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Comment by unlisted7347 | Hacker News Reader

Feels like people don't care about privacy that much. Last time I told my exgf about CCTV cameras in public places and how they shouldn't be connected to a network but rather have internal storage to fit a reasonable length of recordings. Since, live CCTVs never prevent any criminal activity and they possess great threat of surveillance by state or bad actors who may get access to them.

So, she called me paranoid.

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Local storage can go bad, and it also adds cost to the camera. But the most important reason you need streaming to a DVR is that the criminal could steal the camera and if it’s only using local storage, now your evidence is gone.

I do get the concern about general surveillance, but that’s not an argument your insurance company is going to accept.

Local storage is not built into every camera but locally centralized.

"Locally centralized" is a new one for me

I mean I'd rather CCTV footage stays local to the location it's in (a secured security room with a limited data retention policy), but I get why it's networked, because that way it can scale up better. More cameras etc.

And while CCTV is for solving crime or at the very least proving to the insurance company that something did in fact happen, at the same time they're a known deterrent, hence fake cameras. There's plenty of shops that have a screen when you come in to show you that you're being recorded, which again works as a deterrent.

Yeah, but compared to few years ago things have changed for better, i see a lot of communities dedicated to privacy nowadays, a lot of more resources and content is out there now.

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