Who owns private home security footage, and who can get access to it?
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I do. DIY on-site only system.
Pretty simple really - stop using third party vendors for data storage. They're cheap and easy because your data is usually the product. Sure, you would still be forced to comply with warrants/subpoenas if they think you have data, but that's basically unescapable.
[0]: https://ui.com/camera-security [1]: https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-protect-cameras/produ... [2]: https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-protect/products/unif...
Over the year end holidays I was traveling and set one up to monitor my front yard. There was actually an incident while I was gone and I remoted in to find the camera offline, totally missed it when it should have had perfect perspective. The police asked me for video and in this case I would have shared it, but alas could not. Sucks as I have the CloudKey box for video storage, but its very undependable in my experience.
The positives are that it pretty much just works. The mobile app is excellent, the web app on the UNVR is fine, and it has full spousal approval factor.
I have had very few issues with the system, primarily just the doorbell was unreliable until I upgraded the transformer and put an access point right next to it. I had an issue with the NVR right before it went out of warranty and I fixed it by replacing the internal USB drive with an SSD.
The negatives are that it's more costly than other options, Ubiquiti has had perennial stock problems over the last few years, and you're locked into their ecosystem. The NVR won't work with generic cameras and you can't run the software on your own hardware.
It's also possible that, if you have their remote access proxy set up (required for mobile app), you could be subject to the same warrant issues as with Ring.
My cloud key however, have killed a couple of drives over the years though.
This is a very subjective area. As I noted you can get all kinds of NVRs with notification and cameras, others have mentioned Ubiquiti, Roku is also getting into the home automation field, and of course there are open source solutions like Home Assistant.
I highly doubt it, for the fact that many of the features are incompatible with the goal of privacy and convenience.
There are plenty of on-site options that offer the bulk of the benefits, like self contained NVR systems. Once you want things like texts, web access, etc then it gets tricky. Those typically aren't offered in a secure and easy way.
One can walk into a local supermarket on any planet(e.g., Walkmart, Sam's Club, Carrefour, Aldi, Tesco, Auchan) and likely be able to pick up a self-managed NVR with cameras.
If it was not relatively easy, I do not believe these companies would carry them.
You are right, many are not willing.
When my AC unit broke I didn't need to know the finer decisions surrounding which unit to choose.
I have weekly visits from the pool guy for a pool and gardener for the landscaping. A yearly termite check and AC/furnace maintenance. And so on.
We won’t have that for home compute appliances until hardware/interface innovation slows down, and that’d actually been trending in the other direction for a while now. It will stabilize, even while innovation happens at other layers, but core stability plays a huge role in what you have in mind here.
Cloud stuff basically hid that that stuff on the other side of a pipe for a while, but has its own drawbacks and we’re likely seeing the start of a turn away from it.
I’ve been running more or less the same services through hardware, hypervisor, and now kubernetes migrations and revisions. It seems to me doing things “the Linux way”, sticking to open source where possible, is resistant to the fast pace of the consumer innovation market. When anything new comes along, it’s usually relatively trivial to transfer over.
I mean, I essentially provide that to my small social community with a private media tenant.
With ZTA systems in place to accommodate remote access, maybe there is an appetite for neighbor-to-neighbor network sysadmin services? Hard to compete with the sleek silos of big box brands and their infinite marketing budget, plus 5 9s of service, though.
I know it's an "out there" crazy silicon valley leftist idea but maybe something like that could work?
Okay no but for reals, the USPS could do that!
I think the incentive of a trade/artisan economy would make more sense, and justify individualized labor (house calls for NAS reconfiguration, for instance). Like a plumbing contractor vs inspector… I like the socialized idea, but I don’t see how the implementation would work under current social service labor system and organization…
Am I just totally misunderstanding the situation here?
....would you want to as sysadmin now manage them any time police comes and wants some footage ?
I think that can definitely work for stuff like internet access, but anything where "private files" and copyrighted content comes to play will be messy
Really? I installed Ubuntu after a 5 year holiday from it - Now you have some kind of Snaps, and flatpak. There is whatever is happening in wayland. To install handbrake, you need to install flatpack.
There used to be 4 different drivers for intel GPU, now there are 7, and I still can't get Quicksync to work in Handbrake. There seems to be some kind of plugin you can download from their website, but that doesn't install.
After tinkering, I realised that Quicksync works in ffmpeg and in Jellyfin, but not in Handbrake
Mind you, I have a home server that runs 20 docker contsiner for things like home assistant. I deploy applications to kubernetes in my say job.
But this shit is still frustrating
Who do I call to fix this for less than $500 an hour?
Ubuntu is slowly turning into clown fiesta.
If GE made a home security product for example, it would make sense for vendors to get certified on GE home security support. Even if the underlying tech changed a lot, if they had access to support docs and a support portal it could work.
It’s easier to certify techs at an existing HVAC repair on your specific heater than it is to convince somebody to set up shop just for your new and peculiar product. Maturity of industry matters.
What is faster and faster is anti-consumer activities and the general acceptance of it.
For software, there are strong incentives on both sides of the transaction (buyer and seller) for a system to be remotely managed.
Unless it's proof to the negative, which in most jurisdictions isn't something you'd ever need to prove, as the burden is on something occurring, after some amount of time most recordings are useless?
the classic response is "how much you got?"
My thinking is that if something happens that I need the footage for, I'll know that I need it within 48 hours.
A 32Gb flash card is able to store about 2 week's worth of video in my system.
The strong economic growth during the postwar period created a culture with a truly utopian outlook on how technology is applied to improving lives. There was not the recognition there is today that it is possible (indeed, common) to consume resources at an unsustainable, destructive, rate, nor to comprehend the magnitudes and qualities of the effects that our consumption and pollution could have on the quality of life of future generations.
Peopple born in the last 40 years have weathered the effects of Reaganomics on the economies of the world. People born in the past 10-20 years have felt the ramifications of a massive recession during the early years of their lives. All the above-mentioned people are by now old enough to know who is to blame for those massive failures. This has apparently engendered a more cynical, or at least skeptical, perspective on how the future might proceed based on our current trajectory, compared to the more techno-utopian visions of the mainstream boomer mindset.
From what I can see, all generations are equally likely to trade some amount of personal freedom for convenience. The exact things they're willing to trade may or may not be different, but the principle seems a constant.
Citing exceptions has little to do with the conversation at hand, for the obvious reason that different people grow up in different socioeconomic situations even within the same generation. Nonetheless, a clear pattern emerges in attitudes towards this or that "personal freedom" on the basis of what a person can imagine can be done with those freedoms. These are obviously culturally-based attitudes, and obviously cultures differ between generations.
What about this are you finding so controversial?
Does your answer change if, instead of stolen money, the police are looking for the robber's weapon, or the victim's empty wallet, or some other "we have good reason to suspect that he ditched it somewhere around here" evidence?
Yes. And my answer would not change for the other case. It's also reasonable for the property owner to demand that the police get a warrant first.
I'm not arguing about whether or not these powers are OK. I'm just arguing that, in my view, both of the situations the OP mentioned are equivalent in that they're both searches of private property.
https://www.vueville.com/home-security/cctv/ip-cameras/ultim...
I have a Synology NAS and their free security camera software is pretty easy to set-up and use with ONVIF cameras.
By default it uploads short clips of motion to “the cloud” and requires an app + wifi for setup, but you can disable clip uploading after it’s setup.
If you don’t trust it even with cloud uploading disabled, you can just deprive it of internet access once it’s setup. (Block the device on your network, etc). It’ll keep writing video to the SD card while offline. Though with the fully offline approach you'll need to physically take out the SD card to access the video instead of using their app.
