Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash
theverge.com
theverge.com
That doesn’t sound like “we’re cancelling this because our customers let us know loud and clear that they were ethically against this”. If the only thing keeping them from doing this is time and money, what guarantee do we have that they won’t do it again if time and money allow?
They initially partnered with Flock because they thought this would be a feature people would want. They literally bought a crazy expensive Super Bowl ad to show it off.
Turns out people didn't. So now they're not doing it.
Amazon's only interest is to make money.
And they make more money when they're on the right side of whatever gov du jour is running America.
You must be a company.
That's...not unusual.
I would strongly to advise you to assume companies are extremely willing to lie in press releases.
It’s like when you don’t like someone’s friends but you’re not actually going to say that out loud. Instead you say “I'm just too tired to go out” — it’s a “diplomatic out.” Yes it’s a lie at face value but you leave people with their dignity while simultaneously signal your intent. Your friend, who presumably has social skills, picks up the subtext and you successfully communicate two layers of meaning with one sentence.
Press releases are the same thing.
Having social skills means also being able to distinguish between innocent nicer phrase, outright enabling and being coconspirator.
Stop lying. You’re hurting the friendship. If you care about the person, eventually you’ll have to be an adult and explain why you’re not comfortable with the third person.
Talking in private is different where we are bluntly truthful.
This is how we talk in public.
It’s like doing steganography[1] on language. I can pass a secret message to my friend plainly in front of someone else using subtext.
And it’s not even contrived most of the time. Sometimes someone inadvertently leaks out subtext by their posture or tone and an observant person can read that the person is uncomfortable or comfortable.
And press releases are the same way. There is a literal message but often times there is subtext. They can’t say the subtext literally because it is inherently hurtful and burns a bridge (just like me saying “this guy sucks let’s leave”) so you read between the lines.
Outright lying in press releases is different. That’s a company saying “AI caused our company to fail” but actually you invested in the wrong product and don’t want to admit it.
2. saying false things (not bad things per se) could be expensive
Flock may well have agreed on a break to the contract but stipulated that Flock had to agree to the wording of the press statement and Amazon was not going to disparage Flock yadda yadda.
"Thanks! How sweet! You're laid off."
And it's largely legal as long as it doesn't affect their stock price too much in either direction.
The ethical part you mentioned is still true.
Certainly sounds like "We have the integration and we successfully funneled test videos off of internal Ring cameras to Flock".
It doesn't say for whom. That could easily be the legal and marketing department to cover the backlash
[0] https://ui.com/
Edit, update link.
i used to own extensive unifi equipment for my home network, 8 access points, 2 switches, gateway, a couple cams, etc… it was amazing, the initial setup, the interoperability, the stability and maintenance was absolutely painless. i will loudly sing them praises for those things, but i started noticing them trying to jam cloud features and subscriptions behind paywalls deeper into the integration, it’s pretty obvious that its only a matter of time before they enshitify with pay-for-features paywalled behind subscriptions, cloud first, etc…
keep that in mind before you dive headfirst. their stuff was perfect in that stability sweet spot of better than small office but not quite enterprise tier local only configurations, but i personally dipped as soon as i saw what i think is the writing in the wall.
i love their stuff, genuinely i did, but if the goal is to move further away from subscriptions and cloud-first, be very cautious of their current trajectory.
Yes I'm still bitter.
This makes me wonder if it's inevitable for every hardware/software provider to be tempted by the candy now. Makes me ask myself if I could even resist it if I had a customer base with sunk costs who I could take advantage of. My feeling is that I could resist it, on principle, but most people wouldn't. And this is leaving out pressure from investors.
So such a company selling these solutions as locally run widgets - which we understand are under not just pressure to increase revenue, but also relentless pressure from governments to share their data - would definitely need to be completely self-funded, immediately profitable, and the solutions they sold would have to be permanent and not susceptible to any external market or government forces.
Zero updates and zero tracking of installations would be the goal.
