If the authorities come knocking with a warrant, or frankly, even a nicely-worded sensible request, sure, have at it. But ain't nobody accessing the footage unnoticed and without my approval.
I'm sure the cops who trashed Afroman's place would have loved that ability.
However, I do not intend to make it easy to just grab my footage along with any other that can be found, without at least asking.
My problem is that the area around my front door where the doorbell is installed is solid timber, so it's not just a simple ethernet drop. I'm honestly not even sure how the builders ran the existing wire to that location. Maybe my only option is to add a second backup camera in a location where an ethernet install is easier.
Worst part was just running ethernet to the spots where the cameras needed to go (only crawlspace access) but nice not having to charge batteries and even nicer knowing i'm not sending video to netgear anymore.
If I had of had a webcam on my front door a few weeks ago I would have been able to identify the thieves that broke into my car and stole a bunch of stuff whilst I was asleep.
Since then I have "cammed" up, but I use my own hard wired network and connected to a Pi5 with a Hailo8 chip running frigate.
No third party apps, just the fun of more stuff on the network. I do run a Cloudflare tunnel on the PI so that I can connect to Frigate from anywhere when I get alerts.
But basically, it's me and only me accessing the content of those cameras. However I do plan to configure Frigate to upload the alerts and detections into S3 with a three month lifecycle.
I assume some of the concern around this is that folks don't want to live in a panopticon. If that's your objection, I can't really help with that. On the other hand, if your objection is that you don't want a backdoor built into your video doorbell (even one that you must opt into), I'm happy to report that there are good non-Ring options.
I switched to a Reolink video doorbell, and it has decent support for local-only operation. It has the ability to save footage to a local micro SD card, and if you're worried about someone stealing the entire doorbell and losing your footage, it also supports RTSP (a common IP camera protocol). You can even have it upload footage to a FTP server on a schedule. It also supports PoE if you're lucky enough to have ethernet at your doorbell, or don't mind doing the drop yourself.
Set up does require an app, but you don't need to use the app after that. Push notifs also require egress, but, iiuc, this is mostly because of how push notifications work. Push does NOT require a paid subscription.
I personally just use the app, but it's nice knowing that if Reolink tried to pull a fast one, I could just block egress on my VLAN and use it locally.
If you'd rather just go completely app-less, I imagine a dumb doorbell paired with an IP camera and a local ZoneMinder [1] install would provide most of the benefits of something like Ring. Of course, the tradeoff is you now have a second job being sys admin of your homelab. Pick your poison, I guess.
If someone is in my house tapped into the network, cameras are the least of my problems.