There's certainly better local storage options out there. But for local storage with a single camera it’s the easiest and cheapest setup I know.
Very good advice when it comes to Wyze products. Sadly they're just the tip of the security/privacy nightmare iceberg.
I'm sure I could tell them to kick rocks, and they would have to write up a subpoena but there's no reason to do that.
Would they have the right to subpoena you though? Over mere suspicion that they think a vehicle at some point drove a certain direction?
Sure if it was a case involving me personally I'd probably be cooperative, but I don't fancy the idea of just letting LEOs just waltz into my property to "just to take a look"
My neighbor has fake cameras and he gets asked too but they just leave it at that and never press it.
I think making sure some decision basis should be applied (there was a break in, commotion, and a car speed chase which ended here is much different to ‘we just wanna see if this car drove past’)
Owning footage is only half the story, privacy is also a big issue for me, I don't want images of my home being sent to corporations even if I own all rights to it.
The only downside I can think of is that a really advanced thief might know to pull the hard drives and walk with them, but I suspect most residential thieves aren't that smart or wouldn't know what disk to pull from my rack.
The other downside for less techy people is that without the cloud it's not that simple to view your home from a remote location. I just VPN into my home network and view it, but it took some effort to set that up, especially with dynamic DNS and all.
Agreed, that's the only way to build a secure system. I have some outdoor cameras but they are on a physically separate network and can't talk to anything.
Also, they are on ethernet but because they also support wifi I physically cut the antenna connections because I'm not about to trust the manufacturer of the camera to not try to exfiltrate something.
But sadly this is, while not difficult, too much for the non-techie person to do. So people just buy Ring cameras with all the associated privacy problems.
The worst is that while my system is secure, many of the surrounding neighbors have ring cameras outside so I can't protect from those!
This is not normal - there is no other industry where the customer routinely expects to be defrauded, and everyone to get away with it.
Every try to buy event tickets?
Kinda shame we don't have more cameras running OSS software
Armchairing it here - these broad warrants are probably carry over from the days where you'd issue a single warrant for "the tapes" since every camera in the system recorded onto a single shared medium.
Like GP, I have a personal offline system with remote backups that I control. The footage all goes onto a single shared HDD for all the cameras like the old "tape" days. A warrant would likely ask for that HDD - not the footage from a specific camera.
If you get a subpoena that you believe is overly broad, you can take the matter before a judge and argue your case. As I understand it, this can be quite effective in narrowing the scope. It's not perfect, of course, but it's better than having no say whatsoever.
But, in general, if you're getting a subpoena it's because you are a bystander in an investigation, and if you're getting a warrant, it's because you are a target of an investigation. So a subpoena offers a bit more protection for you and is easier to push back against.
You can only fight a warrant after it's been executed (at least, mostly), but fighting it after the fact isn't nothing. If you win, the property seized must be returned, data collected must be deleted, and none of it can be used in court.
A is really my core objection here, the privacy violation of gathering all the camera's data is essentially unresolvable, someone will have at least looked at the footage and at best determined the camera is an interior camera and stopped reviewing it. Personally all my cameras are outward facing (though one is a ptz that could look into the office) and I have only local storage of the video. My other option would be to make an automation that deafens and turns any PTZ camera to the wall unless my alarm system is set to away.
But I don't think it's a real moral conundrum. As I said elsewhere, I think that if we as a society want to have police that can effectively investigate crime, they also need to have some invasive powers. And I think we do want to have such police, because the alternative is much worse.
The reality is that there is no such thing as an absolute right in pretty much anything, because it's rather common that exercising one right can infringe on a different right. So it's all necessarily about balance and compromise.
No. I need a system that detects motion during scheduled times (ideally only humans) and buzzes my phone instantly, giving me a live view and saving a recording around that time. And most of all, it has to be reliable enough that I don't question whether it's working. Anyone who says this is easy is underestimating it.
Something on-prem could do all that, but nobody sells it, and most DIY systems don't have those features (does yours?). So here I am with the Ring.
And sure I'm tech-savvy, but I also don't want to deal with things. The real test is at my parents' house, where I don't live but I manage some of their stuff remotely / occasionally in person. I can't babysit whatever gets installed, and they don't understand computers. Like, whenever their internet was having problems, they'd only know how to reboot the router; eventually they automated this task with a lamp timer. But they were fine managing the Ring once I set it up.
Perhaps the solution that the tech-oriented crowd will move to now is just making things from scratch, I haven't seen the clear consensus on it yet.
My parents replaced the Ubiqitis themselves when they started having issues I wasn't there to fix, with some no-name Amazon wifi APs. MAC address manufacturer lookup just said "Shenzhen." Plugged in, and they worked.
I then have frigate[1] set up on a small fitlet (with a usb CORAL TPU), which gives me excellent control over detection (Humans vs dogs vs cars vs ...). Frigate grabs the streams from my NVR over rstp.
This is then hooked up to my Home Assistant where I have various rules to send alerts to my mobile devices based upon object detected, location of camera, and time of day.
Everything is internal. I have an always on wireguard on my family's mobile devices allowing them to access the cameras and home assistant alerts from anywhere.
It works great, but I have refused to set this up for my extended family (even though they have the same NVR and _really_ want my system), just because there are a lot of moving pieces that need to be maintained (not to mention having a server + vpn)
I have about a dozen 4k cameras I'd love to migrate to a much more capable NVR, but doing so with software typically means I go from a 30W NVR to maxing out a 8 core 200W Xeon even without object detection.
Would love to kill my Duaha NVR and toss this on the Proxmox cluster instead.
EDIT: looks like CPU still used for video decoding regardless of Coral being available: https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/hardware/#do-hwaccel-args...
It needs to be basically the same as a Ring with just one additional requirement, plugging another box into power and your network to act as the DVR/brains, with a QR code that you scan to link it. Sure that can have more customization options, but the default has to be zero config. Probably gonna need a cloud server for notifying and serving the mobile app without having keys to the video (users have to know the difference), which would cost money monthly.
The reality is that except for companies, almost no one REALLY cares about it. It's an expense they'd usually rather not have (like backups), so it always gets the short end of the stick.
People really don't understand this enough to even know that there's a problem. I have explained to a lot of people that "the cloud" just means renting someone else's computer, and they still don't get it.
Ideally, in the video(s) you can talk about how the viewer can setup the solution themselves, breaking it down into components, why each is important and how it all works.
Also introduce how the viewer can buy the entire solution from you directly, where’ll they’ll get some custom support/troubleshooting or they may just hire you for consulting.
This will function as your funnel to let your target customers find your solution as they search for ways to problems they have self-identified.
If you’d like you can also do retargeting ads on the viewers of your video, as they’d be more likely to buy your solution vs the avg joe.
For example - who was the person who approache dthe door with an umbrella today.
Frigate makes sure its a person, Frigate makes sure it in the correct area of camera. Cheap rtsp camera, standalone wifi network. Frigate is the bridge to 'normal' lan.
I bought a Synology NAS and I just added cameras on my home network in the web UI.
Does motion tracking, auto recording and the app rocks. It doesn’t ping me but I also haven’t looked for that feature.
For Wi-Fi outdoor, I've been trying Reolink. I actually have had one die and another one keeps resetting so I'm not sold.
I've heard Hikvision is good but they're more expensive and I haven't tried them yet. I also think they really care whether you buy it from an authorized retailer.
Well that's a crucial requirement. Should ping by default. Even if you can turn it on, I don't trust that they really put that feature first if it's buried in the settings.
I consider pinging a major cause of paranoia (see NextDoor), an invasion of my community’s privacy, and honestly I live in a safe area and insurance covers everything anyway.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/surveillance/feature/mobile
Synology + a cheap RTSP camera and it has all the features OP requires.
