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Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

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211–220 of 331 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see this all the time at work. Folks treat their relationship with employer like a personal relationship. Be loyal to company and it will be loyal to you. But everyone lies. Your managers will stab you in the back and throw to the ditch anytime they can gain something from it.

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

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ability to “Hey Google, play Spotify” in every room and shower is pretty great. That’s literally the only reason I’ve been using it for 5+ years. Oh, and it was practically free.

This is still unthinkable to me. Trading that much privacy for a little bit of convenience? How does it not make you uncomfortable to know that every conversation in your house is live streamed to someone else's computer?

Not even just for my own sake, but for the sake of my guests as well. Unthinkable, because it's highly dystopic. If it wasn't for all that Science Fiction literature and philosophy that warns people about it, the Stasi wasn't too long ago either.

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not a lie. It's called marketing information.

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but we have to call it out every time.

What? This is basic human social skills. It’s like when you don’t like someone’s friends but you’re not actually going to say that out loud. Instead you say “I'm just too tired to go out” — it’s a “diplomatic out.” Yes it’s a lie at face value but you leave people with their dignity while simultaneously signal your intent. Your friend, who presumably has social skills, picks up the subtext and you successfully commun…

I’m sure this is also cultural, but that approach is terrible. Your friend can’t automatically guess you’re lying, not for the first few times, anyway. Of course they’ll believe you if you say you’re too tired to go out. Then they inadvertently catch you or you reject them so many times they start to believe you don’t want to go out with them, not the other friend. All the while they became closer with the other person, who actually did hang out with them.

Stop lying. You’re hurting the friendship. If you care about the person, eventually you’ll have to be an adult and explain why you’re not comfortable with the third person.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still unthinkable to me. Trading that much privacy for a little bit of convenience? How does it not make you uncomfortable to know that every conversation in your house is live streamed to someone else's computer?

Honestly? I don’t care enough about that. I’ve simplified my life to a degree where I’m not depended on anything, nor I get that much ads anywhere. So it’s just a life built around conveniences and focusing on things I care about.

Would it feel any different if your Google Home recordings were streamed to me, an individual, directly?

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

#216
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did your CCTV increase the time you leave the dogs alone, out of interest? We never needed CCTV in the 90s/00s for dogs. We would have someone take the dogs out for a walk/toilet, or if having to regularly leave them alone beyond what is fair to them, re-home them And if you need to check they're not causing mischief they're likely not tired enough So I'm wondering what use case remains really

> We never needed CCTV in the 90s/00s for dogs. We never needed the telephone back when we had smoke signals and carrier pigeons either. Here are three real scenarios that have happened to us just off the top of my head where I was thankful we had cameras and locally stored footage rather than smoke signals and old timey folklore: 1. We couldn't find our cat last summer. Turns out she was sitting in the living room w…

[flagged]

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

#217
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?

Ubiquiti Unifi Protect.

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

#218
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…

"The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety"

Certainly sounds like "We have the integration and we successfully funneled test videos off of internal Ring cameras to Flock".

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

#219
post #6

This is a temporary rollback while there’s a choice to speak against it. Cloud connected doorbells must die as well as dragnet surveillance.

> Cloud connected doorbells must die as well as dragnet surveillance. I'd disagree and restate that cloud services willing to make these kinds of deals must die, painfully, in a fire after being stung by a million killer bees, after receiving a million paper cuts and having lemon juice poured all over them. It is possible for a company to charge a monthly fee to provide a service and only that service without attempt…

Cloud services change. Politicians change. Once the data is in someone else's hands it is at risk.

Imagine our current data corpus in the hands of the Stasi for example.

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right..Or instead of STUN/TURN just use Tailscale for now. I think the reason no one's packaged this into a slick Ring-like plug-and-play probably comes down to corporate greed and how hard it is to raise money if your intention is to start a business that doesn't have ever-expanding verticals. Like, this is a set of solved problems. They just need to be smoothed and packed for the user.

You seem pretty sure of yourself. So when will you be releasing this product that you claim is such low hanging fruit? Right, now you know why this product doesn't exist.

hey dude, it's a free idea, you're more than welcome to it. I just thought of it a couple hours ago as I was writing that. I thought it was pretty good - especially the part about using an old smartphone with Tailscale as the hub because it has backup connectivity and power. Maybe I'll throw a prototype together this weekend if I have nothing better to do. Or maybe you should. You could be that guy.
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