Ring owners are returning their cameras
msn.com
msn.com
This is to be studied by geeks, how to approach non-technical audiences.
To convince them otherwise, you need to offer a more compelling emotional argument, but politicians and lobbyist already tell them that they're going to get raped and killed in the street unless they support their agenda.
So what do you do? How do you come up with an emotional argument that's more compelling than that?
But it's seeming like the trigger for it will be
Regardless of how you see it, although the ad was a kind of manipulative reframing of surveillance infrastructure by using pets as means of psychological manipulation, the Super Bowl ad seems to have just been an unfortunate (or fortunately) timed ad that caused people to glimpse through the cracks in the control matrix being constructed around them.
I don’t think it will really make a difference though. It’s like wildebeest watching their compatriot snatched underwater by a crocodile, to only momentarily pause before venturing right into the same river.
Yeah, it’s a timing thing. Government surveillance with commercial partnerships is more aggressive now, and the stories are chipping away at our collective ignorance until something like this connects the dots for people. I’m off in my corner of culture and don’t watch social video so I didn’t appreciate the work that streamers/explainers have done to alert normal people to these problems. But those videos were more effective at getting Flock out of my city than any canvassing I did. It’s nice to see conspiracy brains turned to an actual cabal.
Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OheUzrXsKrY
With that said, I'm not sure it will have any long term effect on them... sure some people return their stuff, make a post about it, but it's like (insert people with certain political affiliation) cancelling (insert big brand) by burning their stuff. It makes a splash in social, but I'm not sure it really significantly changes user behavior.
FWIW, I don't like being a tech downer/skeptic, but every fucking thing is like this now. Every social media is being turned into surveillance. Every cloud-based application, no matter how useful, is bending over so the state can shove it's hand up it's ass and turn it into yet another way for the Christofascists to shove their bullshit into my life. I'm fucking tired, y'all. I'm tired of finding something cool and interesting, and then needing to audit the entire backend to see if my friends and I are endangering ourselves by engaging with it. I'm tired of seeing something fucking useful, a goddamn video doorbell, and being like "oh that's pretty fucking nice!" and then having to box it up years on because the company that built it is going to turn my porch into a node in the nationwide Good Citizen network.
And it's asymmetric because they seemingly NEVER get tired. There's just a whole like 1/3 of the population out there that seemingly never even sleeps, they're just constantly trying to figure out how to make my life just slightly fucking worse, either for profit or to advance their weird evangelical agenda.
I'm so, so, profoundly sick of these freaks.
Edit: And please just SPARE ME the both sides horseshit. Yeah both sides have problems, but one side is fucking dragging us back to 16th century social politics, and THEY'RE the ones I'm sick more of.
It's not a partisan issue. From leftist utopias to god-fearing Texan ranch lands, the police are abusing power and harassing innocent people. Trying to bring religion and partisanship (in one word, even) doesn't help your message.
I'm sorry I'm having a hard time remembering the role leftists are playing in the US right now what with the Executive, Congressional and Judicial branches all being stacked to the tits with Republicans, right up to the top with our dementia-addled conman of a president, sleepily signing into law the policies that will see us excised as the center of world economics.
I don't see Ring as a politics problem, I see it as a policy problem. Just because something is legal in the federated, ad hoc instance doesn't mean it is advisable to systematize.
Preemptively, the exact sort of "BUT BIDEN BAD" horseshit occurring elsewhere in the thread. And again, yes, Biden bad. Biden is an inept old man who was far out of his depth, who failed, completely, to hold anyone accountable for the atrocity against the Republic that was January 6th. But again, he, and to be sure, the Democrats as a whole, failed that, and whilst that is true, the other side is currently ushering in the end of American global influence and they're going to make it so no American citizen will EVER be able to own ANYTHING EVER AGAIN. So I am simply not entertaining this "both sides" horseshit anymore.
Both sides DO have problems. One has distinctly WAY more fucking problems, and also, WAY more fucking power. If pointing out this obvious fucking reality makes me partisan, or biased, whatever. Partisan I am.
If I'm to be marched into a meat grinder I at least reserve the right to tell the people doing it to me they fucking suck.
the both sides thing is right, you dont remember the lockdowns over a cold, mandated behavioral changes, and countries sending people to "isolation camps" and pressing digital id?
yeah tho its just the "christofascists" huh?
you people only care when illegal invaders get targeted. your outrage is performative.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/flock-haters-cro...
You let Trump announce that there has to be a national gun registry or mandated vaccines. You see he even stepped away from bragging about the vaccines only happened for Covid because of “Operation Warp Speed” under his administration. That should have been something that any politician would be proud of.
BTW, the only impressive thing that happened in his entire first administration is the speed at which the vaccines were developed and his not letting the economy collapse because of the stimulus and he can’t take credit for either because of his own base
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albany_Movement
So I had first and second level connections to people who were involved in the civil rights movement. My mom knew someone or knew who knew someone that could get me a call with almost anyone of influence in the Black community nationally. I went to school with a lot of their children - at least the 2nd or 3rd level connections.
