Eufy “local only” cameras upload facial recognition data to the cloud
9to5google.com
9to5google.com
It provides an view that the linux tech tips and the security researcher initially made the discoveries may have missed.
Long story short - EUFY was attempting to maintain a balance and use of use.
The hot take may not be the correct one.
Facial recognition identifiers are not uploaded if you turn the facial recognition feature off. Identifiers are not known to correlate across accounts, and so potentially obfuscate instead of correlate.
This is likely a reasonably private system that any one of us could have designed. It all comes down to the retention policy (which is not known).
In my ideal utopia I will wear (normal) glasses which include a tiny camera in the frame. When I'm in a gathering of people I would be able to frown or scrunch my nose which would trigger the camera to take an image of the person I'm looking at. The image uploads somewhere where some facial recognition software runs and returns a name to me - possibly in audio form (like a whisper in my ear). The image is not retained, but I would have the information I need to start/continue a conversation with that person without looking like an idiot for not remembering who they were in the first place.
There's barrel-loads of privacy concerns around this ideal utopia of mine. But I'm selfish and fed up with my disability which has, in the past, caused me serious social anxiety.
[1] - Also known as face blindness: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/face-blindness/
I suspect that Eufy is thinking the “no cloud” marketing positioning appeals to people merely because they don’t want to pay for a subscription. For customers like me who chose them for privacy reasons this is hugely damaging.