If I can see them, they can see me. No need to walk onto anyone's property, the whole point (for me at least) is to map things that surveil public spaces

It's more casual than surveying e.g. addresses that may be hard to see if the building is recessed, but you'd still want to capture it because someone will want to route there sooner or later. Not so for cameras that only capture own property

StreetComplete has a "things" overlay that makes it very quick to add these at the position of a front door

Maybe less common in America, but in Europe it's not uncommon to have multiple people going around town delivering various things to your mailbox: a postman for letters, some poor student delivering grocery store brochures once a week, somebody delivering the local newspaper at the break of dawn, somebody else delivering the local church newspaper once a month, etc. And all of them are going door to door. If just one of them is an openstreetmap fan you quickly have all doorbell cameras in their delivery district mapped

You don't need to walk up: 1. You can do wardriving and identify them by MAC address. 2. You can use object recognition on google street view photos or your own photos while you're wardriving.

Walk up to door with stack of papers with a stock photo of a puppy on it that says lost puppy. Check if there's a camera. If the owner comes outside, ask them if they have seen this puppy.

apparently Ring LLC has their own OUI [0]. I wonder if you could wardrive around and identify cameras by their MAC address

[0] https://maclookup.app/vendors/ring-llc

A lot of doorbell cameras use infrared for night vision and motion detection. You could probably just drive down a street at night with a camera tuned to show infrared and they would all be bright beacons.

The search directly on osm.org is optimzied for address things.

For a "complete" search in the OpenStreetMap-data I suggest [Overpass Turbo](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_turbo).

In this specific case I'd take a little detour over taginfo (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Taginfo), e.g. search for `surveillance` (https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=surveillance) there. A little bit of clicking (Type > Values > ALPR) leads to https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/surveillance%3Atype=A... If you click on 'Overpass turbo' on the top right, you get to a pre-filled search on Overpass turbo. Scroll the map to the region you want to search (start small), and click 'Run' on the top left.

Voila.

It is not legal to film the public street. But there is no enforcement, and the police is all too happy with each new camera that is out there. People think more camera's means higher safety. Privacy aware tech-savvy people see more camera's and get less warm vibes.

If it matters to you, Reolink is a Chinese owned company. Not passing judgement one way or another, but if avoiding Unifi over the remote incident matters, I could see this factoring in as well.

I have the same UI protect system w 7 cameras. After that incident, I made it local only. I like Unifi gear, but I became super paranoid after that incident.

After some digging around, I found homebridge [0] (with the homebridge-unifi-protect plugin by hjdhjd [1]) which fixed that for me by tying the UI Protect system into Apple's HomeKit ecosystem (which also leverages the homekit secure video that keeps alerts/motion/snapshots on iCloud). Now all our devices are able to have it popup alerts for motions, packages, etc.

It's not perfect, but this way I'm able to get alerts without tying in to Unifi's SSO system. I also still like to open the UI Protect app when I'm not on the local network to sometimes archive videos, view cameras, mess with one of the new UI PTZ cameras, so I have backup access options, including Tailscale. Tailscale doesn't give me the alerts I want, but lets me access the app as if I were still at home. I also have it tied in with HomeAssistant and recently began playing around with go2rtc.

I'm a super-newb when it comes to all this but 2022 is when I began getting fed up with all these privacy nightmares and began to teach myself selfhosting, docker, etc so I can mitigate all this. Unfortunately, I'm the only one who knows how to tinker and keep all this updated. However, I do have documentation for my wife how to access everything and start fresh to make it easier on her by using UI's SSO way so it "just works" as they say in the Macintosh World, when I'm no longer around.

[0] https://homebridge.io/ [1] https://github.com/hjdhjd/homebridge-unifi-protect#readme

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Here in the Netherlands, the government gave them away for free

They're also illegal because you're not allowed to film public spaces without a good reason (it's up to the judge and case law to decide, e.g. if there has been arson in the area recently then it's reasonable to monitor your car that's parked at the kerb, for example). Nobody has yet gotten in trouble to my knowledge

Gotta love hypocrisy

So like it just came with the houses as they were built? If that's the case I wonder what kind of deal Ring make with the builders of new neighborhoods.

Forget law enforcement, for years they allowed all their employees to access literally any camera whenever they want.

There were women being stalked by ring employees. It was that bad. Teslas had (has?) a similar problem.

