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Comment by gilfoy | Hacker News Reader

I commented on a similar post earlier, but my entire neighborhood, hundreds of houses, came with them preinstalled. Can’t even leave my house without being surveilled.

Some people have the setting on where it starts announcing stuff any time it sees a person, which it does all the way to the sidewalk. So you go on a walk and get yelled at through a super shitty speaker several times.

And it’s about as dystopian as you can imagine with people posting recordings constantly on the neighborhood Facebook group and arguing.

I swapped to HomeKit secure video because of no additional subscription, included in the iCloud one I’m paying anyway. Allegedly end to end encrypted too.

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> came with them preinstalled

That's concerning. Now we have to worry about spyware coming pre installed on houses. I wonder how much the developers got paid to install those?

I doubt the developer was paid, although I bet they get the hardware for free.

The data shows people like video doorbell. If the developer has to install a dumb one, then they would benefit by installing video doorbells.

I had one neighbor with the announcement thing but they eventually turned it off. No illusions that it’s not still recording. But how horribly hostile to have that on, right? No accounting for taste, I guess. I’ll continue staying off nextdoor and the rest and keeping my camera feeds to myself…

> So you go on a walk and get yelled at through a super shitty speaker several times.

I would love to see legislation banning this kind of automated harassment.

Never done it, but on late night walks home I've imagined banging on the doors of the houses with these just to inform them I got the message.

The police chumminess is super dystopian. I definitely went with E2E encrypted cameras because I also think it's so crazy people just hand all that data over without realizing how powerful it is and how much personal privacy they are throwing out the window.

E2E encryption but what are the ends? If one is your camera and the other is a cloud service then you aren't really protecting anything.

Apple at least claims to not have keys for their E2EE, such as when you turn on Advanced Protection (or whatever it’s called) it has this whole spiel about how screwed you are if you lose your recovery ability

You could additionally use encryption at rest where the key is only ever on the client.

Honestly, these cameras don’t solve anything or provide any real utility and essentially represent a waste of money and resources.

There are quite a few videos online where it has helped prove self defense and fraudulent statements by cops.

Who knows how long that utility lasts with cheap video editing on the horizon.

Smartphone?

There are quite a few videos online of a lot of things that I’ll never encounter. Buying a doorbell camera for three figures of dollars plus potential cloud storage/service fees doesn’t seem like financially appropriate response to me.

What about smartphones? They have also exposed a ton of fraud by cops.

They’re not pointed at the front door all the time, so not very useful for cops breaking in. And in any case, cops will have access to their bodycam videos for their side, which you may or may not get access to. Best to have as much data that you have access to for your defense.

I think that the statistical risk of having the cops unlawfully break in to your house is extremely low, and that incidents of it happening on video/social media/the news greatly over-reports that risk.

I’d certainly like to have surveillance if that were to happen to me but I think the likelihood is extremely low, to the point where I’m pretty sure tossing money at the problem will be a waste.

One time the city wanted my neighbor to pay for a new trash can, but I had a video of the trash truck swallowing it lol.

It’s mostly just convenience though. Neighbor kid rings my doorbell and it tells me who is there. Tells me when I have a package. Helped me recover my cat that escaped. One time a huge buck came on my porch to eat some flowers that was pretty cool, bro had no business being that far from the woods lol. My kids can talk to their friends through it if they ring the bell when we’re not home.

I bet the trash can cost less than the camera.

They’re about the same

What sort of stuff does it say?

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