[edit] but this is also not that hard. All the company needs to provide is a piece of software that stitches together existing hardware. The only updates would be when hardware updates, and those would be included in the price. If "NEVER CLOUD" was the company's entire corporate identity, then preserving that ethos would be a mandate.
[edit2] nevercloud.com is currently on sale for $8350. I'd suggest building the prime directive into the name, but that much money has better uses.
I have a unvr and protect and nothing runs through their portal, I connect directly to the ip address of the unvr. You can cut internet access off on the vlan and everything works fine.
They're the only subscription things I've seen if you have your own controller.
I haven't seen that writing on the wall yet, Unifi are one of a select few tech companies I trust.
Also fwiw, if someone is willing to spin up a Windows VM or are running that stack anyway than Blue Iris is probably the default contender for local security software, well polished. I know a few people who still keep a single remaining W10 with GPU passthrough install just for that, not even for games anymore where Linux has gotten good enough in the last few years.
All of this though benefits a lot from already having some sort of homelab and/or self-hosted stack. If you do then the marginal investment may be pretty minimal and value quite high as you use it for a lot of other stuff. If starting from scratch it's a lot more of a haul which of course is precisely why a lot of people use other solutions.
* Apple says it’s end-to-end encrypted. I assume, maybe incorrectly, that they can’t view it.
https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/icloud-homekit-secure...
Here's what I found.
If you don't want to pay a lot, there's something called "wansview" which is a white-label to a number of cheap amazon cameras (sub $20). You can do ONVIF and RTSP on any of the wansview firmwared devices and then knock them off the internet to keep it local.
Most recommendations of cameras for things like home assistant point to things at rolls-royce prices (~sometimes 20x the cost of the cheap consumer ones).
You shouldn't have to pony up a 2,000% markup for the feature "has tcp port open for rtsp"
Anyway, here's some wansview firmwared cameras
https://amazon.com/dp/B0CBBT5RMP $14
https://amazon.com/dp/B07QKXM2D3 $18
https://amazon.com/dp/B0B1T8T1WD $17
https://amazon.com/dp/B0DN1W3SWM $12.5
There's probably more
You can do on-device storage and stream over network ... no cloud subscription needed and no huge price tag.
If you're looking for others, you don't even need to buy the camera and check. Just scroll through the marketing jpegs on the amazon page. If they have screenshots with wansview you're good.
It's the only vendor I've found that does this.
This should be long term stable. If they decided to remove it you'd have to manually "upgrade" the firmware - which you won't have to do.
It seems just as risky picking from a bunch of white labeled chinese knock-off type cameras, who knows whats running on them.
These are all working "on the reservation" - I'm not flashing anything. There's always a risk but I think these are just cameras.
They might be running a spy rig side hustle but they open up their ports. I haven't gotten two way audio or the camera motor to move around on the ONVIF protocol yet but there's "profiles" that can do this ... I'll just have to see if the cameras respond to those profiles.
If not I'll contact Wansview.
In my experience with Chinese companies when I contact them about things like this they treat me as if I'm about to pull the trigger on 100,000 of them so who knows, maybe wansview is the win here.
I'm totally open to nice things being cheap.
Maybe it is just me and I have nothing left to loose, but the idea of people needing this surveillance is baffling.
It has been useful to me when traveling to be able to see a package on my porch and text my neighbor to grab it for me.
I run frigate for some interior cameras (cheap esp32s) to watch my 3d printer, etc. It's been stable and easy to use for me, but I can't comment on using it for actual surveillance.
But the goal posts are always moving so you have to be prepared to abandon and move on.
It works with cheap, generic IP cameras over RTSP. It's pretty easy to get it working with a Raspberry Pi too.
I was using the synology surveillance app, but after their recent shenanigans, I wanted something I could self host and modify on my own.
I'm using it at my property with 14 cameras right now and I'm really happy with it. There's still some work to do, but it's integrated with ML object detection, and even integration with a VLLM to describe a scene when certain things are detected.