> now actively partnering with a police surveillance company

You can make this point stronger: Amazon is a police surveillance company (with Ring), just not primarily.

Yeah there are plenty of self-hosted solutions that work just as well.

The feature in the app is also worded cleverly:

“Search party lets you use your outdoor Ring cameras to help neighbors in your area”

Note: doesn’t mention pets yet. Then:

“Starting with lost pets, Search party will…”

What comes after lost pets? Very open ended

“Do it for the lost puppies!” is darkly comedic as a way to ease people into the idea.

Oh, Jesus!!

This f shameless pretention of doing something noble - barely helpful above normal practices btw. - while manipulating clueless users into turning on mass-surveillance is revolting and disgusting. And ordinary employees figured this out, phrased, created content, implemmented, pubished, and are maintaining this dirty practice. Many times with (very misplaced) pride. Shame on all of them actively participating in this coward scheme!

Thanks for the heads up, just went in and disabled it on my 2 cameras. Next step will be to throw these privacy invading pieces of junk in the trash. Just need to find a comparable product.

Are there any wireless (running power to these locations is not an option) doorbell cams that record to local storage instead of the cloud? I refuse to pay a subscription for these things.

Ideally they would record to my server instead of onboard SD card so that the footage can't just walk away if someone grabs the camera.

“Opt-in-by-default” is a lot of words to say “opt-out”.

I love how evil the concept of "opt-in-by-default" is. It's so rapey and sinister.

I think encouraging people to enable E2EE is more realistic than asking everyone to throw out the Ring cams they’ve potentially spent hundreds on, yeah.

Unfortunately you can’t opt out. The surveillance network blankets virtually everyone - friends, family, all of society.

This is also the end game for LLMs

> The only real solution is strong privacy laws around gov usage and strong courts willing to enforce it.

I don't think this is a solution, personally.

I’d prefer to see a solution provided by technology that negates surveillance. Could be a very lucrative industry to start selling Bond style tech to the masses.

any solution that has “law” in it is 100% not a solution

Based on what? There's no constitutional right to privacy, while courts have consistently expanded the scope of government powers and immunities and consistently hollowed out the Bill of Rights. It's gonna require a new legal paradigm.

(Ex Flock Employee) It's as simple as that agency saying "Hey, can we have access to your camera data?" and the originating agency saying "Sure".

Flock (deliberately, IMHO) has no verification on whether said agencies are allowed by law or regulation or whatever to have that access, it's just a free-for-all.

I do the same and it works well. But do you see the Reolink app hammering domains of the form p#p#.reolink.com? I have to kill the app between uses it it drains my phone's battery because of this.

Yeah, this is my idea as well. Good to know that the Reolink app still works locally and via Wireguard, that means I'll have less UI to set up in HomeAssistant.

Absolutely, I will be running PoE wherever possible, definitely for the doorbell. Not just because of Amazon drivers, I've read reports of burglars using WiFi jammers to make sure wireless cameras are useless during a break-in.

I'm not disputing this but I'm not sure if I understand what it is they're doing or why but am curious.

I have 2 Reolink PoE cameras, and they just hopped on the network with DHCP and I used a web browser to configure them. No app needed. I did install the app later, once the cameras were safely on their own VLAN, and I could connect to them by internal host name or IP address.

Initially I believe so, but they can then be isolated via VLAN / firewall rules and cut off from internet access.

What are the nature of those vulnerabilities though? How many require physical access or network access to exploit?

If someone is in my house tapped into the network, cameras are the least of my problems.

Who cares? If you're doing local-only cameras they're not internet accessible. Who's going to try to hack those vulns? The mailman?

They're investors, not bosses

Being an investor is not an excuse. It makes you amoral, too.

"I didn't build the bomb, I just funded the company that built it."

Couldn't someone standing outside figure out where interior routers are by triangulation, simply by walking around the house?

Isn't that already enough for a heads up display? Direction relative to where I am point and shoot? I don't think the layout of the house matters that much since the person using the 'wifi' router strapped to their back/head can already see what's in front of them?

So combine it with a plan made from a social media posting.

Not just social media postings but past real estate listings can probably provide floor plans.

And if you don't have those, a lot of buildings have common patterns. Its very much in the realm of possibility to train a model using exterior and interior information so that you could have AI generate a floor plan using only exterior data.

Combine that with a small drone that could fly around a building and take different wifi signal readings to triangulate access point positions.

Once you have all that don't you have everything you need to detect movement in the building based on signal disruptions?