I don't have it set up that way but thought about it. Zoneminder does motion detection and can be scheduled too. I'm not sure about the human recognition part, but I think I heard there's so sort of plugin out there for that, but I could be wrong. It will also send alerts and can be visible from the web if you have a static IP or a service that provides the same functionality (forget the name).
It just detected movement, sent an email with video file attached and a link to stream.
No face detect AI but this is ancient software, and minimum effort to set up
Isn't there the standard work around that companies do of having scheduled deletion. As long as the deletion is scheduled and not in response to a legal request, what is gone is gone and not a crime. If you receive a warrant you might have to stop further deletion, but what they want is likely already gone.
Since you have your own system, would you be willing to share links to info on a "roll your own" system?
I'm a big fan of this project:
It's open source, and you can hook it up to a Coral (or some other things, I think) to get crazy-fast classifications. But CPU is fine for only a few cameras.
Once you get something like that setup, it's just a matter of finding cameras that support RTSP. You get them setup however you like (but preferably wired, with PoE), point Frigate at the RTSP stream, and that's it. Now you've got home security footage that never leaves your house. You can set up a VPN to watch the feeds from elsewhere. Frigate supports MQTT as well, so you can hook it into Home Assistant to get notifications, and even pipe person events into something like Double Take to get face detection:
https://github.com/jakowenko/double-take
EDIT: Oh, and the most important part is to have your security cameras on a totally separate network that doesn't have access to your internal network or the internet. The best cameras are from China, and you don't want to give them any opportunities.
Another issue is finding all of these projects and choosing the right ones that'll receive long term support and making sure the pipeline (Camera -> NVR -> Frigate -> ? -> Home Assistant?) doesn't break and stays up to date.
A lot of moving parts, and last time I looked it was hard to find a good NVR with Linux support that also has a decent web app (and even better if it has a native mobile app)
You can use Ubiquiti's surveillance software that's part of the UniFi console (that you can manage locally, with no cloud account), or other third party local-only monitoring software such as Synology Surveillance Station, BlueIris, and open source solutions such as iSpy, Frigate, ZoneMinder, and many others.
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Unrelated to cameras, I've preferred Eve for IoT devices simply because they adopted Thread and Matter very quickly. Nothing of them I have is IP addressable, nor can directly reach the internet. They have nice apps for phones and tablets, but I also use open source software to aggregate everything into my own dashboards (and automation) that I host and manage locally.
I will not use an external server. The cameras are in an internal DMZ, and no ports are open. I have a Synology server, recording the video.
But the convenience (and well-written apps) for Ring and Nest cameras is hard to argue with. People don't care about this kind of thing, if they can pull up video of their dog taking a dump in the living room, while they are sitting at a bar with you.
The police can still subpoena that footage and if they do, you can’t legally destroy it.
If you’ve got the money, you can fight the subpoena and you can be sure that they can’t bypass you and get the footage while your fighting it, but you better preserve it and don’t let it age out if your NVR in case you lose the fight.
If "can't be forced to give it up by normal legal processes" is your standard for what it means to own something, there is very little in the world that you do actually own. So little, in fact that the concept doesn't mean much at all.
I think the issue, really, is a philosophical disagreement. I think that if the police are to be able to investigate crime, they need to have some invasive powers. But they also shouldn't be trusted to use them without controls. The subpoena (and warrant) process is the control we have in the US. I don't think the existence of this ability is, itself, a serious violation of rights.
Other people may legitimately disagree.
There is also a serious discussion that could be had about whether the controls are sufficient, but that's a procedural issue rather than a philosophical one.
Not if it ends there and cops make the right decisions. However it's a legitimate concern that an overly broad police investigation, even after a real crime happens, might lead bad/lazy/dishonest cops to wrongfully accuse someone unrelated.
This is true of your car too, look up civil forfeiture in the US. The bar for seizing property is much lower than for criminal conviction.
If some person you dislike got robbed in front of your house, you could be compelled to help them by supplying your video footage even if you don't want to. If you really owned your camera footage, you could say "Naa, I don't wanna help that guy, I'm not going to let you have it".
That’s why the police asked us for the data. Because we own it.
You say that like it’s a bad thing…
including your freedom and your very life.
If the government does not have power to compel then property rights are moot anyway as the biggest warlord will just take your shit.
Seems a sophmoric definition of ‘own’.
Furthermore in this circumstance you aren’t even deprived of your video. They simply want a copy.
This is not a reasonable definition of ownership.
Let me get this straight. You're so concerned about your property rights being absolutely privileged in such a way that when social institutions gathering evidence for the crime of robbery -- a crime where relevant law is meant to deter/address the violation of property rights -- come knocking at your door, you want to assume the privilege of telling them "nah, I don't like that guy, screw him and screw his property rights and nothing I own will be involved in the enforcement of laws regarding those property rights"?
I think what this highlights is that, even where rights are important, they are rarely unqualified privileges. In the reality of any sufficiently complex system, corner cases or even conflict between worthwhile values exist. A legal system that cannot obligate people to produce relevant evidence for a case will likely be without power to make judgments based on evidence or enforce its laws, including those meant to protect property rights, which are the reason you can be said to "own" things at all.
In order to have a functioning legal system, there needs to be power to compel people to do things. Not every arbitrary thing -- good legal systems have limits too -- but you'll never be able to have rule of law without some power to compel.
It’s essentially creating an attractive nuisance if you do and then want to refuse to hand them out.
If you were the victim of a crime, and some useful evidence that could lead to the identification and punishment of the perpetrator existed on someone else’s camera system, wouldn’t you want the police to be able to get hold of it?
3rd party have no motivation to only give the say front porch camera video vs "here are all of their videos from every camera everywhere".
You don't actually need to hire a lawyer to fight a subpoena. It would be smart, but not necessary. And how expensive that fight is depends entirely on how far you want to take it.
If you're broke, you can still appear before the judge and argue your case. It only really gets expensive if the judge rules against you and you want to fight it in a higher court.
Trouble is that police, prosecutors, and even judges and juries can famously get that wrong. So I find this caveat not to be especially reassuring.
The current setup is this way because of a very complex set of intertwining factors which are shifting constantly. So 'shoulds' are plentiful and never ending.
'Is', however, is right in front of us.
You can be forced to give up anything you have. If that's the deciding factor for the question of ownership, then nobody owns anything. I don't think that's a useful definition, though.
This is a pretty accurate statement.
What they can't do is say "decrypt this blob and let us look around".
If you refuse to hand it over and they get a warrant and seize your NVR, then I'm not sure if they can compel you to decrypt it, but you may already be in jail for contempt and probably are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees at this point, so most people would cave long before this and just hand it over.
The likes of Ring (it might have actually been Ring if memory serves) were recently caught sending data to whomever asked nicely.
They also wouldn't request data from cameras offsite. I mean, they could, but why would they (and would they even make the connection that these cameras are also owned by you?)
With Ring it seems to be more like selecting a box on the map and click "request".
"well, it does record only when it detect motion, and there isn't anything on that date, but here is the neighbour's cat video few minutes earlier"
Just need to shred the files instead of just removing them.
Then again if it is by police to you they need to say what they need and not just get everything automatically so IMO not really that problematic as the case where they can get inside house footage from 3rd party company coz they don't give a shit.
It's my data on my drives. Are there legal retention requirements? Lying and saying "I already deleted it" seems like a pretty simple solution.
The fact that it's not on a popular cloud camera provider may make it harder for them to discover what it is they need to request, but they can still do it and you could still be compelled to comply.
