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Comment by mikkupikku | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a fairly impractical thing to map unless you're getting volunteers to walk up to and inspect people's front doors. I know there is an app for a sort of gamified version of this where people take tasks to verify street signs or even how many stories a building has, I used that app for a while, but doorbell mapping seems a lot leas casual.

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If I can see them, they can see me. No need to walk onto anyone's property, the whole point (for me at least) is to map things that surveil public spaces

It's more casual than surveying e.g. addresses that may be hard to see if the building is recessed, but you'd still want to capture it because someone will want to route there sooner or later. Not so for cameras that only capture own property

StreetComplete has a "things" overlay that makes it very quick to add these at the position of a front door

Maybe less common in America, but in Europe it's not uncommon to have multiple people going around town delivering various things to your mailbox: a postman for letters, some poor student delivering grocery store brochures once a week, somebody delivering the local newspaper at the break of dawn, somebody else delivering the local church newspaper once a month, etc. And all of them are going door to door. If just one of them is an openstreetmap fan you quickly have all doorbell cameras in their delivery district mapped

To expand on this - Evri, DPD, and my Postie all come regularly to the door and are the same person nearly every time for me - and have been for years. Amazon, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. are irregular and often different people.

Then the leaflet drop guys are maybe three different people.

Then there is food delivery, which is rare (because we rarely order) bit still another group of people.

Oh and then there are the Jehovah's witnesses.

You don't need to walk up: 1. You can do wardriving and identify them by MAC address. 2. You can use object recognition on google street view photos or your own photos while you're wardriving.

Wouldn't identifying them via MAC address be very inaccurate, as you can't pinpoint them to a specific house very easily?

Would cameras like these emit any sort of IR light or anything that might be detected from a distance?

Object recognition would depend on them being very obvious from the outside - which Rings do appear to be (I've never seen one in person) but I imagine there will be less-obvious options soon enough, if there isn't already.

War driving will give you multiple sightings + signal strength, you can triangulate. https://wigle.net/

Walk up to door with stack of papers with a stock photo of a puppy on it that says lost puppy. Check if there's a camera. If the owner comes outside, ask them if they have seen this puppy.

And then at door 125,000 you finally reach the home of the puppy that’s in the stock photo you printed. And they say “Why yes, we have seen this puppy. How did you know??”

So use one that you know to now be dead.

Well this is taking a dark turn

We live in the age of generative AI.. can't you just use one of those instead?

See https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/ for some ideas!

"That puppy is an AI fake, you must be casing the neighborhood."

And then remember you live in America and you get shot for walking on someone's property.

Joking, a little, but seriously: the culture in the US has rotted to such an insane degree. Not only are we not friends with our neighbors, I'm actually scared to talk to them!

I participate in Nextdoor.com because of a community group I work with.

The fear in people’s hearts is insane. One memorable one was a Little boy who decided to sell candy bars. I knew the kid from my son’s school. Some psycho followed him for a few hours, tracked down to his home and called the sales tax authorities and the city clerk as he didn’t have a peddler permit. She documented her “investigation”, complete with photos.

Can you share more? Why was this person upset with kids selling candies?

They dont have any better to do. When I was living in south bay (nice suburb area) during short contract role the " nextdoor nanny state stay at home drunk soccer moms " would record out the front window, call the police in anyone POC, keep notes of what time you car leave and join

its like HOA mental illness. Different people had chased my amazon driver with a phone accusing them of being illegal, calling police for while I was cooking indian food... Ide rather have the crime in the city in contrast to this nonsense

I genuinely believe if I had dog at the time they would had poisoned it for barking once

> Why was this person upset with kids selling candies?

Because they didn't "follow the rules" or whatever. You see this personality type all up and down HN but usually not so extreme as to call the city about a lemonade stand or whatever.

The city clerk is also the same type of evil. They should have told that person there weren't resources available to enforce or some other lie.

Some people are psychopaths when people ring their doorbell.

apparently Ring LLC has their own OUI [0]. I wonder if you could wardrive around and identify cameras by their MAC address

[0] https://maclookup.app/vendors/ring-llc

Yes

That's fun. If you have an account you can use https://wigle.net/mapsearch to search for bluetooth devices with that prefix from other people's wardrives. There are definitely some results coming up. A wildcard search for bluetooth devices named "Ring %" also seems to work

A lot of doorbell cameras use infrared for night vision and motion detection. You could probably just drive down a street at night with a camera tuned to show infrared and they would all be bright beacons.

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