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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

#281

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

noduerme wrote: post #108
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?

SimplySafe can be use with or withut a cloud subscription. With cloud, you are really paying for the monitoring (the discount I get from home owners insurance for monitored fire/co detectors alone pays for the subscription).

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

#282

Post by AlecSchueler »

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.

I took it more as holding them to their actual words and highlighting how they weaseled on the obvious ethical concerns and fear over backlash.

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

#283

Post by cmiles8 »

Amazon knew exactly what they were doing… they’re just scrambling because they got caught and underestimated the public backlash from their actions. They made a calculated decision, and calculated wrong.

Every tech savy person I know is working up plans to rip these things out and go with solutions that have more rigorous privacy controls. For example the UniFi setups keep all your data on prem so you can avoid these scenarios where some company decides “maybe users won’t mind if we just start using the data for something else” games.

The fact that the backlash comes after spending millions on a Superbowl advert to promote the offending tech and use case is a pretty epic “own goal” by Amazon.

I have security cameras, and have always voluntarily shared footage with relevant authorities when there was a valid need, but that’s a decision for me to make, not some corporation.

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

#284

Post by amelius »

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.

"closed circuit" has a different meaning, since the internet.

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

#285

Post by izacus »

dylan604 wrote: post #139
noduerme wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard would it be to sell a solution that makes it easy for a consumer to set up on-site recording? Ship a small box loaded with Tailscale and some software that connects to cameras over a LAN, and runs a webserver that allows user logins through a web interface. Nothing needs to go into the cloud. Yes, then you sell it once to a customer and that's it. No subscription or planned obsolescence. Fine, so factor that…

They have been selling NVR based camera systems for decades. It's clunky. It takes a network savvy person to open up their home network to allow remote access. It takes an even savvier person to not do that in a way that guarantees getting their network pwnd. Having a cloud based solution from an ethical company would be the consumer friendly solution people are actually wanting. Lots of people are willing to spend m…

I never had to use a "network savvy person" to have people connect to their TP-Link or Reolink cameras at home. The cameras record to SD cards (or NVRs) just fine.

Stop spreading lying FUD please.

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

#286

Post by tencentshill »

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.

I would suggest Annke - They appear to be rebranded Ubiquiti/Amcrest cameras with modified Hikvision FW, with fully local capability and great quality (The $30 2k camera sells for $130 from Ubiquiti)

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

#288

Post by JKCalhoun »

Noaidi wrote: post #258
noduerme wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Have you tried just using nothing? Can we all take a look inward and see how fear is selling us these devices we do not need? Maybe it is just me and I have nothing left to loose, but the idea of people needing this surveillance is baffling.

To that end, a fake camera is going to be a reasonable deterrent.

It has been useful to me when traveling to be able to see a package on my porch and text my neighbor to grab it for me.

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

#289

Post by kristopolous »

mlrtime wrote: post #223
kristopolous wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been looking for cheap optionally non-cloud camera recently and cycled through 15 different vendors on amazon buying, testing, probing, and returning. Here's what I found. If you don't want to pay a lot, there's something called "wansview" which is a white-label to a number of cheap amazon cameras (sub $20). You can do ONVIF and RTSP on any of the wansview firmwared devices and then knock them off the internet t…

Are you saying they all come with the same firmware/software or they can be flashed to something else? It seems just as risky picking from a bunch of white labeled chinese knock-off type cameras, who knows whats running on them.

They seem to come with the same capabilities. I assume they farm out the firmware to someone else that they license from, then they get the firmware at basically free in the hope that the firmware maker will push their cloud product but this is all speculation.

These are all working "on the reservation" - I'm not flashing anything. There's always a risk but I think these are just cameras.

They might be running a spy rig side hustle but they open up their ports. I haven't gotten two way audio or the camera motor to move around on the ONVIF protocol yet but there's "profiles" that can do this ... I'll just have to see if the cameras respond to those profiles.

If not I'll contact Wansview.

In my experience with Chinese companies when I contact them about things like this they treat me as if I'm about to pull the trigger on 100,000 of them so who knows, maybe wansview is the win here.

I'm totally open to nice things being cheap.

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

#290

Post by SecretDreams »

crazygringo wrote: post #276
SecretDreams wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, Amazon has our best interest at heart, alright? Surely they're not working on this still in the background.

At the end of day, Amazon is a business, not an extension of the police or the FBI. They initially partnered with Flock because they thought this would be a feature people would want. They literally bought a crazy expensive Super Bowl ad to show it off. Turns out people didn't. So now they're not doing it. Amazon's only interest is to make money.

> Amazon's only interest is to make money

And they make more money when they're on the right side of whatever gov du jour is running America.

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