The civil rights movement was very aware of things like this at the time
The implication is obvious, the feel is inhuman.
The power of a few seconds of video is why TikTok had to be brought under control ( and sadly not just because of worrying about what others might do, but to specifically censor and promote specific messages ).
The issue really isn't about whether your neighbourhood has camera's, the question is who is in control.
Didn't USA's current regime take over TikTok in order to use it for propaganda? Twitter-X was used so successfully that they're expanding their psyops.
Either way just stop using it and nobody gets to psyop you. It’s very straightforward.
China didn't seem to be doing much with it, as far as the West goes. Not sure if they were using it against their citizens though? Much safer to have it Chinese controlled for me, it seems.
You suggesting that China was "anti American" sounds crazy to me. They were surely your biggest trading partner? Like, I hate all those guys so much that we're going to make everything they want at whatever price they want to pay ...? In the past it might have been possible to argue they were anti-American in their politics; like opposing democracy, or rounding up nationals, ... but USA does as badly (worse?) on those things.
What it looks like is China was 'winning' the trade balance and USA's billionaires decided to take a break from raping teenagers to throw all the citizens on the fire to try and leverage their position to bring in fascism as a means to enriching themselves even further. Go USA, eh.
Yea but you can stop what would be 80+% of the influence on your life by not using it. It is very straightforward.
> China didn't seem to be doing much with it, as far as the West goes.
China (and other malicious actors) have demonstrably leveraged social media platforms to inflame tensions, create anti-American and anti-Western sentiment, and more. With platforms like TikTok they were able to more directly influence content, they understand the algorithm that is used, &c.
But let me put it to you from a different angle. If you don't think China was or could have been using TikTok to influence Americans and westerners in general, then I'd suggest the US had nothing to do with, oh, idk, the Arab Spring. :)
> Not sure if they were using it against their citizens though? Much safer to have it Chinese controlled for me, it seems.
Well they have other platforms for that, social credit score, TVs on every corner, &c. Much safer for me to have it American controlled so I don't have an authoritarian Chinese communist party trying to influence me or anyone around me, or further inflaming tensions for their own gain.
> You suggesting that China was "anti American" sounds crazy to me. They were surely your biggest trading partner? Like, I hate all those guys so much that we're going to make everything they want at whatever price they want to pay ...? In the past it might have been possible to argue they were anti-American in their politics;
Well it's not just Americans and Canadiens, it's the EU too. The strategy was to leverage incredibly cheap labor (slave labor in some cases) and loose environmental restrictions to start manufacturing cheap goods and then move up the value chain. Inherently there's nothing to wrong with the approach (minus the slave labor and all of that), but as China continued to do so they did so while also undercutting competitiveness from other countries and blocs. They artificially devalue their currency, they routinely broke WTO rules so much so that other countries said to hell with it. The EU for example has historically tariffed Chinese products. Why? Because if they don't then local industries in the EU with long summer vacations and all of these nice things would be out-competed and out of business.
This isn't really controversial or anything. It's pretty well known, and from an American standpoint the point of view with respect to China is rather bipartisan.
Separately I don't particularly care who owns TikTok. I've never used it. But if someone is going to own Tiktok and people are going to voluntarily subject themselves to these algorithms and the owner’s intentions, I'd prefer it to be Americans (or another western country).
My point is, you are not on the same team as Larry Ellison, if you are a typical American.
Larry is part of the problem.
geographic "from <> to <>" slogans are very commonly used in such contexts. Basically you take a are geographically split into multiple regions, make a "from->to" slogan which treats this areas as one unit in between and imply through it that it should be all homogeneous (weather it's about country boraders or ethnicity)
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Like e.g. the German national anthem is based on a song from 1841, i.e. it predates WW1,2 and in turn the current German border.
Due to this the first verse refers to boarder rivers which by now lie outside of Germany (and and has other issues related to sever misinterpretation of most of the verse).
This lead to it being abused by Nazis and later neo-nazis to mean Germany should go to war and size various border regions.
But Germany did need a national anthem and this song has a lot of important history meaning unrelated to WW2/Nazis. So west Germany decided to make it the anthem again, but only sing the 3rd verse for official occasions. Through due to continuous abuse of neo-nazies of the first verse this was changed with reunification and today only the 3rd verse is the official national anthem.
Anyway I got a bit off topic but "from <> to <> verses" crossing country boarders (or "ethnic" boarders if used in some "ethnic" context) are most times "pretend to be harmless" slogans of extremists, even if they have a history where they had other meaning (like with the first verse of the song the German national anthem is based on).
Only one side is an illegally occupying power who took the land by force from the people who were peacefully living there.
And don't quote me events from ~2000 years ago.
If everyone held grudges that long the whole world would be at war.
The people in the West bank currently being driven from their homes - they aren't a threat to Israel - they are just farmers working their land. Trying to pick their olives.