Yes, seems like a bit of work but it absolutely seems like the type of effort some governments would put effort into.

The police has access to the planimetry of your home. Secondly, if they get close enough they can measure the distance between the agent and the router, and then deduce all the relative distances from the router to the people inside.

"Just trust us, the people on that boat were definitely smuggling drugs."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=901lYbPmqu4

Yikes. Talk about imperial boomerang.

The police have a very safe job, generally. They've done studies and construction workers have a much higher rate of injury and death than the police in the US. People have this idea that being a police officer is really unsafe and that they're throwing themselves in the line of danger just by doing their jobs, but most people are law-abiding and civil. There are people who are not, but that's not a good reason for the police to pretend like nobody is.

I got hit by a car in a hit and run, and despite there being dozens of cameras, and me getting the footage of the car hitting me and driving off (not clear shot on license plate), the police immediately called it a cold case and refused to even try to get footage from any other cameras nearby - so I'll hold my breath that they use this for anything to prevent crime.

A country like the US has around 0.47 deaths in the line of duty per million per year whereas a country like Germany where people can't buy gun just like that is at 0.37 and a country like the UK where normal cops do not have guns is at 0.05

Which is easier, Wifi 7 in all homes or gun restrictions ?

Personally, I think it's the other way around.

Sci-fi writers understood both what technology could create in the future (and what would be desirable), and also understood how people abuse power and the tools available to them to stay in power (or gain more).

In other words: they predicted the future, more than they inspired it. IMO, that also makes their writing that much more interesting.

Read more Solarpunk? From a writers standpoint though, I suspect its easier to weave a dramatic plot through a dystopic background than a more optimistic one

Many people (including in this website) are hard at work creating the torment nexus.

A lot of aspirational tech was consumed by builders. I dare you to find a nerd who has watched Star Trek and hasn't once thought "wouldn't it be cool if I could interact with the computer with my voice", or "using touchscreens for everything looks so futuristic"?

And yet here we are complaining that our phones are over-listening to us and our cars no longer have knobs.

Whats important to understand about the indeterminacy of peoples minds is that if we could read each others thoughts, we would be vulnerable.

Now with the written word and how seemingly determinant people are in large numbers we are again super vulnerable.

> In 2023, the FTC ordered the company to pay $5.8 million over claims that employees and contractors had unrestricted access to customers’ videos for years.

It’s right in the article

Im running Zoneminder for cameras, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf and lightmusicserver for media, keepass + webdav for a pw manager, file browser for fast file sharing. Takes a week to setup from scratch but from there on it's like 10min of maintenance a week.

I think something like Tailscale's technology could resolve this and many other self hosting access cases. Already, I don't open any ports - just use Tailscale to connect to my PC at home. If this was integrated into the "camera app", it could be seamless - only authentication required. Since the traffic goes directly point to point, the cost of hosting this service isn't too large either.

I understand why it's not feasible. I admin a server at home and one for a small business, and most people do not really understand "why doesn't it just work like a normal app." For the foreseeable future self hosting is an ideological choice rather than one of practicality :/

Tailscale

Humans are basically the same, even if the technology is different.

"History doesn't repeat itself but rhymes a lot" (or words to that effect). What is happening now in the US (and many other places) strongly echoes the events leading up to WW2.

I am quite sure there are a few lessons from the past that can be used to guess where current administration is going.

Then is up for the citzens to let it happen or react.

I feel this entirely. The constant surveillance is almost unavoidable if one ever wants to participate in society. How can I always avoid using a cell phone when my source of income requires that I be accessible most of time. People will respond to get another job or buy this obscure product instead, but as you said, I can’t live my life if I’m constantly researching EVERYTHING that affects my life, and having to wade through so much bs to do so.

That was a major, if not the core theme of 1984, and how the system could create and manage such a state.

I think this is correct, but buying something like a Ring camera is 100% voluntary. And buying a smartphone _used_ to be 100% voluntary, and people couldn't get enough of them. People aren't ignorant about privacy, they don't even care about it. Try telling your friends you turn bluetooth off on your phone and don't have a data plan for it. They'll think you're very, very weird. They do not care about privacy whatsoever.

Nothing against that per se, false alarms should be kept in check.

If you have a system where, as I understand it, the main point is to check who is standing in front of your door, and that system now is one automatic update away from dipping into your bank account... How long until the police departments figure out that donations to a specific company could be very profitable?

