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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

#81
Too little too late. I’m cancelling prime and returning my ring camera, even past the return deadline. Andy Jassy funded that Melania documentary and is generally a spineless oligarchic friend of the Trump administration. Amazon is basically anti constitutional.

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

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Anyone got alternatives? I love the convenience of a video doorbell but I really really would like to not help the police or ICE or anyone else for that matter unless I decide it's a good idea.

Normal door bells are pretty great and have less overhead and maintenance... All tech puts it's best foot forward, some of it's really nifty, but a camera on every street corner is always going to pose more risks than it's worth IMO... It's work to go back to the old ways but I think this is one we step we should really all take.

I think your take on cameras is legitimate, but from my home office I can't hear my doorbell if I have the door closed or if I have music playing at even a low volume. Installing a smart doorbell that notifies me when rung was a significant upgrade over the old doorbell.

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

#84
post #70

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.

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?

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

#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 and money allow?

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

#86
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 ;)

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

#87
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.

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

#88
post #70

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.

Tons of people had cameras 20 years ago. It was 2006, not 1906. Besides, we've had pets for surveillance for hundreds of thousands of years. Literally nobody in history has thought "nah no need for security".

What a ridiculous way to try and be on a high horse.

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

#89

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…

When I got an Apple TV I never expected the main value I'd get out of it was being a smart home hub. I do wish the automations were a bit more programmable. Other than that it has been perfect, everything even failed over to my other Apple TV when rearranging the living room without having to think about setting either up as hubs.

Also it's the perfect Tailscale exit node that's always online in your home (They have a tvOS app)

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

#90

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…

And you can run open source camera firmware on a disconnected vlan if you don't want to trust a phone app or a camera with internet access.

https://github.com/radredgreen/wyrecam

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