It's a false equivalence to say there are two sides, on the one hand and the other.
Given the number of Jews who live in areas under full Palestinian authority (or in any other Arab countries), we know that “free” means “Jew-Free”.
And given the way you refer to all of it as “Occupation”. Including the parts that were legally purchased, developed, and built by Jews, the parts where Jews and Muslims live freely together as equal citizens, the implication is that all of that needs to be dismantled as well.
What’s your intention with the Jews who live there?
> What’s your intention with the Jews who live there?
Eh? I have no 'intention', nor implied master plan - nor indeed have any personal stake in the region - other than to say that the running sore of the obvious injustice creates problems well beyond it's borders. Militant Islam is of course a problem - but I'd say Israel's current actions are one of the best recruiting agents.
I will say is that Arabs, Christians, others and Jews were quite happily living side by side in the region before the Zionist colonial project, there is no reason that can't be the situation again.
There may be some racism as in every other country, but Israeli Arabs have the same rights as Jews in Israel (and if you visit, you will see them living side by side and getting on well). Asides from being able to travel to certain areas, which the Arabs are allowed but Jews are not. And that military service is optional for Arabs.
It doesn’t matter if Christians and Jews were historically tolerated in Muslim countries. There’s no other country in the world that has proportionally this many Muslims and Jews living together. To think that you can replace it with a better model based on neighbouring countries is ridiculous or disingenuous.
That is simply not true. For example the 2023 Citizenship and Residency Revocation Law specifically only applies to one type of Israeli citizen.... guess which one?
>there may be some racism as in every other country
The question is whether than racism is part of the law and policy of the country. It's quite clear, under the current leadership, that if you are 'other' then you are second class.
Here's another example:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/02/knesset-must-...
> The West Bank is under occupation, Israel itself is not.
So Israels actions in the West bank are thus somehow not relevant???
> with a better model based on neighbouring countries is ridiculous or disingenuous
Senior members of the current Israeli government ( and I specifically make a distinction here between the goverment and the country ), are quite openly calling what can only be described as ethnic cleansing.
And as well as the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel is currently also occupying parts of Lebanon, Syria, and also appears to want a war with Iran.
The solution isn't to cleanse/kill everyone else, the solution is to find a way to live side by side.
The Key "Exclusionary" Mechanism The Funding Clause: The law authorizes the Interior Minister to revoke citizenship or residency only if the person was convicted of a terror offense and it is proven they (or someone on their behalf) received monetary benefits from the Palestinian Authority in connection with that act.
Practical Effect: Because only Palestinian prisoners/families receive these specific PA stipends, the law does not apply to Jewish citizens who commit acts of terror, even if they are convicted of the same offenses.
ie It's if you are a terrorist and receive money ( like a pension,wage, benefit ) from the PA. It's quite clearly constructed to not include Jewish right-wing terrorist acts.
This was openly discussed, as the intent, in the Knesset when the law was passed.
See: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/12/how-israel-used-dis...
None of this is surprising if you look at what the key political players have said in public - they are openly supremacist.
There is a reason for the ICC,ICJ cases.
Can't reply to post below due to depth - so reply here:
The point is that only terrorism funded by the PA counts - why add the PA funding qualification??? So for example if some settler movement funds people to terrorize Palestinians - it's not covered.
Surely terrorism is terrorism? The PA qualification aim is clear.
That's why all citizens are not equal before the law. It's very clearly specifically designed to favour one set of people over another.
It's quite open - I don't understand why you feel the need to redefine black as white.
There’s nothing in the law about the race of the perpetrators. That the Palestinian authority only pays Arabs to kill innocent Israelis doesn’t make Israeli law unequal.
AFIK no
But once you do take it over and have no morals, why not also use it for such?
now that also brings us to the good news, which is a lot of people really don't like any form of internet connected cameras and the culture related to surveillance to it is very different here.
It's another ad of course but a pretty funny response and sums up the issue nicely.
Is this hurting Amazon? No, it is not. As long as they're honouring return requests freely, you know that the number of returns is within their accepted levels of distressed inventory. If it's getting into uncomfortable territory, they'll start rate limiting people by saying they're past the return window, or they should try again after a week.
If Amazon's return policy changes, that'll be much more interesting to see. But chances are, people forget about this in a month and their sales are unaffected. This may go the way of #deleteUber, #deleteFacebook and similar boycott campaigns - minor blips at best.
but Reddit is mostly relevant "in the west" where most countries have an inverted age pyramid and most old people are not on Reddit, but on Facebook
and reddit relevance outside of the US is often far less then people think, to a point where many people not even know what it is. It doesn't has a network effect pulling in "friends and family".
and a lot of people "around 30" are still on Facebook due to network effect and active enough to count as active users (which doesn't mean much to be fair)
And in the US around ~18% of US users where in the age group 18-24 in 2025. Idk. how but somehow Facebook still manages to convince surprisingly many "just adults" to join it. And if they aren't on Facebook then they are on WhatsApp and maybe Instagram.
