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.
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 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.
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.
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.
What a ridiculous way to try and be on a high horse.
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"
They also can give the Feds access to your iCloud data through a NSL. Just like Prism.