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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

I wish more people that wanted cameras would invest in systems that store all recordings locally. Video recordings can be very important, personal, and/or important in criminal investigations.

If you own the camera and put it on your property, please don't allow all recordings to be sent to a emote server you have no control over. And seriously please font leave the camera accessible to the public internet 24/7, it may be convenient but its also begging for trouble.

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Storing CCTV footage on-prem is at odds with preserving said footage. It’s usually easier for an intruder to destroy or steal the physical storage device on site compared to gaining access to an off-site storage device in an unknown or practically inaccessible location. This is especially true for residential properties.

Do you hide it in a wall or in an attic somewhere?

If we're considering the adversaries here as both a centralized provider for recording access and storage, and the intruder who might look for a DVR and destroy it, then it's reasonable to want a way to decentralize all copies of the data and also not want untrusted individuals from having access to the decentralized copies. The argument GP provided wasn't that off-site storage was bad, but that off-site storage in a SaaS platform that is easily identified as a destination to subpoena by virtue of seeing the Ring brandname on the doorbell and/or cameras is risky and in their opinion undesirable.

It really depends on your threat model, like anything else with privacy and security. Storing the tapes out of site would probably work, honestly on-prem is so uncommon that I'd expect any intruder to think the cameras are connected to an online service anyway.

If I wanted to get clever I'd have a dummy setup of some kind. Stash a few real enough looking and literally label it "cameras". I'm not worried about defeating Danny Ocean here, I'd be surprised if an intruder even looked for the storage system let alone would recognize it.

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