Now all of this doesn't really fully show how relevant reddit is because checking some minor memes once a week makes you show up as active user but also means it's pretty much irrelevant for you.
And if I look at people I interact with or where I can see a bit how they interact (i.e. _very highly biased by social environment_) then thinks look far worse for it. Reddit seems relevant in the US, mainly for people "around" 30. But outside of it, it seems to be more like a footnote. Used, but something most people would not care if it's randomly gone.
You are making some assumptions and guesses when all of these numbers are generally searchable - I don’t disagree with your point largely speaking, but the magnitude(s) is what seem off to me. Over 50% of Reddit traffic is international, about 75% of Facebook’s is. Yes clearly Reddit biases “the west” but a couple of y’all keep trying to paint these incredibly stark pictures.
Reddit and Facebook are both massive. They both have significant influence on culture and discourse worldwide. You’re also disputing Reddit’s traffic but again a search will confirm it is the 7th most visited site in the world. We can argue with the significance of that is given their demographic distribution, but then we would have to do the same thing to Facebook and I just don’t think that’s a particularly useful conversation without some concrete data at our fingertips. If you have some I am legitimately interested to see it.
Either way: Yes facebook is more international. Yes it is larger. But the gap isn’t 1000x. It’s not even 100x. They both have mainstream appeal, they both have shortcomings that keep them from being “truly” representative. It doesn’t help that Facebook hides their DAU’s among their other offerings to obscure the stall (perhaps it’s now even in decline) they have experienced. That’s not a good look I’ll say that much.
and also because many modern platforms are app focused and don't care about web traffic
and Reddit is a huge target for scrapping int the US so traffic numbers of recent few years have become a meaningless metric
Outside the US Reddit is often far less relevant then in the US, still somewhat relevant in many "western" countries but often far far less then in the US (like e.g. where I live no on "young" (<20) nor "old" (>50) people use it and the people which do use it are mostly from a _subset_ of often very US influenced tech/nerd/gamer cultures).
And if you go to countries where speaking English is far less the norm Reddits relevance drops sharply. The thing is, that is something like 50% of the word population... In India Reddit doesn't matter, nor does it in China, nor does it in many (but not all) of the highly populated areas "between" (south) China and India.
So why I don't know if "site [..] 10 most visited in the world" is technically true or false it is highly misleading even if true and seems to be bordering on US defaultism, through maybe more "the west" defaultism.
Now to be fair people forgetting like half of the word population in their arguments is pretty common, in not just the US, but also the EU.
It's a bit like with HN, it might feel representative for the IT industry world wide, but it is only representative for a certain FANG/US-startup/US-hacker culture influenced subset of it. Beyond this it has hardly any representation weather it's wrt. articles or people commenting. But "beyond this" is on a world wide scale a _very_ huge part of the industry.
from the not very representative context of people I know/where I live (not US):
Ring customers are often old overly worried people which "don't really care anymore" about ideal (often due to an over exposure to fear inducing propaganda, like the kind of stuff which first ties to make you think you live in far more danger then you do and then blames it on immigrants; And ring them comes in by being cheap, reliable and convenient and maybe the only AD reaching that demography. Worries about privacy are on the other hand shadowed by fear about people breaking in and beating them up.)
Other people needing cameras tend care more about privacy ideals and do more research. In turn they won't use ring.
And people not needing cameras most times also really don't want there to be cameras, especially not internet connected ones.
Through in general the relationship to surveillance is very different here compared to what it seems to be in the US.
Reddit: 121 million "daily active unique users"
Source: https://investor.redditinc.com/news-events/news-releases/new...
Facebook: 3.58 billion "family daily active people"
Source: https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
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I'd definitely consider both "mainstream".
(I know plenty non-tech and "normal" people who use reddit.)
The thing about Reddit is it really amplifies voices. 10-100 people can be on the same subreddit and comment or post something, and it looks like “a lot” of people.
It’s also much easier to be a non-representative sample at 3% of the population than 50%. And, there’s a big sample bias for this sort of thing. I think someone is way more likely to post “I’m getting rid of X” versus “I don’t care and I’m keeping X”.
Remember forums of old. Larger sites with daily visitors in the thousands already had nearly isolated topic silos within the forum. The effect is even stronger here.
So you are just seeing a biased subset of the (relatively) mainstream reddit.
A great example of how community moderation inevitably slides a platform to one side or the other of the political spectrum.
I honestly don't think mods on reddit should be allowed to moderate more than 1 or 2 of these top sub-reddits, this would at least force some semblance of diversity of thought on the platform.
Reddit went mainstream many years ago, hence the marketing dollars spent there on astroturfing, and brands acquiring pet moderators. The posters/commenters/readers follow power-laws like any online/offline community.
For example: I'd say HBO should worry about what the game of thrones related subs are saying about their latest show (which is good, shoutout) but only as a vibe check. The normies will always outnumber the kind of people who go to a subreddit to discuss their favourite show. Normal people just watch and forget.