This was my first attempt at a large-scale application that is heavily AI assisted. I need to update the screenshots and feature list for the readme, but if you have any questions or want to get involved, let me know.
Yeah I should know better than to buy Amazon crap I know
Since no one will build that (or at least not build one where I never, under any circumstances, have to touch their servers; or not one they'll prove never does), I've been gathering the specifications for how to build it myself. I don't really have the means to make it a mass produced solution, but I can certainly build a fucking server that does everything I want, and shove it in a public repo with a readme. Maybe some hero out there with a 3d printing farm will create a package out of it, but I won't hold my breath for that.
The other half, at least for Ring doorbells, is making it easy to get push notifications when button pressed, with instant two-way connection for chatting through the camera.
It's already hard enough as a "certified homelabber" to get these things set up and running.
(Yes, I know you did the post with "haha, this is too hard for average human", but it really isn't. Don't be a big corp shill.)
Frigate no longer recommends the Coral accelerator. I think Hailo is recommended now
Otherwise Frigate is great and integrates well with Home Assistant. I have a light on my office desk that comes on when a person is detected near the house, for instance
Object detection, and then human detection, is extremely useful. Thankfully thats become nearly trivia enough to happen on device, but even with just "dumb" cameras the open source, on network solutions are very good.
Every tech savy person I know is working up plans to rip these things out and go with solutions that have more rigorous privacy controls. For example the UniFi setups keep all your data on prem so you can avoid these scenarios where some company decides “maybe users won’t mind if we just start using the data for something else” games.
The fact that the backlash comes after spending millions on a Superbowl advert to promote the offending tech and use case is a pretty epic “own goal” by Amazon.
I have security cameras, and have always voluntarily shared footage with relevant authorities when there was a valid need, but that’s a decision for me to make, not some corporation.
The Amazon Go stores and “Just Walk Out” were a good idea on paper but terribly executed because Amazon leaders didn’t understand how customers think and the awkward aspects of the design. Same with the palm reader tech they just scrapped. Similar here where someone thinks this is a good idea but is completely out of touch with customer mindsets. It’s a recurring pattern for Amazon.
I was worried it would be a lot of work to replace Ring stuff. While Reolink’s setup experience isn’t quite as smooth, it was still trivial to get working. Highly recommend it for everyone who wants a decent alternative.
https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/super-bowl-revealed-a...
People aren't being luddites or not understanding innovation. They know perfectly well what is being sold, and they hate it.
Contrast it with the Dotcom bubble, where people mainly thought it wasn't for them or that they didn't need it. Look at interviews of people back then, and the services advertised are at worst described as "unnecessary": you would've had very little trouble convincing them that there would be some market for them.
But with those extreme AI examples? Normal people understand it, and they hate it.
A soulless psychiatrist who'll give you generic cookie-cutter advice about deeply personal issues? Why would you want that!?
Same with the personal trainer, the startup coach, and the professor. Any of them would be incredibly creepy in real life, with their fake smiling, uncanny repeated stock phrases, and fake positivity.
They are trying to spin it like the integrated ads are the problem, but the services are too far detached from genuine human behaviour for that to matter. "Our creepy ripoff psychiatrist doesn't have ads" isn't exactly a great message, is it?
But it's not a good ad when the only people who will get the reference are those plugged into "ai twitter". But association by implication doesn't work, the only thing most people will end up associating is the creepy guy with "Claude"
It might also work for people who watch "South Park". I've never used any LLM speech interface, and until recently had only ever asked ChatGPT short one off questions and so had never seen the sycophantic tendencies, but immediately recognized the creepy people in the ads were supposed to represent ChatGPT from its portrayal in the South Park episode "Sickofancy" from August of last year.
Same with AI, the same people who fought against Google and Microsoft‘s data collecting now throw everything on data but the kitchen sink at their AI services.
Yet you mention Google and Spotify in one command.
Independence seems to be something different for me. Even thinking about tools, maintenance and the repairs over the years... convenience and independence are closely related, and privacy is at least just a welcoming side effect.
