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Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

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Re: Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

#101

Post by nozzlegear »

whatever1 wrote: post #80
alehlopeh wrote: post #61

A lot of you won’t want to hear it but HomeKit + iCloud secure video is the only way to go. For one thing it’s end to end encrypted. You can also do ML stuff like face recognition which happens locally on your Apple TV. And you can set it to trigger HomeKit scenes if eg the person in the video isn’t recognized, or if it recognizes a particular person. Yeah Apple bad, blah blah. But they don’t have an incentive to sel…

Unless you explicitly enable Advanced Protection mode for all your devices, Apple stores your key in their servers and will give it to whoever legitimate looking asks for it. Aka ICE etc will definitely be granted access.

> Unless you explicitly enable Advanced Protection mode for all your devices

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.

Re: Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

#102

Post by stalfosknight »

chmod775 wrote: post #92
dabinat wrote: post #85

> Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. 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…

They're saying that because saying what they actually mean would paint flock in a negative light, which they likely want to avoid for various reasons.

So they'd rather lie in their press release.

Re: Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

#103

Post by zamadatix »

p-e-w wrote: post #70
alehlopeh wrote: post #61

A lot of you won’t want to hear it but HomeKit + iCloud secure video is the only way to go. For one thing it’s end to end encrypted. You can also do ML stuff like face recognition which happens locally on your Apple TV. And you can set it to trigger HomeKit scenes if eg the person in the video isn’t recognized, or if it recognizes a particular person. Yeah Apple bad, blah blah. But they don’t have an incentive to sel…

There’s actually another alternative: Just don’t install surveillance in your home. Approximately nobody had it 20 years ago. Before asking which unreliable, overpriced, invasive gadget to buy, think about whether you really need any of them.

Approximately nobody was using everything x years ago. That's not really a measure of what's nice to have and what's not, it's a measure of how long the nice to have has been around.

Re: Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

#104

Post by nozzlegear »

p-e-w wrote: post #70
alehlopeh wrote: post #61

A lot of you won’t want to hear it but HomeKit + iCloud secure video is the only way to go. For one thing it’s end to end encrypted. You can also do ML stuff like face recognition which happens locally on your Apple TV. And you can set it to trigger HomeKit scenes if eg the person in the video isn’t recognized, or if it recognizes a particular person. Yeah Apple bad, blah blah. But they don’t have an incentive to sel…

There’s actually another alternative: Just don’t install surveillance in your home. Approximately nobody had it 20 years ago. Before asking which unreliable, overpriced, invasive gadget to buy, think about whether you really need any of them.

Why? I like to keep an eye on my dogs when we're away, and it's all done securely using HomeKit video. My iCloud is e2e encrypted and the camera doesn't upload anywhere besides there.

What's the invasive part? Not giving my dogs privacy when we're out of the home?

Re: Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

#105

Post by nozzlegear »

Barrin92 wrote: post #84
p-e-w wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s actually another alternative: Just don’t install surveillance in your home. Approximately nobody had it 20 years ago. Before asking which unreliable, overpriced, invasive gadget to buy, think about whether you really need any of them.

I always wonder what the overlap of this economically is. If you can afford all this home surveillance gear aren't you already likely to live in a place that's comically safe? Why are in particular Americans with their gated communities full of soccer moms and Labradors putting cameras on their house as if they're living on a US military base?

We have cameras to watch our dogs and make sure they're not getting into trouble with each other, things in the house, the cats, etc. We're not worried about bad guys or our personal safety.

Re: Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

#106

Post by nozzlegear »

righthand wrote: post #65
alehlopeh wrote: post #61

A lot of you won’t want to hear it but HomeKit + iCloud secure video is the only way to go. For one thing it’s end to end encrypted. You can also do ML stuff like face recognition which happens locally on your Apple TV. And you can set it to trigger HomeKit scenes if eg the person in the video isn’t recognized, or if it recognizes a particular person. Yeah Apple bad, blah blah. But they don’t have an incentive to sel…

Apple totally sells your data, they just anonymize it first. Why do you think they shifted towards services? They also can give the Feds access to your iCloud data through a NSL. Just like Prism.

McDonald's can give my data to the feds through an NSL, yet I still buy their fries every now and then despite the risk.

Re: Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

#107

Post by geerlingguy »

idle_zealot wrote: post #86
s0a wrote: post #83

Frigate NVR + Amcrest cameras. 100% local, private, on-device AI object recognition and classification. Can use a Google Coral USB TPU to speed that up. Runs on hardware as modest as a Raspberry Pi.

Great. Now package that as a plug-and-play product so more than 1000 nerds will use it instead of participating in the largest dragnet in history ;)

This is only half the problem.

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.

Re: Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

#108

Post by noduerme »

dakolli wrote: post #95

Doesn't matter, I've come to the conclusion I'll never buy into one these networks. There's a reason "security" cameras were always on "closed circuit", there's no need give these companies money.

I've had a couple Ring cams for years. I hate the network, hate having to pay for the cloud storage, I've just been too lazy to research self-hosted alternatives. Is there solution you'd recommend that's relatively polished and easy to use?

Re: Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

#109

Post by recursive »

Barrin92 wrote: post #84
p-e-w wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s actually another alternative: Just don’t install surveillance in your home. Approximately nobody had it 20 years ago. Before asking which unreliable, overpriced, invasive gadget to buy, think about whether you really need any of them.

I always wonder what the overlap of this economically is. If you can afford all this home surveillance gear aren't you already likely to live in a place that's comically safe? Why are in particular Americans with their gated communities full of soccer moms and Labradors putting cameras on their house as if they're living on a US military base?

I like the idea of comedy based on safety.

Re: Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

#110

Post by riversflow »

idle_zealot wrote: post #87
dabinat wrote: post #85

> Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. 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…

You seem to be taking the company's words at face value and assuming good faith. I would caution against doing that.

Amazing how often people do that. Corporations have very little incentive to be truthful and often have good reason to be dishonest. I notice it particularly wrt video games, gamers are always taking studio’s messaging as gospel and not corporate comms.
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