petty the crime.

I'm shocked that the police even took prints. When my house was burglarized, they looked around and then told us to file a report and left.

The crime lab said it was rare for them to make an appearance. He said if there had been a dead body, they'd have brought out all the toys to do forensics. I gently reminded him that I would have been the dead body in question, and the whole conversation was soured after that.

I'm genuinely shocked that you even got them to take prints at all. I've been robbed before and the most police have done is fill out a police report.

So depressing to hear. I’m really sorry you had to go through all that.

Alot of the footage is passed along on next door. People do connect the dots, eg they tell you where the guy who grabbed your package is camping, then you can try to go retrieve it yourself.

Personally, I was motivated to get a Ring camera after a couple instances of porch theft. In the years since it has never happened again. So there is some deterrent value.

I would never install a smart device INSIDE my home. But I don’t see why people are freaking out about door/driveway cameras.

I don't know, I don't live in a place with driveways so it's hard to say how I'd feel about them. Where I live these cameras all face the street and public sidewalk, a place I feel is adequately surveilled already.

Anyway I had a few packages thefts over a few years and did nothing about them at all. I haven't had any in about a year though so clearly it's working.

The deterrent value would be the same for a dummy camera then?

The number of people who report this is ... significantly high.

Perhaps Amazon was instructing their drivers to steal packages until they see a Ring installed.

(Even with a Ring camera you should still get recordings of people noticing you have it ...)

A doorbell camera has a field of view that is much less than the range you can see it. So it can deter without catching people in their history.

Who said anything about deterrence? Get you packages as soon as they are dropped, scream out the window when someone decides to check your door handles, go down stairs with a baseball bat if they keep at it. Cameras enable all of that, we are basically in the DIY of crime prevention because the police can’t really help us.

What’s the point? Even if you have a great video of a dude stealing your packages nobody will arrest or do anything about it.

I used to have things stolen off my porch frequently. After installing a Ring camera, that ended immediately and never happened again. It did seem to work as a deterrent.

You don’t have to pick a dystopian spyware camera to deter porch theft. This attitude is why we can’t have nice things.

What is the issue with a porch camera looking out into a low traffic public space like my own personal driveway? I seriously don't understand the complaint here, and I say this as someone who has a Faraday pouch for my phone and a policy of no AI "assistants" WITHIN the house.

There isn’t any issue with a camera. The issue is that you lazily picked the spyware camera from Amazon.

…and? I’m paying them for a service if handling recording and integration with the app, etc.

What is the problem here?

I will have my own definition of dystopia and not rely on some privileged HNers definition. Thank you very much

Since the camera is a good deterrent, would you then consider disabling the service?

Why would I? It faces my private driveway which, is my property in a public space. I have absolutely no qualms about that being recorded.

this is exactly why i added a fake camera in front of my door.

The point is it helps prosecutors build a case when serial package thieves are eventually caught. This happened in my neighborhood a few years ago.

You also know very quickly you have a package at your door, or someone has entered your drive way. If you are home, you can “greet” them which usually scares them off. Even if aren’t home, you can greet them with the speaker. I wake up pretty quickly at night when my nest person detected alert goes off. I live in the back town house, so fortunately I don’t get much random person passing by traffic to set off false alarms.

> Ironically, if police would just do their job on property crime, they wouldn’t be so needed.

A girl can dream, can’t she

>Ironically, if police would just do their job on property crime, they wouldn’t be so needed.

if the last several years have taught us anything its that police only do there jobs when they feel like it. whether that processing rape kits, stopping gunmen, stopping property theft, doesn't matter that wont do it.

When police are incredibly understaffed, they don’t do their job because they don’t have many to do it. Granted, everyone is understaffed these days, so it’s not just a police problem, and prosecutor/judges in my county make things harder for them by auto releasing the property-crime offenders they do catch (doesn’t matter if they have 10 warrants for times they didn’t return to court after being released from previous arrests).

It’s not just the police’s fault that they are ineffective, the politicians (that appoint judges and prosecutors) and the people that vote for the politicians take a lot of the blame also. And even after that it’s just a bad time for labor and crime.

> incredibly understaffed

That's adorable.

Yeah, our court system is vastly underfunded...police generally aren't, though some departments are having enormous difficulty finding qualified people who want to work for them.

Ironically and sadly, it becoming such a hated profession means we really don't want the people who are willing to do it. It's a grave they dug themselves, though.

These problems predate the pandemic and fallowing recession, trying to blame it on the immediate labor shortage is unreasonable.

And since when has being weak on crime every gotten a judge of prosecutor elected in this country? Politicians go out of their way as a mater of course to look tough on crime to the point that it a problem of its own.

no offense intended, (maybe you have some inside knowledge and perspective that I don't) but this seems to be a little disingenuous to say the least.

Police do not decide what rape kits are processed, prosecutors do.

There are a variety of reasons kits are not processed, including the victim not cooperating, the accused confesses or dies in prison, there turns out to not be a case (such as: victim claims Bob raped them, but Bob was at dinner with someone else and his phone/credit card records confirm it, and so on.)