In that case I would kind of rather they go to a megacorp vs. me needing to get a lawyer and figure out how to respond.
But generally I agree that it's sketchy for a third party to hold the data.
Since the likelihood is footage from your home is to investigate you or your family, knowledge of the data demand in itself is potentially invaluable, as you can begin forming a defense.
Which has pros and cons.
Cannot chase what you don't have.
That's all assuming the cops understand I'm not involved or committing crimes. As indicated in your sibling comment, that may not be the case and having my own representation would be needed.
It's shitty situations all around frankly.
In TFA they mention the possibility of complying but not giving everything that is asked for. A lawyer can probably help you craft that in a way that will satisfy a judge.
Point about Ring's lawyers (which we've seemingly gotten away from this deep into the thread) is you do not pay for them or get involved if you don't want to be. You don't get to be involved in strategy either, which may not be in your interests. Getting the best thing for your interests may require paying a lot for a lawyer and a lot of stress. It would all depend on the specifics of the case.
When you own it, you can fight back to your heart's content.
And by the way, you do pay for Ring's lawyers if you use their product.
The most important point
A subpoena for Ring is an order to produce data. A warrant for Joe's CCTV at 223 Acacia Avenue is permission to take the data.
So you're happy to give away your data, but also insistent that you should pay someone to review the request for your data. Apologies if I'm misunderstanding your comments (very possible), but I think I at least understand why some folks are confused.
You can't escape the shittiness of this problem by running your own server. It's a bad situation either way.
The root of the problem as i read it is overly zealous law enforcement and a judge that is not acting as a proper check on their power. It's a political problem. It can't be escaped with purely technical solutions like who stores the data.
But it all depends on the circumstances. As you say, the whole point of ownership is that I get to make that sort of decision.
Given it's common sense to never talk to the police without a lawyer, you would want a lawyer for this situation so you know you're not unintentionally fucking yourself over.
Obligatory IANAL.
Don't generalize and don't conclude from your point-of-view to the whole world. There are enough places where you can talk to the police without even thinking about a lawyer (and never ever even require one, even in such situations). Not everyone's country is the USA (I assume).
Obligatory IANAL.
Many of these kinds of warrants are closer to the "minor traffic ticket" side than anything else. The trouble is that you may want a lawyer to tell you that.
So wouldn't the alternative where they get the footage from someone else be just as bad as you turning it over without checking, and therefore something you should prevent if consulting a lawyer first is to your advantage?
That's one of many reasons.
Even if we aren't talking about court orders, any interactions with the police beyond small talk should be guided by a lawyer for the same reason. Arrogance has no place when interacting with the law, the complexity of which is far beyond the understanding of common men.
The problem is the side of it where you abandon in advance your ability do to that by giving a third party custody of your data and then suffer whatever consequences a lawyer might have advised you to avoid when the third party hands your data over to the government.
It doesn't matter if you're going to abide or contest court orders or whatever the hell else. I'm not talking about that.
You. Need. A. Lawyer.
Mere mortals cannot and will not understand the complexity and intricacy of law.
You. Need. A. Lawyer.
Having a lawyer do the basics is really cheap. Having a lawyer fight the warrant or craft a minimally-revealing response is expensive. You don't have to break the bank if you end up getting served a warrant.
Of course there no case law on the third to determine if one has to continue to give quarter to surveillance equipment.
You go back a year and look. Damage there? If no then go back 6 months. If the damage is there then you know it's between 6 months and a year back. Rinse and repeat, binary search.
Having said that, I wouldn't store that much. A week would be all I'd want.
The risk is that some judge doesn't appreciate your ironclad solution and so orders you to watch all the footage so they can record it over your shoulder.
I don't believe in cloud servers for home automation or home security stuff, I also think encryption and local storage is great, but all these techno-nerds are under delusions that enough geeking out on technical solutions will somehow change how law enforcement or the courts treat them. If they want to pursue you for something, it won't deter them.
If a crime occurred outside your home, but your home security cameras caught it, the police will discover this when they talk to you about the incident to collect witness statements, if you choose to share it.
If a crime occurred inside your home, and your home security cameras caught it, the police will discover this when you report the crime and you offer to share the evidence that may help you receive a cure.
There is absolutely nothing that a megacorp helps with here.
But they're not equal.
The police can acquire a warrant and serve it to a select few megacorps for ALL of the footage at a specific location for a specific time range. That's setting aside some policies where there's active cooperation between the megacorp and the police. By hosting it myself, I avoid this sort of blanket privacy violation.
In my particular situation, I'd guesss it would entirely eliminate police acquiring a warrant for my footage unless I'm a criminal suspect or there was a crime committed in my front yard. Maybe I'd be a bit more forthcoming anyway if a crime happened on my property :P
Maybe your situation is different?
In that case it'd probably be OK to hand over footage.
But the more sinister and intentional motive among law enforcement also exists. The whole thing is a crapshoot and every case is probably different. If you're lucky, a responsible cop is involved. If you're not, it can be really bad times.
In my view, there is no effective difference between having a commercial entity holding your data and having the police hold it.
or you destroy the evidence.. sure, the regime may come after you, but they cant get what they want
Can you claim protection against self-incrimination?
So my take would be that it's not so much the "cloud" part of this problem as it is the "it's now convenient to have lots more cameras" part of it.
Is Amazon allowed to reach into your network and take the video they want?
IANAL, so not sure on recent case law, but last I knew (~2010 Apple encryption case?) the government couldn't compel a private company to change their existing architecture to expose data in unencrypted and/or physically/legally-accessible fashion.
If they already have data security implementation gaps or a tap-susceptible architecture, then it's a different matter. The government serves them a warrant, and they have to comply.
But if Amazon being compelled to reach into a network and retrieve video stored locally is a threat model, that should be mitigated by a tight firewall and non-updating devices...
Half of the IoT privacy gaps are because people don't run network security barriers anymore, and then are shocked when companies abuse them.
To me the concern is not a proper subpoena duces tecum to Larkin, but the lack of specificity that can be ignored going to the cloud provider.
One big issue I have here is that Amazon provided video from cameras inside the home that could not possibly have what the police are after. Not only is this a privacy violation, the police are going to waste time looking at useless video. Seems to me that dumping huge amounts of data on police is an issue of cost to the community.
Wouldn't they be required to prove that it was deliberate though? Rather than an unfortunate accident with a hammer?
If you've never destroyed a tape before but suddenly start doing it after an incident it won't go well for you. Even if you do get off it'll be a painful process.
The only way to do this safely is good old records management - routinely and boringly destroy records on a regular cadence. Preferably automatically. If you become aware it may be subject to a police investigation then take action to preserve it.
If you don't want to do any of this the best option is to just not keep the record at all - don't make a recording.
You aren't the first to think that you can "accidentally" do a thing, snicker about it, and get away with it. It's literally the first thing anyone thinks of, and laws have had thousands of years to get wise to this ancient trick.
If you can make a plausible lie, stick with it, then there isn't much they can do. There absolutely are one neat tricks, and authorities conveniently lose evidence or claim recording devices were malfunctioning regularly. The ruling class can destroy evidence that's under subpoena and claim it wasn't intentional or that they contained no evidence of wrongdoing anyway.
If you don't want to furnish evidence in criminal cases, minimize the number of cameras you set up.
If you don't want them to see it, there isn't much they can do to get beyond "I don't recall" or ever prove that you did in fact recall when you said that.
It absolutely will infuriate them though, and many of these people are petty fragile egomaniacs who will absolutely try to retaliate against any real or perceived slight. Even if they don't have anything else on you they could choose to use the process and the resources of the state to punish you. You have to expect that. They won't get the evidence or destruction of evidence though.