Ring does support end to end encryption (which disables most of the cloud features), but users are still at the mercy of Ring to trust that it really is e2e encrypted and not the "fake" end to end encryption that some marketers have used to mean "Well it's encrypted from your end all the way to our end where we decrypt it". I don't trust that Ring doesn't have a law enforcement toggle to break the e2e encryption on demand if the police ask for it.
Ring (owned by Amazon, who runs a private airgapped AWS region for the CIA onsite at Langley) also works with law enforcement agencies.
Skip the movie; the ending sucks and there's too much drama.
The book neatly lays out how little steps towards a better life (like being able to find your lost dog) lead to an oppressive surveillance state. Every step is a good thing and makes logical sense. The end result is not good.
Cloud connected doorbells must die as well as dragnet surveillance.
Cannot even imagine what is going on these days, inside & out.
During Snowden revelations I'd already been apprenticing for years; nothing Edward documented surprised me. I'd literally walk around our 500,000sqft elevated floors knodding my head [none of this exists, officially].
----
Nothing is as it seems.
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During DEF CON ~XX~ (approximately same timeframe as story above) it was publicly revealed that intelligence communities had redefined the word "intercept," to mean when a human operator catelogs a certain piece of data/traffic (i.e. not algorithms sorting). #1984 #newspeak #elevenyearsago
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I no longer carry a cell phone. Don't use email. PO Box in profile
I run grey man where I can. Stuff that's private stays private. Paper and physical security is still good.
Possession is nine-tenths of the law (e.g. physical bullion; offline crypto keys; bullets; counter-bugging).
>checked for implants ... shocking some of the shit that goes on
I've seent some bullshit, myself — "shipping delays" — smelt their pure evil. Our facilities necessarily existed to be networked; but definitely had isolated departments.
I'm not quite there yet, but after Netanyahu made that comment like "if you have a phone you're carrying a little piece of Israel with you" right after the pager attack stuff.. I keep the phone in the back of my backpack away from my meat bits.
A one-way beeper allowed me to phase out mobile phone usage. Obviously presents inconveniences, but I'm semi-retired with no rush to be anywhere. Bonus health points: no locally-generated EMRadiation.
[•] My provider (USA): <https://pagersdirect.net/>
If you use numeric-only paging, bots haven't figured out how to SPAM, yet. Also available is alphanumeric email-to-page; two-way pagers also exist (but why?).
Pretty sure government agencies will have no trouble finding you from that bit alone, and then tracking your movements is trivial. I mean, you have to show up and check the box periodically..
This made it extremely difficult to capture the actual perp. He eventually walked away with minimal consequence, for lack of evidence/possession.
[0] established with false identification
Could a solution be forcing Amazon (and Google and Flock and...) to open their backend software either for self-hosting or for running on somebody else's "cloud"? So subscribing to such a device isn't that different from getting web hosting from Dreamhost or Hetzner?
Maybe there's a host or IP field in the settings that users can easily change?
N.B. Flock isn't really targeting the consumer market.
I'd disagree and restate that cloud services willing to make these kinds of deals must die, painfully, in a fire after being stung by a million killer bees, after receiving a million paper cuts and having lemon juice poured all over them.
It is possible for a company to charge a monthly fee to provide a service and only that service without attempting to leverage their users and their data for any other form of income. Companies used to do it all of the time. It just takes a C-suite/board/founder to have the moral fortitude to not sell out their users.
Just for context, could you provide some examples of such people?
This is why regulations are extremely important. There need to be a strong enough counterincentive or companies will eventually always follow the path of least resistance to growth. Ethics when present may create some form of friction along some specific paths, but it’s never enough for those to not become, eventually, that very path.
Just because majority of people choose to be assholes does not mean everyone has to be. Be the change you wish to see in the world, or something
If the answer is you lose your job and your means to provide for your family if you don’t put corporate desires first, then we’ve constructed the society we want already and no one should be complaining.