Yet simultaneously the internet represents the opinions of a very small and vocal minority.
I’ve never seen an internet boycott have an impact.
If I hadn't told you the date of the boycott, would you have been able to spot it on this chart?
[1] - https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/bud?gaa_at=eafs&...
https://sherwood.news/business/beer-bud-light-market-share-b...
Budweiser stock did recover, but they haven't (afaik) repeated the behavior that got them boycotted in the first place. It appears that this boycott achieved exactly what was sought.
I'd agree that this is a rare exception, and that boycotts are almost never successful. But this really is an example of that unicorn.
Brexit.
Reddit is one of the most visited websites on the planet, not sure how you can say it isn't mainstream.
> Is this hurting Amazon? No, it is not.
Depends on your definition of hurting Amazon, but regardless Ring is a tiny portion of Amazon's revenue so even if every single Ring owner returned it wouldn't "hurt Amazon"
> This may go the way of #deleteUber, #deleteFacebook and similar boycott campaigns - minor blips at best.
Not sure about Uber, but #deleteFacebook absolutely did have a long term impact in certain demographics.
In some states in the US, it is not illegal for a cop to have sex with someone they have arrested. Ain't that just dandy.
The Polish situation could be an upgrade.
That’s why police looks to piece together from a larger surveillance network. Maybe you can’t see the face on the home camera but in another camera down the road, or a license plate on the getaway car down the street, or an accomplice without disguise. They want everyone to have cameras and then they can abuse the system.
Friends showed me high quality close up footage of someone stealing their bike. Absolutely useless, all you saw was an average guy that you wouldn’t recognize if you walked past on the street.
No cloud involved if you run your own VPN.
Or even better, _just a little_ cloud involved if you expose through Cloudflare tunnel for just you and whoever else needs to access it.
Some countries have laws for this, as in you can only point the camera so that you don't catch everyone. This can have downsides, e.g. if you have no (even short) front yard and your (organization's) door is directly on the curb - but I completely agree that this is just tough luck, the privacy of random people walking on public property past private property should not be filmed.
Not only did it give me peace of mind but two specific examples come to mind. One was when the garbage company’s truck picked up my trash can, and never put it back down (the whole thing fell into the back of the truck). I was able to get a replacement can for free, otherwise I wouldn’t have had any clue where it disappeared off to.
The second time was when my first Steam Deck was stolen in-transit. You could tell from the very hollow sound the box made when the delivery person threw the box onto the porch. It helped prove that it wasn’t stolen off my porch (side note, screw UPS, bunch of thieves, I also had another Steam Deck stolen from one of their drop boxes, last time I ever used one, by one of their employees. No recourse at all, I just had to eat the ~$700. Also, Valve, stop shipping the Steam deck in an incredibly obvious box).
Same concept though, local NVR, remote access via WireGuard.
No. Unless your camera is being held by a human being who can take action.
Cameras do not prevent crime. That's just marketing.
All they do is let people watch crimes after they've happened, and share the videos to spread fear to other people, which then sells more cameras.
If doorbell cameras prevented crime, the internet would be full of videos of people trying to steal packages, then changing their minds when they see the camera.
Instead, it's all just recordings of a crime that has already been committed.
I may also have a nice rock for sale, we'll see how it goes.
But I wonder how much of that will wear off once everybody has one.
But we're talking about doorbell cameras here, not giant boxes in the sky with flashing strobe lights on them.
A thief doesn't know if there's a doorbell camera on a particular home until they're already on the porch and recorded.
When a thief wants to steal something, they usually stop trying to steal that thing once they become aware they are being monitored. Even if they only realized once they reached the porch.
It's not a guarantee, but it's something. And it provides a trail to follow if something is stolen (or worse).
Maybe your thief moved away.
Most burglars work in their own neighborhoods.
My armchair take is that we need to start going after those who provide the systems. If a regular person buys a streaming doorbell or a car with a sentrycam, it should be up to whoever takes his money and handles those streams to ensure that they're not doing illegal surveillance of public spaces, IMHO.
It’s against the law to post cctv onto things like Facebook in the U.K. but people donor all the time. Early on the law could have banned cloud cameras but it’s too late now, far too many people like to answer front their phones. So glad I no ln get deliver pizzas.
I agree. And that's sensible. We don't want the law and culture to diverge too much. The former is meant to serve the latter.
But I do still think it would be possible to start going after the suppliers of the services.
Bear in mind europe is known for millennia of pogroms and ethnic cleansing (like, I'm sure, many other parts of the world). Sometimes the culture must bend towards the needs of a stable culture.
Of course. I'm absolutely not saying that culture shouldn't bend. I'm just saying the law must bend to follow culture to some degree.
And let's be clear: it wasn't a change of law that ended the millennia of pogroms and ethnic cleansing. It was culture that changed. Once culture was enough changed for enough people, the law followed and took care of the stragglers.