Our system of law is derived from English common law, and in that system, the public is entitled to everybody's evidence. That's part of our social contract. Again: I'm not moralizing, but I will point out that you can't coherently accuse a prosecutor of abusing you when you've gone out of your way to break that contract.
> Our system of law is derived from English common law, and in that system, the public is entitled to everybody's evidence. That's part of our social contract. Again: I'm not moralizing, but I will point out that you can't coherently accuse a prosecutor of abusing you when you've gone out of your way to break that contract.
I certainly can do so because to them, the situation is indistinguishable from somebody who truly does not recall.
Follow up questioning that is quite reasonable in my opinion would be along the lines of "What efforts have you made to find where you stored the recording?" "What is your usual practice with these recordings?" and that's where you trip yourself up and reveal the lie.
Others might be questioned and say that you're fastidious about keeping track of your data, further underscoring that you're keeping something from them.
I don't think this 'maniacal' in the slightest but that is a characteristic you perceive in the process. Remember only one person is being evasive here - you.
It makes the question go away though. And you can use it as many times as you like. That's the beauty of it. Take notes from the ruling class who use this to its fullest advantage.
> Follow up questioning that is quite reasonable in my opinion would be along the lines of "What efforts have you made to find where you stored the recording?"
"Rummaged around looking for it."
> "What is your usual practice with these recordings?"
"Put them with the others and try not to lose them."
> and that's where you trip yourself up and reveal the lie.
I mean if you are singularly dimwitted yes but you've got bigger problems if that's the case.
> I don't think this 'maniacal' in the slightest but that is a characteristic you perceive in the process. Remember only one person is being evasive here - you.
Well you're changing your tune now aren't you? Before you said they were justified because I was lying. But they didn't know that, and therefore they would also believe themselves justified to bully people who are not lying and abuse the power and money of the state to attack people.
The 'ruling class' have something you don't - money and connections.
> I mean if you are singularly dimwitted yes but you've got bigger problems if that's the case.
Honestly this is classic nerdery thinking they're smarter than everyone else when dealing with systems they're not familiar with. That's the worst kind of stupidity. Hubris comes before the fall.
> Well you're changing your tune now aren't you? Before you said they were justified because I was lying.
No I didn't. You're confusing me for someone else. That kind of lack of attention to detail will catch you out if you need to lie to the courts :)
They still get hauled before courts and don't just get off scott free. They get off because they use the right tools. You and I can use some of those tools too. Not all of them, but some of them.
> Honestly this is classic nerdery thinking they're smarter than everyone else when dealing with systems they're not familiar with. That's the worst kind of stupidity. Hubris comes before the fall.
It doesn't matter if you're honest or not, this simply is not something that helps to justify your position. It's just not an argument.
> No I didn't. You're confusing me for someone else.
Ah that's true.
> That kind of lack of attention to detail will catch you out if you need to lie to the courts :)
No it's not, but if you are the type of person to put the same attention to detail in to a court case as you put into posting on anonymous internet forums then I can see why you think it would be.
> "I don't recall where it is", "I must have forgotten to put a USB stick in it", etc. If you can make a plausible lie, stick with it, then there isn't much they can do. There absolutely are one neat tricks"
And where we're at now:
> They still get hauled before courts and don't just get off scott free. They get off because they use the right tools. You and I can use some of those tools too. Not all of them, but some of them.
> No it's not, but if you are the type of person to put the same attention to detail in to a court case as you put into posting on anonymous internet forums then I can see why you think it would be.
I don't think we're disagreeing at this point. You've basically admitted there aren't 'neat tricks' and you'll have to go through a painful experience with the courts which is what everyone has been saying all along. Fighting legal battles isn't a neat trick.
A comment said that if it was not stored on the cloud, he would still be required to hand it over. You then said it would become some huge problem and no easy way to get out of.
The reality is actually if the police somehow did find out you had non-internet video cameras and served you with a subpoena before you realized what they wanted and had time to take prior action, you could dispose of the recordings and respond that you don't have anything. If they wanted to haul you before a court, "I don't recall where the sd card is", "I don't recall when I last recorded something", etc is going to be the end of it. So there absolutely are neat tricks. There's no word twisting and elaborate confabulation of lies to get caught out with, it's not like an episode of law and order. You just say that you don't recall.
If it was you under investigation and particularly if it was a very serious crime then sure they're going to try harder, that wasn't the situation we were discussing though (and in that case depending on what's on the tapes it's still not necessarily the case you'd be better off to be honest).
That sure sounds like you're advocating breaking the law to me. Rich people may be able to get away with it, but that doesn't magically make it OK.
It may sound like it but I'm not. Who knows how one's memory might function in a stressful situation.
> Rich people may be able to get away with it, but that doesn't magically make it OK.
What makes it okay is the ruling class who create and operate the judicial system get away with it, so it's okay for commoners to too.
What I store on my drives is my business. If I choose to delete data I don't want (prior to being asked by police to retain it), that's my business. I certainly won't be providing anyone records on when I create and delete files.
When someone else possesses your data (not even sure ownership matters) they may just share it and if you’re lucky you get an FYI in the mail. You’re not even necessarily a party to the request and you’re banking on a company rep to fight for you.
IANAL but you’d hope fighting the warrant yourself on the interior cameras would be easy but definitely not necessarily the case.
My understanding from the article is that he was, in fact, given 7 days to contest the warrant, and elected not do so because he didn't want to spend money on a lawyer. Which sounds pretty similar to the options he'd have if he had sole possession of the data and the warrant was served directly to him, though of course IANAL.
Third Party Doctrine says that once you give your data to someone else, you lose most of your rights to privacy, control, etc. It's why law enforcement doesn't NEED a warrant to go after so many things like cell phone records, bank account info, and so much more. The fact that so many companies want a warrant is usually a courtesy, not a requirement.
Check out the book "Habeas Data" for the (US) legal reasoning on it.
And to be clear, I think Third Party Doctrine should be wiped out and I should be able to say "you can't use, sell, share, etc my data without EXPLICIT PRIOR permission from me."
One could almost say that aggressive opposition to this exposes a true tyrant.
Some examples are red flag laws which use the civil system to avoid the protections of the criminal system for the government to seize property (beyond a reasonable doubt, right to representation, ex parte protections, etc). Police stopping, questioning, and sometimes seizing guns (property) without any crime being committed and with some of those guns (property) being destroyed. There is of course pushback on things related to data reporting such as registries (Ring is essentially a registry that allowed police to contact the individual in this article), new credit card merchant codes, and data abuses of carry permit information (disclosing names and addresses of gun owner which is basically a map for thieves).
One of the big problems is that many of the coverage of the cases focuses on 2A and the 4A part gets hidden. Of course that makes for a bigger headline for the involved groups. Or they can be in specific industries that a normal person doesn't care about (FFL blanket record copies).
Recent case with more prominent 4th amendment angle. https://crescentcitytimes.com/supreme-court-sides-with-goa-i...
General stuff about searches. https://jslawgroup.com/fourth-amendment-gun-rights/
ATF has been performing entire book copies when they're only supposed to copy data related to specific guns/individuals related to a crime or error.
https://fflconsultinggroup.com/firearms-record-books-atf-for...
The cynic in me thinks that the 2A gets more press because it's easy to find commercial and foreign government support for their organizations. 4A proponents don't have much if anything to sell.
As someone else said, though, the 4A doesn't really give companies and people much to sell to one another in that section of society. They would seriously benefit from password safety products, better choice of hardware, and full-disk encryption, but this group doesn't tend to have a lot of electronics technical chops.