Having a cloud based solution from an ethical company would be the consumer friendly solution people are actually wanting. Lots of people are willing to spend money to make problems go away.
[edit] To my mind, the biggest hurdle wouldn't be networking to allow this box to host its own app that was accessible to the user from elsewhere. The hurdles would be things like lack of "smart" reporting / facial recognition, backup power, backup connectivity, etc..But in theory, a repurposed smartphone as the platform could solve the backup power and connection issues.
The same approach could be used for cameras - see for example Home Assistant's remote access. Sure, you'd still need a cloud-based STUN-like discovery service, but a small one-time fee should easily cover operating it.
Or was your intent merely to taunt him for failing to be independently wealthy?
Anyway, thanks.
The problem is, you have to be young and dumb and oblivious enough to think that your idea is golden, while also being old and wise enough to be able to implement the idea. You don't want to wake up one day, a decade later, and someone's independently thought of the same idea, and gotten rich, and you're still driving a taxi. My email address is on my profile page. Email me.
When Bitcoin emerged, I wrote a gambling site. That also was illegal in America, so I kept it closed to the US but tried to get my original games licensed in Nevada, which was a fool's errand since it takes $500k just to get them to look at a game and there's a 3 year waiting list, mostly Bally. And look where we are now with online gambling.
The lesson of my life isn't that I need ideas with a bigger moat. It's that being able to code my ideas well is meaningless compared to having half a billion dollars to buy off a legislature. I'm a coward, I guess, because I never wanted to break the law. Now I live in a timeline where every major company in those two sectors achieved market dominance and legality because the people who started them were willing to flout the law, raised enough capital and fought off lawsuits long enough to bribe their way into legitimacy.
I have a fantastic idea for an AI service, too, and it wouldn't be hard to implement... but it will almost certainly raise dozens of legal issues until someone with more balls than me comes along and just does it. Money is nice but I don't need that kind of trouble. That's why those ideas stay on the wall.
Stop spreading lying FUD please.
Imagine our current data corpus in the hands of the Stasi for example.
Of course no one gives a fuck, and they're sadly ubiquitous. Police love them. Complaints about illegal monitoring are just ignored.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, but the 21st century main mode of operation is Distrust. We are constantly, actively fostering distrust in our neighbours and communities. Everyone is constantly suspicious of one another. When in reality the vast majority of us are very well behaved.
>1:58pm Police coordinate takedown
>2:00pm Suspect apprehended
What a complete joke, lol.
They also can give the Feds access to your iCloud data through a NSL. Just like Prism.
What a ridiculous way to try and be on a high horse.
What's the invasive part? Not giving my dogs privacy when we're out of the home?
We never needed CCTV in the 90s/00s for dogs. We would have someone take the dogs out for a walk/toilet, or if having to regularly leave them alone beyond what is fair to them, re-home them
And if you need to check they're not causing mischief they're likely not tired enough
So I'm wondering what use case remains really
We never needed the telephone back when we had smoke signals and carrier pigeons either.
Here are three real scenarios that have happened to us just off the top of my head where I was thankful we had cameras and locally stored footage rather than smoke signals and old timey folklore:
1. We couldn't find our cat last summer. Turns out she was sitting in the living room window and pounced on a fly that landed on the screen. The corner of the screen pushed out and she fell right out the window. She has no interest in going outside so we never looked for her out there, but she was huddled in a bush right where she fell hours later.
2. A train carrying chemicals derailed and caught fire in my hometown several years ago, causing an evacuation order while we were out of town (https://www.kcci.com/article/evacuation-order-lifted-followi...). The sheriff wouldn't let us back into town for several hours, but we were at least able to judge that our animals were nervous yet okay.
3. My wife came in from the back yard with the dog, who had suddenly started foaming at the mouth. She's panicking, thinking he ate some kind of poison. I have no idea what's going on, so while she calls the vet I look at the camera feed for our patio and see he had been following a little toad around on the deck while my wife was in the garden before finally scooping it up and giving it a few licks.