I live in the UK and first time I'm hearing about this - it's definitely illegal to record your neighbours or members of the public without permission, but AFAIK if you are recording videos of your own driveway you can post those anywhere you like since there is no privacy issue there.
Have you got any more info about this?
Edit: let me clarify - sure, there are _circumstances_ under which it's illegal to post a video on facebook, whether it's recorded with CCTV or your phone doesn't matter. But there is no blanket ban on posting CCTV footage anywhere, and your post makes it sound like it is.
Would love to hear more from a lawyer on this!
https://sprintlaw.co.uk/articles/can-you-film-people-in-publ...
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/domestic-cctv-usi...
Data protection laws are very rarely enforced though
>>(for example it will not be appropriate to share any recordings on social media sites)
Again, that's not what the legislation itself says and it's not so black and white. Posting a video from your own driveway of you parking your car would be perfectly legal even if taken from your own CCTV system. Posting a video of a postie that comes to your door every day for no reason other than to identify them would be not.
No. In Poland it's legal to record everything, only when you publish the recordings you need the recorded people to agree.
The core issue is that "nothing to hide nothing to fear" argument is correct as long as the government is trustworthy. Not only that, but mass-surveilance greatly improves life because it allows much better crowd management. Case in point - speed cameras. Would you support the removal of all speed cameras in Norway?
Interesting. Thanks for this perspective. But for the sake of this debate it's still more or less the same situation.
> The core issue is that "nothing to hide nothing to fear" argument is correct as long as the government is trustworthy.
The government and everyone else who might have access to the data.
> Not only that, but mass-surveilance greatly improves life because it allows much better crowd management.
Hard disagree.
> Case in point - speed cameras. Would you support the removal of all speed cameras in Norway?
No. Speed cameras are different. They do more or less not record people who are not reasonably suspected of committing the crime of speeding. They are more analogous to a doorbell camera (or car sentry system) that only actually starts storing/sharing/streaming data when very good evidence of a crime is in progress. I would, for example, be OK with a camera pointed at a public area if the operator of the camera can prove that the data is only stored whenever say the house's burglary alarm trips (this is equivalent to speed cameras when the induction loop in the ground says that a car passed faster than the speed limit). That minute of recording that may include innocent people in public areas is something I would consider to be in the public good. It's at least very different from a system that monitors continuously.
The fact that nothing is stored in normal circumstances of course needs to be backed up by very public audits. For example the operator would need to release source code and be liable to an enormous fine if state inspectors find that different code actually runs on the device. At least that seems like the ideal situation to me.
So basically your entire argument revolves around the government pinky-promising that it won't use the data from speed cameras to track innocent citizens. Because when the network is dense enough, you can tell who went exactly when and where. This isn't any different from Amazon pinky-promising that it will only use data to improve customer experience.
The bigger point I'm making is that mass-surveilance technology does have benefits to the society, and any absolutist "but but but my privacy" who fails to acknowledge them is doomed to lose the debate.
This isn't how many speed cameras work in Europe. They work by having a speed camera at location Y on the highway that snaps a photo of your car/license plate read, and then another one 5km down the road that also snaps such a photo and plate read.
If you average more than the speed limit in that distance between photo timestamps, you get a ticket mailed to you.
Due to the way it works, it's taking a snapshot of every single vehicle that passes each camera. How long that data is stored/etc. I suppose is a matter of how much you trust the government.
This system is considered better most of the time since it allows for brief excursions of the limit for overtaking, and doesn't just set up a situation where everyone slows down for the one known speed camera point (or slam on the brakes when they notice a mobile speed camera van on the side of the road).
Either way, the public auditing procedure I outline could apply to time-between-two-photos-cameras too.
In the Netherlands you can record, but only share it with the cops and otherwise you need some clear exception (e.g. dashcam images with minor accidents to your insurer). In all other cases you can either not store them, at least not publicly and all cloud falls under public, or have to inform everyone about their presence on the images, or blurr every identifiable mark (e.g. faces, number plates, names etc). Pretty sure all cloud door cams violate that. So the cops sometimes ask for people's doorcam images, and they are allowed to do that, but likely the people providing them will have recorded it illegally due to it being stored on some cloud account.
This question has already been answered by security footage videos and as long as they are overwritten withing a certain time, stored non publicly and only shared with allowed officials, it's ok.
There are exceptions, but very limited, like clear public good (e.g. whistleblowers).
Now the cat is out of the bag and it has become an untenable position to be against this type of surveillance. And don't get me wrong, I want rapists and murderers to be caught, but I am at the same time also worried about the effect that this will have down the line, in particular when live AI analysis of footage becomes cheap enough that it gets integrated into these cameras so the cameras can report (what they deem to be) suspicious activity automatically.
"Hmm, should we solve the murder, or, maybe get somebody fined $100 for having an unauthorised video" ?
> "Hmm, should we solve the murder, or, maybe get somebody fined $100 for having an unauthorised video" ?
Don't be surprised to find out the answer is both.