I say this as someone who recreationally shoots long arms and works in a tech/science field. The Venn diagram hardly overlaps. Which is a shame for both sides, I think.
If they did, they could set it up like AWS where you hit a button to spin up a pre-configured image that is considered yours. They don't want to do it this way because they want your data.
Also whether they need a warrant or not seems to be moot since it seems the judges are more than willing to sign them. We would also have to address the lax views on "probable cause" that seem to be rampant with warrant approval.
Under CCPA/CPRA in California, you can request that personal information is removed. There are half a dozen other laws around the US that allow for similar requests in different forms.
Enforcement is still hit or miss. Lobbyists are starting to fight back against the most effective laws, for example:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion...
I'm involved in the fight to strengthen and expand these laws, and overall I'm hopeful for the future.
We didn't get this way overnight so while I'd love my idea to fly immediately, I appreciate people pushing things the right direction.
I think the best solution is to set content to auto-delete (unless flagged) after some period of time. You can't turn over what you don't have.
This is basically a necessity in on-site systems to free up space for additonal recordings anyways. Run a few cameras at decent resolution even at a fairly low framerate and you're looking at a couple TB per month.
I have three cameras recording at a decent resolution and framerate, and together, about two weeks of video takes up less than 32Gb, because most of the time nothing is moving in the fields of view.
It's really not. You can buy off-the-shelf systems from Amazon right now for around $500 that your grandmother could set up and have running without difficulty.
The real problem is the perception that this is a difficult thing for non-techy people to do.
CCPA/CPRA is a minor start, IMHO.
Telecoms need to collect and store usage information (including call detail) to perform billing functions.
As with most such laws, there are loopholes big enough to drive a column of tanks through.
And many other corporations collect and store data both for billing and because they can [mine|analyse|sell] such data.
Just being able to request removal of "data" isn't nearly enough.
Unless there are unambiguous opt-in data collection/retention policies, with clear, concise language about how such data could be used.
What's more, such policies should apply to any and all third parties providing services to corporations with such data.
Further, as another comment[0] in this discussion pointed out, the Third-Party Doctrine should be gutted and a requirement that all government agencies collect data for law enforcement purposes through the issuance of warrants by judges that specify the "probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."[1]
This is (unfortunately) a wide-ranging issue, with a growing number of industries (autos, electronics, "cloud" services, etc., etc., etc.) collecting, storing, using and selling all sorts of PII.
From a privacy perspective, this is a nightmare, the CCPA notwithstanding -- even in California.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35073264
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment
That's a real understatement. When I see how much effort is being put into neutering even the minor protections that has, I wonder how we'll ever get anything like reasonable protection.
The solution is to allow the user to easily and in real-time access and control (port, delete) all of their data or data about them that a company holds.
You won't get an argument about that from me.
But I'd say that not collecting such information in the first place (which will require reversing a variety of perverse incentives) is the best solution.
If the police get a warrant to search my home, they can see what I HAVE in my physical possession at that moment not what I DID have, have DONE, or SAID.
With video (or audio) data, someone could review every action, conversation, item, or facial expression my family has had within sight (or hearing) of the camera.
When someone can construct a complete record of everything that happened, it gets ripe for abuse.
This is what I wish more people could understand about "the cloud".
The moment your private data is sent to a third party, it's game over in terms of having any privacy control on that data (unless it's encrypted with keys only you control and only you can ever access, but that's rare, intentionally).
So many people will argue "Oh but I trust company Foo" without realizing that is completely irrelevant. Company Foo might be trustworty, today. But management can change in the blink of an eye and they now still have your data. Or most importantly, regardless of how honorable management is, they can receive government orders (up to including NSLs) which force them to leak the data no matter what.
It's useful to think of this not as you losing your rights, but you transferring your rights to that third party. The end result is the same, but that emphasizes that someone else has gained what you lost.
But then, the federal government would have to acknowledge that Tik Tok is just a different nation state doing what American companies are doing...
Shameless plug -> https://nbailey.ca/post/nvr/
But it's also important to only record what you absolutely must. I think putting CCTV cameras inside your house is insane, and putting up cameras in any "private" outdoor area should likewise be avoided. Once the data exists, somebody will want it eventually.
Here’s a good starting point: https://ipcamtalk.com/threads/best-current-recommended-camer...
I'm very sympathetic to this. However, I have cameras inside my house. The reason is that there's no way to cover the outside of my house in an effective manner without also recording what's happening on the sidewalk or in my neighbor's yards.
But the cameras are hardwired and no video leaves my premises, so that becomes an acceptable risk for me. The video isn't kept for all that long, so even if someone has a warrant, they can't get a long history of video.
And it proved useful in my break-in, because I could see exactly what the burglar took.
It limits the choices, and they tend to be a bit pricier, but the tradeoff seemed reasonable.
Annecdata - but people I know who have cctv around their home store for as long as possible, limited only by the storage size availiable - every motion from a car / person / tree blowing through the trees - years of recordings.
People are selecting 180 days on Ring as the retention period (if they could select longer they probably would), the default is 60 days.
What realistic use case am I missing that would require 60 days let alone, 180?
Or without even going on vacation I had an expensive DLSR camera stolen and didn’t realize it for 2 months when I went to take it out of its case. Assuming I had a security camera in that room 180 days would have been useful.
There's a great HomeBridge plugin which enables HomeKit Secure Video on my UniFi Protect cameras: https://github.com/hjdhjd/homebridge-unifi-protect
Used to use HKSV, but I’m running a Unifi Protect setup these days. Everything records locally to my NVR with a 30 day retention policy. No cloud. Honestly it’s been more reliable too. Downside is I spend a decent amount of time running Ethernet lines.
UI’s stuff works so well with the Apple ecosystem (mainly thinking ATV and iOS apps) that I haven’t even bothered to bridge the setup into HomeKit yet.
https://github.com/koush/scrypted extends HKSV to a lot more cameras.
I'm using it with an Amcrest AD410. I have an SD card in the AD410 to record 24/7, then anything with detected motion is also recorded by Scrypted to my NAS as well as uploaded via HKSV to Apple.
HKSV is pretty aggressive about what it's willing to keep, so I can go back to my NAS if HKSV trimmed a clip too aggressively, and if even motion wasn't detected, I've always got the SD card I can go to.
My PC's cloud backup is like this: It is stored in their cloud, but the provider cannot decrypt the data. Only I have the key.
Why should Ring or other such companies actually require access to the video? Only I should have access to the contents.
It is great that the people who had their video data provided to law enforcement were notified after the fact in this situation. I wonder how many people never find out due to national security letters not allowing it.
[1]https://www.vice.com/en/article/mb88za/amazon-requires-polic...
There's an annoying thought. Amazon could be providing a live feed of every ring device directly to an aggregated intelligence data center, while being legally prevented from revealing that fact by a national security letter. Seems inevitable, and anybody buying a ring device should assume it as likely.
Imagine the boon of having indexed facial, gait and voice recognition feeds recorded and stored for eternity covering a significant portion of residential and business locations.
Probably not. Great effort is made to hide the use if NSLs. Instead, they engage in "parallel construction" -- reverse engineering a different way of getting the evidence they've collected, so they can use the evidence in court without revealing the NSL.
The initial outlay is a bit more expensive but the setup is rock solid, provides tons of network analytics, has smart lights paired next to the cameras, and continues to work even when my ISP has issues. I've _voluntarily_ given footage to the police a couple of times but it feels much better when the entire system is within my control, sitting in my office.
[1] https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/115012240067-UniFi-Net...
If judges in your area are giving those out like candy then you've got a problem, whether you have security cameras or not.