This is just the systemization, scaling of what existed previously. It's a rather predictable pattern at this point in America. Introduction through innocuous means, expansion through a combination of convenience and fear, then systematic expansion once the slaves have become accustomed to the new state of things. It's a rather common ratcheting normalization staircase.

Even public information clearly describes how it is the "CIAs" one trick pony, whether it's orchestrating a "color revolution" for "democracy", instigating conflicts and war to feign innocent self-defense, implementing social engineering and Constitutional subversion, or implementing mass surveillance specifically. It's the same wife-beater and child rapist type pattern of grooming abuse that then feigns innocence and deflects blame to anything and anyone else.

Most people are really not all that different than any run of the mill battered wife (even if only in the making), psychologically. I get it a lot when I point out what a trap and an illegitimate, enemy entity that the EU is (not to pick on the EU, because it also applies to the US and many other places, but it's far more pronounced with the "EU-cultists")... You get the constant predictable defenses of the love-bombing "abusive boyfriend"/wife beater in the making responses. "you don't understand", "the EU really loves me", "you never want anything good for me", "he showers me with all kinds of benefits and slick marketing", "we are going to be happy forever".

It's sad, and as someone that has watched that cycle unfold even in my own family, it's really kind of demoralizing and somewhat depressing to know exactly where it's heading and being unable to counter the forces that have roots a long long time ago, forces of nature. So, the US and the EU will have to suffer that which is predictable and was preventable, no matter how much they wanted to see the world through rose colored glasses.

Maybe for humanity's sake, China can free the world of the scourge of this cycle and the psychopathic, narcissistic, maniacal group of people that causes it all... if they don't just kill all life on the planet because if they can't be in control then no one can be in control.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They're license plate readers, make/model/identifying-feature databases, and search engines. I didn't say they were just "license plate readers".

My solution to that is to just not keep anything valuable in the car and leave it unlocked. After getting my car window smashed in twice for the thieves to not find anything other than trash I decided this was a better system and haven't had a problem since. For all I know people have rummaged around my car but I don't have to deal with damages anymore.

My ideal anti-theft device would be a mode where the car is unlocked but the alarm goes off if you try to open the door.

This program would literally not be possible if that was the case, as it's completely opt-in. Citizen, Flock, Ring, they're all symptoms of the same disease.

But let's say you're right: that means that laziness is enough to bring on the surveillance state.

Video door bells are a massive safety feature for people living by themselves.

I disagree. Fear is the tool authoritarians use to control people. First they make you fear the other, then they make you fear their force.

When your fear the other the consent is internal.

You control people by instilling fear.

Anybody can merely force someone else to do something. I can, you can. That's small fry stuff.

The real ticket is getting people to do the things you want with no force. Convincing them to act against their own interests. Now, thats much harder, and that's the type of thing the big dogs are looking at.

Do you mean about the folks with Ring cameras needing to feel control over their environment, and feeling like giving access to the Police/Flock/ICE will help gain that sort of control?

Unfortunately the advent of the IP camera, or the Citizen app, and decreases in crime, have no correlation. It just makes one feel better, which is fine in the same way that smoking in public is fine.

The camera will not prevent it.

A line from George Carlin comes to mind...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-54c0IdxZWc

We need a competent counter-narrative but no one (few) figures in the federal government are offering one. The media also loves to report on crime. Etc.

I hope people will join their local community groups.

HomeKit secure video is cloud stored, but end to end encrypted

Not having to expose data to mega corps is one part of the solution, but more so there should be a solution where government can’t so trivially circumvent 4th amendment by purchasing the data from corps they’re not allowed to collect w/o a warrant.

I don’t know what the “equivalent experience” is, since I never really cared to learn what Nest does or why people want it.

PoE cameras, frigate, home assistant.

I think one of the traps we fall into is imagining that an attacker is somehow intelligent (someone who can immediately attack video storage) but simultaneously uncreative (doesn’t think of some way to make the surveillance footage irrelevant).

I’ve decided that I’m not a high-profile target for covert operatives, but I am a target of opportunity for people who have access to my data once that data is outside of my control. The decisions I make based on that are decisions like, “No surveillance feed goes into cloud services operated by companies I don’t trust,” but “I don’t need to encrypt my NAS”.

u /hopelite is a 4 month old account with ~40 karma who mostly posts about european immigration

low-effort agit-prop bot

>elected government

Elected in part by the useful idiots on HN and many other places. They were so ignorant of how government actually works they were happy to give it this power. They foresaw the jackboot being used to stomp petty criminals and fellow middle class types who don't "pay their fair share". But they had never cracked open a history book because if they had they would know that sort of stuff is never a top priority.