Would we have gotten by without a camera in all of these scenarios? Absolutely. But it never hurts to have more data, especially when it's privacy friendly and local, and it's disingenuous to nitpick the very basic human desire for peace of mind as if you don't understand it.
> or if having to regularly leave them alone beyond what is fair to them, re-home them
> And if you need to check they're not causing mischief they're likely not tired enough
Don't patronize me.
Local ML/face recognition would be a bonus. Ability to sync to a private owned server owned by me would be a bonus.
I'm assuming there are projects out there that would enable this -- does anyone have recommendations?
So, yeah. Look into frigate.
If Apple ever releases an Apple Home app for Android, I'd transition my entire home over by the time of my next Google Home Premium subscription renewal.
This is very easy though, you just go to your iCloud account settings under the settings app and enable it. It should be on by default imo, but I understand the argument for why it isn't.
Either way, enabling it is not a barrier and ICE cannot be granted access once you do unless you yourself give them that access.
If you decide that everyone is lying to you all the time, you can't build a useful model of objective reality. You just end up frustrated and not taking simple actions you can to make improvements for yourself and others. Don't fall into that trap.
I don't assume just know history, PRISM. I don't see how not trusting apple means I can't trust anybody. On hackernews people should know better to trust anything but transparency (source code) which might as well be the dictionary defined opposite of apple.
Frigrate nvr + cameras that are confined to internal network. Easy peasy. And you get to set it up exactly as you want.
p.s. i am not saying going with apple is a bad idea (i dont have an opinion), i am just saying thats far from the "only way to go"
I made it half a century without a doorbell in my phone. I don't need it now.
I dont understand why anyone chooses Ring when the costs of Unifi are so much better.
The ring app also sucks imo and all their hardware is quite slow.
The self-hosted and home-automation and home-assistant subreddits are _full_ of discussion threads on this. The good news is that you have a TON of options to pick from. The bad news is that they're all deficient in one way or another so you really do have to spend a bit of time to figure out who executes best on the things you care most about.
If you don't mind the lock-in, Unifi is nice. Reolink (and the other DaHua re-brands) usually leave a lot to be desired in terms of software / quality but they are cheap and they reliably spit out a regular video stream that can be used with just about any software. Just don't let them onto the WAN!
Alternatives really need to be for the masses that have little Knowles in server hosting.
This is one reason I invest in Linux Smartphone company's that are work towards a clean solution for the masses. Daily drivers that are satisfactory for us build the stepping stones to walk to the alternative.
Hubitat is a different player in this space: https://hubitat.com/
Unfortunately a portion of the information getting circulated is the complete opposite.
I'm not an asshole so I cancelled my subscription.
If other people are cool with doing things without any reasons and based on pure trust, that's on them. But that's not gonna be me
Consider the Nancy Guthrie case. The owner wasn't around to give consent, and the camera didn't even have an active subscription, yet law enforcement was still able to recover video from Google's systems.
The only way it could be as you say is if the video was only stored locally without any remote access, or if the video was encrypted with keys only you control. Google clearly is not doing this. I really, really doubt Amazon is.
You certainly can't be sure of that. In fact, it is almost certain that these companies provide the data they collect to the police and government agencies data, often without warrant.
All tech puts it's best foot forward, some of it's really nifty, but a camera on every street corner is always going to pose more risks than it's worth IMO...
It's work to go back to the old ways but I think this is one we step we should really all take.
[0] https://reolink.com/ca/product/reolink-video-doorbell-wifi/
Truly top-notch quality, full-featured, very low maintenance, easy to set up, cheap to operate. I'm glad so many people are using it now.
For video doorbell I just have a cam that can see the front door and I drew a box around the area I want notifications for. When a person enters the box, I get a notification and snapshot.
I’d like to acknowledge the damage I carry as a human being as a result of the pressure to pretend that this is normal. Just because there doesn’t seem to be real alternatives in so many areas of this “free market” /s economy.