I'm a bit miffed that the app is trying to sell cloud storage, but for now a full cheap local setup is still possible.
(For a serious setup I'd of course opt for something more serious).
Also what are some good 4k Wi-Fi cameras that work with Synology?
I've never once seen someone in my friend & family circle achieve some positive outcome in their own household by having more surveillance around it. The only thing I observe is increased anxiety when squirrels or FedEx trigger push notifications to phones.
My system isn't managed by any companies, so nobody can be all sneaky about getting footage. But I could still provide that footage to the cops when needed. It's the best of both worlds.
I should note that I have no cameras that can see any public space. They only record my private areas. I have too much respect for my neighbors to invade their privacy.
I think that the reason why they are taking this more seriously, particularly considering my monetary loss was relatively low, is because of the way the break in happened.
It was very violent. The burglar had tried breaking my door open with a crowbar (or similar tool), a power tool that the police think was a saws-all, and when those methods failed, just resorted to kicking the door repeatedly until the doorframe itself broke. I have no idea why he didn't just break a window instead of going to all that effort.
I believe the police interest is not really because of the theft, but because of the method of entry. It was more like a home invasion you see in the movies.
But that's all speculation. The cops tell me nothing, other than this was obviously not a random burglary. I was targeted specifically.
The burglar was covered head to toe, so the video doesn't provide for readily identifying him. But there were other things that the camera incidentally picked up that points a finger to a particular neighbor.
So, for me, the video did something very important: it clearly told me that however this all shakes out, it's too risky to stay where I am and I need to move. That knowledge alone was worth the surveillance system.
I thought this was worth mentioning -- the burglar beelined for the closet in one of the bedrooms. I mentioned to the cop that I found that strange, as if he was looking for something specific.
The cop said it's not strange at all, that burglars usually do that because people tend to keep their really valuable stuff in their bedrooms. The lesson I took from that is don't keep your really valuable stuff in your bedroom.
Just a little public service announcement.
I have a cat. Someone needs to take care of it when I travel. A smart camera and smart lock let me know if someone came to my house to give the cat food. Before that, twice, my cat went 24-48 hours without food because the designated caregiver dropped the ball.
Why? Obviously that's your choice, but there's nothing inherently evil about a "smart home". The main issue is that some devices require a cloud connection, but I'm getting rid of those.
I installed cameras after someone got inside our fenced in backyard and stole a bike. It would have been great to have some evidence or even a notification that something had happened – this was at the height of COVID so we were not even going out, took me a week to notice the missing bike. Cameras are configured to only turn on in a schedule - so late at night and early morning; I can also manually turn on if we are out for an extended period. I don't do 24/7 monitoring precisely because of the useless notifications.
Not so sure. If a house is designed to have as much surveillance capability and access points to gain as much info on you as possible - like if Facebook were to design a house to collect user info on the inhabitants - that would absolutely be “evil” in many peoples eyes.
The real question is do all these “smart” devices actually improve people’s well being? Or is it all marketing magic bullshit with negligible end- user benefits at the expense of more privacy invasions?
I don’t want my house cooperating with big brother, and that’s what many smart devices seem more than willing to do.
These companies are encouraging fear and paranoia to sell their products, and there is no guarantee using said products will deter criminals, or ensure that they are caught and punished even if you have clear video evidence.
This whole camera craze is built on a bunch of hot air. Ditch the cameras and stop living in fear.
I believe that was the intent of the GP's question: Why have indoor cameras?
Sometimes they fight over food (automated feeder) and one doesn't get fed. But it's hard to tell if they're meowing at us because they were bullied out of food, or because they know we are softies and will feed them if they meow enough. We can check the feeder footage and see who got fed.
One of them is potty-shy, and about once every 3-6 months stops using the litter box and starts using obscure corners of the basement until we can coax him back to using the litter box. We check the footage every couple days to make sure he's using litter boxes.
For a software-oriented site, I'm baffled at how obtuse users can be. A lot of the negativity I'm seeing is along the lines of "I have no use for an indoor camera, therefor anyone who uses them is dumb." There are lots of legit uses (if you think about it for more than 2 seconds), and not all of us want provide the police with indoor footage of our cats shitting.
Around the time the bait disappeared, the police were pursuing a suspect from house to house at 2am. If it was the same person, and I had proof, stealing from parked cars would be the least of anyone's concern.
What are the odds your local police are going to take your package theft footage and actually pursue the thief? Even for more serious crimes, it's questionable whether they will seek (or use) camera evidence, or be successful if they do. I know of an armed robbery attempt that occurred close to home, and to my knowledge no inquiries were made regarding camera evidence (I was a witness).
I can think of plenty of concrete uses for surveillance cameras, sure, but I'd say the costs vastly outweigh the benefits for most people using them today.
Check out some online social (fearmongering) sites like Nextdoor some time - it's nothing but busybodies speculating that the person parked on the street is casing their house or stealing packages. Quick, report them to the cops.
Oops. The local cops no longer accept 'suspicious person or vehicle' reports unless there is a crime in progress.
Round these parts you would return to your car and the window would be smashed.
> Check out ... sites like Nextdoor some time
Highly reccomended - but dont go alone, take a support person with you to pull you back to reality after a few minutes, it is a truly horrific place.
Living in the inner city where property crime is rampant might make you change your mind. A dashcam was the star of a legal case I was in, and our outdoor cameras have caught multiple yard prowlers. Police don't do anything about it, of course, but at least I can notify my neighbors with actual evidence.
but saying it’s worth having cameras just so your neighbors believe you isn’t really justifying them. If anything, you further proved how pointless and ineffectual they are. I’d rather save that money.
At multiple locations and every area of the price spectrum, from indies to bigcorps, I have had my rights and privacy violated. So I keep a camera so I can know about it.
At 2 locations now I have used footage to break my lease early with zero penalty. Never got actual charges pressed against anyone but just with that it has paid for itself multiple times over.
Oh, come on. Go install a Nest or Ring for a week and see how much you come to rely on it. "Do I need to answer the door or is it just girl scouts selling cookies?" "Do I have time for coffee or should I head home to grab the package?" You can chat with the folks at the door! You can say thank you to the Grubhub driver as they drop the meal. You can see what the neighbor's cats are doing on your doorstep in the middle of the night. You can point one into your backyard trivially and see if it's the rabbits eating your leeks.
I mean, no, you don't "need" this, just like you don't need a dishwasher. But don't pretend it's just about paranoia, it's a fun tool for the modern era.
(Conversely, the folks here arguing about the terrible abuses possible with third party access to this data about girl scouts and cats are the ones who seem maybe a little paranoid.)
I’d probably like finer control over my air con so that it automates to on when the solar is producing enough electricity to cover it, but otherwise I just don’t really get it.
But I still have a front door to interact with the rest of society, and automating (even partially) my interaction with all the junk and people that need to use it straight up saves me time. It's great.
The doorbell and security camera stuff do seem to be a cultural difference between the US and where I live though; I don’t have strangers routinely come to my front door and don’t really have security concerns that aren’t solved by locking my front door.
A couple of my friends have smart doorbells but none that I know of use security cameras at home.
curtain twitcher
someone who is very interested in what their neighbours (= people who live near them) are doing and tries to find out by looking out of the window without being seen:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/curtain-...
Another case that is valid is for very old people that share the video with their family. A few months ago a very old (~ 100) lady that I know died and her only daughter, one continent away, found out by checking the camera. The alternative would be for neighbors to call the police days later for not seeing her, but that is undesirable.
Got the kid to a sleep doctor and cleaned (and eventually replaced) the carpet. Got rid of the cameras.
It would have been embarrassing at least if anyone got that footage. Glad it was all local storage.