Working as intended? It’s a wireless CCTV.
I hate it, but you are being recorded everywhere you go. Your plates and your face get scanned every single day, all day long. This is normalized. Privacy is dead.
You will never get access to any of that data when you need it. It is not there to help you. You need to keep your own evidence of the world around you; you never know when you will need it.
Not condoning it; just accepting reality.
> It is not there to help you
It’s like those “This call may be monitored for 'quality' purposes.” service calls.
You can bet, that if the recording helps the company, they’ll have it, but if it helps you, well, they didn’t record that call.
"You didn't try hard enough to sell the customer something else when they called with a major problem."
"How dare you deviate from the script and talk to the caller."
"Why did this take ten minutes? Get those call times down."
In the U.S., municipal vehicles have ALPR scanners on them. They go into a database
Cop cars will ping if a flagged plate is seen (even if the front and back plates don’t match) and the officer will pull you over. Literally happens every day.
Exactly my point but most of the comments here would have you believe you're going to be stupid up against a wall at any moment.
It takes a special level of delusion to think you're pulling one over on the billion-dollar company who just paid millions to advertise this capability during the Super Bowl as if everyone didn't already know.
Hasn't Ring been sharing video with law enforcement for years? Ignoring that zomg ICE is the Reddit cause du jour (these people live for this), did they just now figure out how cloud-connected cameras work?
I fully expect these to all be replaced with generic cameras from Amazon full of security holes, that upload all video to CCP-controlled servers in China.
Maybe he realized it and wasn't interested, but man that would have been an epic move, by using their teen angst and have a hundred million active users overnight.
Except that’s not the only reason to participate in such a boycott. Perhaps they simply do not want to participate in one voluntary node of participation in the surveillance capitalism network.
To make a real statement here, we'd probably need several million returns in the US alone. (A quick search suggests more than 20M installs in the US.)
its kind of like how in videos of altercations, the first thing all parties involved will do nowadays is grab their phones and start recording.
– George Orwell, 1984
These days there is more experience with it, and for example to get "invisible" in IR one of the tricks used by the stormtroopers there is to put on an IR-protective coverall (it works to some extent and for short time) and to walk over warm asphalt.
In general even without IR the regular camera sensors these days are very sensitive, and you can pull a pretty good image out from the darkness by shifting dynamic range well down.
[0] Is it fancy if IR camera tech has been around since like the 1980's or 1970's?
[1] Since WWII if Wikipedia is to be believed.
https://philipbloom.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/SONY...
This camera is capable of iso 409,600, 4 stops higher than this image. I mean this is turning night into day.
Actually most real cameras had/have subpar videos to normal phones. Small volumes so hard to develop good optimizations in small teams, sensors optimized to the max for still photos. That market is basically slowly dying (I stopped using my full frame too the day my S22 ultra phone came despite lower quality of photos, tried taking it on trips few times but it mostly stayed in the backpack).
Its better now regarding video quality, but if you say travel to exotic places, more than 95% of the folks have phone only. Even those with cameras rarely pull them out unless its proper photo safari.
What could go wrong by installing cheap cameras in such places?
https://www.euronews.com/2026/02/04/bulgaria-probes-secret-f...
https://www.ocnal.com/2026/02/bulgaria-launches-criminal-pro...
[2]:https://ring.com/support/articles/uds27/Community-request
E.g. he won't (didn't?) own a mobile phone, but is okay with borrowing someone else's. He won't use Wi-Fi where he has to log in but would happily borrow someone else's.
It's not being right; it's shifting responsibility in exchange for his own personal convenience.
One might disagree with value of the example being set, but I'm not sure I would characterize his choices as in any way convenient for him.
Live like the Amish in 2026 (though I assume they have phones now).
It's not setting an example. We have a word for it and it's called being a mooch.
The attitude is consistent with that famous video where RMS explains that he's "never installed GNU/Linux" because he could just ask someone else to do it for him, and suggest others should do the same.
For that matter, why own a car if we can borrow someone else's? Especially with license plate readers and traffic cameras everywhere, who wants to be tracked? Let your friend be tracked instead. That is the level of logic here.
Setting an example would be just doing without the things he doesn't agree with. Need to make a call but only other people's cell phones are available? Well, you don't make the call. Need wifi but no open networks are available? Well, you don't get wifi. Is this even more inconvenient than the already-inconvenient use of other people's cell phones or wifi logins? Absolutely. But it's actually sticking to your principles.
And? That’s actually one of the strategies to counter any risk, if you can’t avoid it or mitigate it, you transfer it.
Consider that there are two components here: one is that Stallman is uncomfortable with the risk of carrying a tracking device (aka cell phone) around with him. The other is that he wants to make it known that people shouldn't carry cell phones because of that tracking; part of his platform is advocating for and against things like this.
If he was merely worried about the risk, and was just out to protect himself, then using someone else's cell phone (which would be at hand regardless of whether or not he used it) would be a perfectly reasonable, pragmatic thing to do. Transferring the risk, as you say.
