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Comment by sb23 | Hacker News Reader

It sends every picture to a server somewhere before sending the push notification. Not sure I like that very much.

Well whats the other alternatives? Sending images to devices on a shared network, or having a server in your house/phone which receives the images. All of them are quite unpractical, most people don't know how to setup a server in their home, heck most people won't know how to even forward ports (hence UPNP in CPE/SOHO routers).

Running a server on your mobile device isn't an option on all platforms, many cellular ISP's don't provide you with a "legal" internet IP but rather use NAT, and running server software on mobile phones is probably a bigger security risk than this.

And while some might say well they could've used dropbox or any other similar storage yes they could, but no one in their right mind would ever design a product which relies on a 3rd party like that since that 3rd party can (and they often do) change the TOS or scrap the service you rely on completely.

This device isn't for people who are paranoid about their security and privacy, you don't put a device which takes a picture of anyone who enters your house if you worry about privacy in the first place. This device is for people who want convenience and as long as it's cheaper than an intercom with a camera in it or is much easier to use it's fine. This is actually quite nice solution for various apartment / condo complexes, you can buz a delivery guy into the hallway when you out and about if they hook it into the buzzer.

>Well whats the other alternatives? Sending images to devices on a shared network, or having a server in your house/phone which receives the images.

Encrypt the image with a key that both your iphone and the device share, but the servers do not.

It still leaks privacy-sensitive information (what time somebody appeared at your front door), but it's better than the alternative, and perfectly feasible for a company that cares about the privacy of its users.

a) You could use encryption; at a minimum you could render the image data opaque to the storage location. It would be much harder to protect metadata like time of access. You also lose the ability to view the data in a web application without voluntarily compromising security.

b) Perhaps sandstorm.io or owncloud integration.

I would be surprised if the company did anything like this though, it's unlikely to rise to high enough priority in their planned features list.

I agree that the set of people who worry a lot about this kind of privacy is unlikely to intersect much with the set of people who run a (closed source?) cloud integrated appliance on their door peephole, connected to a closed-source U.S. hosted web service.

>Well whats the other alternatives?

Use a DHT to find your phone's current IP and send it point-to-point?

> Well whats the other alternatives?

E-mail.

An ftp server.

email isn't any more secure than their solution, heck it's probably less secure. FTP again insecure, FTPS/SFTP maybe but 99.9% of user don't know how to setup an FTP server and it's again goes back to the problem that then you need a server hosted somewhere which is a limitation that will kill the potential market for the product.

I'm definitely a big fan of the convenience such devices, and even the simple indoor cameras, bring, but the paranoid part of me always wonders about how easy is this for someone else to access?

Not to mention being an amazing vehicle for a surveillance state - want to see all people who visited someone? No problem!

Well, even if the vendor secures the data properly, there's always third-party doctrine, so as it stands today, you may never know if government or law enforcement accesses your door logs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

It's a little premature to complain when the service isn't built yet, but yes, a less privacy-hostile design would be nice.

You are ridiculous

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