Given all the instances of government agencies abusing their power to target political enemies of the current administration; I wonder how reasonable such an assumption really is.
If my footage can help catch a burglar or vandal in my neighborhood I've made the whole community a bit better. But I already live in a very safe area. All I've caught so far are some possums, cats, squirrels, and wasps.
But I also see when packages get delivered, etc.
If I'm ever not OK with it I can just replace the cameras with any PoE alternative. My house is wired to be flexible.
If the courts decide there's anything (physical or digital) law enforcement wants/needs, you have to turn it over or face jail[0][3] and/or fines. That's nothing new. Nor is it likely to change anytime soon.
However, not being able to comply (e.g., you don't actually have such data) is a defense for contempt of court. As such, short-term retention policies and secure deletion methods would be preferred.
Perhaps also with a 'canary'[2] as well, that will delete all data if some key/setting/file isn't updated within a specific period of time. Unless one has been ordered by the court (or some law on the books to retain data), this is perfectly legal.
[0] Not prison. Contempt of court[1] means jail, not prison.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_court#United_State...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary -- Not exactly this (as it affects the retention/deletion of personal data rather than informing others of government involvement), but a similar idea.
[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/jail-vs-prison...
Edit: Corrected punctuation.
Sorry for the late reply, but the whole point is to "lose" (i.e., delete) such data if a canary expires. With a canary, no action is required to delete such data. Rather renewing such a canary stops the deletion of data.
If the cops want to catch a thief that ran away on your street and ask for your camera footage, being in control of the video files means you could send them the outside footage and pretend you don't have have cameras inside. With a cloud provider, they will just send everything and not give a fuck.
You: Okay
Police: ...so we're going to need all the footage from inside your home
You: Wait wha—
Judge: Sure, I'll sign a warrant for this. That sounds perfectly reasonable.
Police: Hey can we get a warrant for all the Ring cameras on this street. Oh and we know for a fact that there's a guy with more exterior cameras who has refused to share footage with us.
Judge: Sure, I'll sign that warrant. Nobody would be dumb enough to put Ring cameras in their house.
Guy who is that dumb: I'm not going to fight the warrant even though I got a letter saying I can totally prevent my interior cameras from being included in the data Ring turns over.
1. Technology companies as data creators should have the responsibility of clearly denoting the ownership of the data they create.
2. Data created as a product or derivative of something a user owns should be given the option to be owned by the same user.
3. Rights for data owned by a user should be akin to physical ownership and stewardship, including limited scope of warrant by law enforcement, etc. (Why would we limit the ability for a police officer to search your home, but not the video footage you installed of the same?)
4. Technical implementation including but not limited to advanced cryptography should NEVER be disallowed or restricted by the owners of data.
Ring gave him a chance to challenge the warrant but decided not to. He might've just had to write Ring a letter, though he says in the article he thought he'd need a lawyer. If he was the subject of the warrant directly then he'd need to deal with the court directly, probably requiring the help of a lawyer. Ring deals with warrants all the time though, so they are probably a good resource for challenging these kinds of things.
...
You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.
1984, George Orwell
Recall campaigns for judges exist in a lot of American jurisdictions. Such is warranted here. If it’s recognized that rubber-stamping Ring requests can and has lead to a recall being presented to voters, judges will in general take more care to consider the request in the future.
Unfortunately DIY security cameras are usually based on old hardware and lack the AI goodies of new systems (e.g. semantic event detection).
Did he volunteer it to them initially, or to someone else? Is he part of a ring neighborhood thing? (They have a function to offer to share footage with your neighbors). Or did the police simply throw out the dragnet and look to see if Ring had any customers in the area? I suspect it's one of the first two options.
In such a case, you're better off not offering your information to begin with (unfortunately), and you'd likely be okay with a Ring as long as you didn't advertise its existence online. You'd be better off still with a non-cloud solution that, while subject to subpoena-or-something, flies under the radar even more.
The closest thing that comes to mind is to use a unique AES key for every chunk of 5 minutes or so, and then encrypt those keys with an asymmetric cipher with the private key secured off-site somewhere, which could selectively decrypt some of the AES keys. But that could be an inconveniently long list of keys for, say, 10 video feeds over several days.
At least in some states¹ in the USA, police cannot compel you to give up a password².
¹ https://www.reuters.com/business/legal/us-supreme-court-nixe...
https://goldsteinmehta.com/blog/limits-on-federal-civil-cont....
People should absolutely familiarize themselves with the laws surrounding this in their jurisdiction even if they're doing nothing wrong - legitimately forgetting a password and defiantly refusing to share it are often treated the same way by the criminal justice system.
They drew this conclusion from a court order being served upon people who had selected "record everything" when they set up their surveillence camera?
People with different priorities buy different hardware that's more complicated to set up and more expensive but keeps the sensitive data local.
In my experience they know exactly how they work, they want to record everything that happens in the street infront of their house - that is litterally what happens.
Is ring etc really much more of a privacy nightmare than any other cctv? Given the wide spread use, it is easier for police to do a blanket request, but back in ye olde days the officer would stand there, look around and see all the cameras and go make requests where they saw one.
End result is identical, its the same thing with a few extra steps.
If nothing else, at least then it would be obvious when you're being watched, so you wouldn't have to be on guard every moment.
Everyone I know who owns a Ring does. They don't care. Convenience always wins. People who put privacy and related rights above convenience are the exception.
> Privacy advocates point out that the police don’t have unfettered authority in demanding footage: They need to get a warrant from a judge...
Sounds like these "privacy advocates" are extremely naive; most judges will sign anything the police put on their desks.
The problem with this notion of ownership is that it's not compatible with the idea of trading assets in a typical traditional market like all that existed before the internet was built
We need to setup a camera for insurance purpose in my mum's house in France after multiple burglaries but I absolutely do not want to give access to a third party.
You can battery-back it with a cheap UPS to cover this video server, the Power-over-Ethernet switch via Cat-6 cabling to your private video cameras.
No more hassle. No more monthly fee. And free access from your cellphone.
I think for most neighborhoods and people they seem needless, but perhaps I'm a bit too naive.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure if something did happen, I'd wish I had footage. And maybe I'd go out and buy cameras. But then, I've watched my brother-in-law's Ring footage of his catalytic converter being stolen from his Prius. On 3 separate occasions. Gotten angry, thought about what I'd do if I happened upon these scumbags. And yet, that's all the footage does; makes you angrier.
I had to dig really hard to find a link to github (https://github.com/ispysoftware/iSpy) but I get the impression from the README and lack of activity that this repo was superceded by another product from the same company, and that appears to be what the main website is marketing for download/payment. And according to the license file, some rather important bits of it are not open source at all.
If you put something in someone else's desk drawer, is it really yours alone to access?
Self hosting has become much easier than 10-20 years ago.
Not saying it's not wildly inconvenient, but he could if he wanted to.
I should add, though, that my cameras only cover the the external doors and windows. There are no cameras, say, in the bathroom, covering my bed, etc. My surveillance goal is simply to record anyone entering and leaving while I'm not home.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/27/politics/house-vote-fisa/inde...
Snicker. I love when people the media spreads false information. Democrats have been all about monitoring your every move, just as Republicans. I hate politics. How about we all become Libertarians please. Less government, less in our business.
Why would anyone put camera's in their home? This is lunacy. Outside, I can understand.
I thought so too at first glance. But the article explains, that they only come on when the security system is turned on. i.e. when one leaves the house. I could see investigating a burglary when at work, for example. Would not send it to the cloud, but can see the logic otherwise.
Who can access it? Anyone with an internet connection that can reach shodan.io.