Prosecutors don't just go "fuck women, don't test these kits lying around!" despite what you might be led to believe by a lot of folks trying to generate outrage.

I live in a community like yours and IMO you're just hurting yourself. Your home is probably already covered by everyone else's cameras and they can just pull the footage from them. It seems like the only person that doesn't have access to recordings of their own home now is you.

Actually across the street from my house is a fence and so I only have neighbors on the sides, because of that my home is not being videoed.

But also because for me the minor inconvenience of not constantly videotaping my house is overwhelmed by the opportunity to stand on a principle. Sure it doesn't do much to Amazon or anyone else but at least I know I am not participating in the Orwellian surveillance state. It also gives me the opportunity that when people notice and ask about it, to inform them about it. A lot of people didn't realize that this information was available to the government to use at their discretion as well.

OP already responded to your comment, but I'll bite and argue that, in your hypothetical, they're not hurting themselves.

First, they're taking a stand based on principal. That they're successful in doing so is a win for them. Second, to your point, they're still covered in case of theft because their "home is probably already covered by everyone else's cameras and they can just pull the footage from them". Assuming they're on good terms with their neighbors, this request should be pretty easy and quick to fulfill. If they're not, local PD can still get a warrant for the footage.

> First, they're taking a stand based on principal.

I'm all for that, but taking a stand doesn't benefit the individual. Taking a stand is for the benefit of society and requires the collaboration of society

> Assuming they're on good terms with their neighbors, this request should be pretty easy and quick to fulfill. If they're not, local PD can still get a warrant for the footage.

yes and that process is just objectively much more difficult than pulling the data from your own camera, which takes all of five seconds versus an order from a judge. That means they're life is worse.

>That means they're life is worse.

It doesn't, though. If they are aware of the tradeoff (that in order to have the privacy they want, it will take longer to get any footage they may need), and they find that the tradeoff is worth it, then their life is not "worse". After all, that's why they made the decision to begin with - because they believe that their life is worse with them than without.

But it's not more privacy, that's the entire basis of what I'm saying. In this hypothetical, you're already monitored by cameras. The only difference is that the subject doesn't own them. The privacy is the exact same in both.

By not taking part in it, they are not contributing to something they oppose. It's a moral choice for them. My fault for not making that clearer.

One person making such a principled choice may encourage another, who may encourage another, and so on. If enough of us make principled choices we don't necessarily have to live like this.

My view on this is that we're not going back and it would be silly to try to do so. Once you have the technology to record, track, and ultimately apprehend criminals, simply not doing so in the name of ideological purity becomes increasingly obscene. What we need are courts that understand the technology, prosecutors who fear censure for overreach, and fair laws about standards of access to the data.

It's here to stay. We just need good rules around its use. The benefits are too compelling.

There are vendors who provide exactly the same service that Ring does, but allow you to retain sovereignty over the data. Ubiquity, for example.

That still doesn't protect my sovereignty if my neighbour points their camera at my drive way (which was described by another commenter in this thread).

What, we're just going to skip over the fact that the police can beat the shit out of you and throw you in jail for a few hours, largely consequence-free, before any of those parties even get involved?

"We can't surveil criminals because the cops will beat them up before they're even charged" does not seem to me to describe a problem that has absolutely anything to do with cameras.

This isn't about "ideological purity" nor technology: My home is literally the only place where my family and I still have some form of privacy, is it too hard to understand that we don't want random strangers having the power to lurk into our lives 24/7?

You're confusing random people looking whenever they feel like with a well run system the GP is asking for.

Maybe the way is to store the footage or a decryption key locally so the police have to physically get it off you (and you can't refuse) if they want access and can't drag-net. That's what's traditionally done with business's surveillance cameras.

By that logic, we should use illegally obtained evidence to record/track criminals. Not sure that's how the courts actually operate.

Did you just wave away all concerns and criticisms of an increasingly aggressive surveillance and police state as “ideological purity?”

People use that word because they think their own biases are realistic, but it doesn’t get more ideological than believing that giving police and courts more surveillance power has benefits that are “too compelling.”

> We just need good rules around its use.

Rules change. The people in power change. They may say "fuck those rules" in the future. The only way to prevent abuses like this is to not surveil unnecessarily.

According to the article, users can opt-in to end-to-end encryption, so it's not true that this is "out of our control".

Yes, you can opt in, but the Ring mobile app insists on generating your passphrase for you instead of letting you choose your own. Which means Ring could still perfectly well know what your passphrase is, even though it's supposed to be "private", since it's their code in their app generating it. Sorry, not buying it.

Edit: Also, at least according to HowToGeek [1], you lose some significant features if you enable E2EE.

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/741180/how-to-enable-end-to-end-en...

(Edit to edit: My Ring app gives me an even more comprehensive list of features that are disabled if you enable E2EE. Since among them is Shared Users, which is how my wife and I can both see our Ring videos, I don't see how this is any kind of actual support for E2EE. Surely a significant portion of Ring's customers have more than one family member who wants to have access to the videos.)

I see stuff like this all the time, yet people are quick to call obvious extrapolation a “slippery slope fallacy”

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