Nah. They aren't. If they were, they would leave. I went to school for aerospace but didn't work in the industry for the longest time because all the jobs available were military.

These people don't care, they might put on a fake persona that pretends to care, but you outright don't care if you work at these places. You get a job somewhere else when you care.

What you hear from them isn't caring, it's just a way for them to pretend they are someone they aren't. The person they pretend to be would not be working there.

We used to know this inherently and we spent half a century passing really well thought out and actionable laws designed to thwart the darker side of capitalism while still allowing it's benefits to accrue to the masses.

Since then we've forgotten how to enforce anti monopoly and media ownership rules. Similarly we've somehow completely turned campaign financing into an open competition for bribes.

It's the government that wants unchecked power, no matter what. This is why people support the 2A, and why it was the 2nd most important thing to those who founded the country.

Ofc they do not. It is only about making money. As is free market. Actually they will always trade morals for profits if possible.

Ah, yes, because those <checks notes> communists and <checks notes again> feudal lords, theocratic regimes, monarchs and all manner of other non-capitalist societies have such a stellar track record of treating people well.

This isn't a capitalist or any other "ist" problem. It is a problem with society and social norms.

The cameras are there because people want them to be. The cameras get used because it is not politically toxic to do so. The use continues because the people objecting to the current abuse don't object on a principal level, they love the jackboot. They'd just rather see it used to levy ruinous fines upon middle class scofflaws (got I hate that word and the people who use it unironically) than whisk brown people off the street. Sure, different people would screech if the powers that be pivoted in that direction but at no point does the screeching add up to change because only the people who hate a specific abuse screech at any one time.

History also teaches us about communism but so many people refuse to accept that part of history and romance it.

So why wouldn’t any accept capitalism and ignore its flaws?

We should all learn from stalinists like you. Murdering 145 million people is quite the feat.

Do you believe burglars have more rights in your home and to your things than you do? Then why do you apply that logic to others that then must suffer your abusive imposition of abuse? How about you just abuse yourself if you want to abuse.

Why does in your mind a "brown person" that is a foreign national who broke the law in and of America by entering and/or remaining in the USA, have more rights to have a job, make money, and even receive public assistance in America than a non-"brown person" that is a legitimate citizen of the USA?

What is worse, is that you don't even understand that your support of this kind of lawlessness is only for the purpose of allowing the rich to plunder the working and lower middle class, the real victims that through your words and actions hate with a passion.

Sure, burglars also benefit from burglarizing, but that does not make it any better than foreign nationals benefitting while the rich also use them like some crime boss in control of a burglary ring. How do you think, e.g., the home builders who make ~30% gross profit on homes that are poorly built due to "immigrant labor" report triple digit billion dollar returns?

You people baffle me that you cannot connect two dots as you at the same time lament that wages are too low, as you support floods of wage decreasing supply flooding "immigration".

No one is targeting "brown people" they just happen to be the majority of brown people the ruling class loves importing to profit from at the expense of the indigenous people, just like when the British and Hispanics did it through slavery. You are no different than the slavery rationalizers of the 17th-19th century. Today the ruling class just figured out how to manipulate you into supporting importation of brown people to undermine the indigenous people, and you don't have the intellect or integrity to understand you are being manipulated.

I and many other US citizens were brutally imprisoned by CBP/DHS under Biden and no one gave a shit, and at the time it wasn't the cool hot topic for lawyers so ACLU and none of the civil rights lawyers I contacted were interested. I even pointed it out here on HN, I was accused of having it coming, it wasn't until Trump came into power that anyone other than my own family actually believed the story about DHS imprisoning me, dragging me around the state in a prisoner van, and insanely getting a retroactive warrant all over a completely fabricated PC of an unnamed dog alerting an unnamed officer (that as far as I know, didn't even exist).

Hopefully this will be a lesson to maybe start giving a shit about these things when they're being tested rather than when the heat gets cranked up against brown people.

I don't understand why you assume that the government is following all the laws when it comes to cell phones and cloud data but won't when it comes to ring data?

> or turn it off entirely

That part you can't do. Unless the battery is removed, phone can be turned back on remotely.