But using someone else's cell phone is a violation of the principle. How can I take his advocacy seriously if he freely admits that we need cell phones out in the world, otherwise it's even too inconvenient for him to go about his business?
>How can I take his advocacy seriously
You could just listen to what he has to say and consider whether or not it's true. His personal behaviour at the end of the day has little bearing on that. "He doesn't even do XYZ therefore I won't believe him" feels more like a rationalization one comes up with because one doesn't want to believe him in the first place.
This does not make any sense at all.
He doesn't give a crap if a random phone record of his appears in a random haystack, and that's kind of the point isn't it? It's the aggregated, crawlable stores that are the threat
There may be other issues with Stallman, but that behavior doesn't strike me as particularly inconsistent
Super Bowl Ad for Ring Cameras Touted AI Surveillance Network
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46950915
Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash
I'm not affiliated btw, but I found the instructions really useful - they walk you through an install of Debian 13 (small version of the OS with minimal components), set up low maintenance options (auto updates etc.), install Docker & Frigate, and set up your cameras for best performance depending on your needs.
Keep everything local (if you want). I also integrate with HomeAssistant and expose that through a free CloudFlare Tunnel for access when away from home.
CloudFlare tunnels by the way - these are a great solution to accessing home-network resources without punching holes / port-forwarding etc. because all the access is outward from the home network, then an authentication layer added by CloudFlare.
Personally, I use Zoneminder: https://zoneminder.com/ Zoneminder is very "janky" but predictable.
I set mine up about three years ago, and it's been nice and boring since: https://nbailey.ca/post/nvr
EDIT. I'm really confused how you concluded that this comment is anti European. Quit whatever drugs and social media if something like this is triggering your paranoia.
Work related: We sell solutions including CCTV and video-intercom and we have only recently started providing customers with stickers they can use to make those installations comply with regulations. Technically, it has been the responsibility of the customer installing the device, so us doing this is just nudging people towards compliance because nobody cares. I can guarantee you that there are tens of thousands of cameras here filming public ground and it is not prosecuted. In fact, someone at the office put one up a long time ago for a PTZ demo (not recording) that was not compliant and it took almost 10 years until we got ordered to take it down.
Most of these are not recording, only recording situationally or only locally. Still not legal technically. However, ever since cheap cloud-connected doorbells have become available, they have definitely been installed here. They do not comply with regulations whatsoever and next to nothing is done about it.
Even if your company does such stuff... the number of cameras per street is far fewer then one sees in the UK or USA.
Are there sources?
Or is this just a fantasy story?
> Or is this just a fantasy story?
People buy them from Ali, Temu, Allegro, eMAG and install all over the place. Simply freaking take a walk and look around.
Then maybe those cunts can sell a camera without cloud storage for once? Or the one that connects to local hub, like Chinese cameras do?
You frame it like the only alternative to American surveillance cameras is Chinese surveillance cameras, but no cameras seems to be no option for you.
Who is the one with the paranoid, imaginary reasons?
Edit: Ah btw, here in germany we have of course cameras to see who is in front of the door, it is called Türsprechanlage. It does not record, it does sent to the cloud, it is not smart, and is developed and produced in Germany, for example by Siedle.
People online claim all kinds of things.
>>This Reddit user is alleging
The story, in part, revolves around one post on Reddit. Isn't this a low effort article? Isn't this just a wild guess by the Redditor posted as fact?
The final straw was when somebody ripped one of the Ring Elite (wired) doorbells off the outside wall. (This was during a Teamsters labor action against Amazon, but I cannot prove any relationship.) There was never a motion alert, and no footage of the culprit was recorded. The final frame had something in it that may have been a person, but it was impossible to be sure.
Having one of my Rings stolen was actually a blessing. I had the police come and take a report, and submitted a claim to Ring. They sent a free replacement, which I promptly listed on eBay, along with the other used one.
So after paying $5/month times two doorbells for five years, I went looking for something better. I settled on Reolink. Everything about them is better. The video quality is far superior, the motion detection is outstanding (and very customizable). Also, the Reolink doorbells cost less than a third of what the Ring Elites cost.
They offer optional cloud storage for about the same price as Ring, but you can also opt for free local storage (using a microSD card in the doorbell). I've got both doorbells set up with 256GB microSD cards, and have them both streaming RTSP to my NAS/NVR, which is something the Ring will never be able to do.
Also, Reolink has made no announcements about partnering with law enforcement, or anyone else. I suppose they might grant access to their cloud, but I doubt they would directly access the microSD cards, and certainly would be unable to access my NVR. I prefer to have some control over my own data, and the Reolink doorbells give me that, while being better and cheaper at what they do.
The one feature the Rings had which was not easily replaceable was smart home integration with motion detection, but I was able to implement that using edgebridge, my NAS/NVR, and some webhooks. My workaround is actually superior to what Ring offered because it's all local, and will continue to function even during an Internet outage.