14h ago

Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism and Mass Surveillance

www.eff.org

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is back at the helm of the surveillance doorbell company, and with him is the surveillance-first-privacy-last approach that made Ring one of the most maligned tech devices. Not only is the company reintroducing new versions of old features which would allow police to request footage directly from Ring users, it is also introducing a new feature that would allow police to request live-st

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I bought a cheap Chinese security camera for a fraction of the cost of a Ring and signed up for their cloud storage system. I'm more comfortable with the Chinese government being able to access footage of my backyard, than the current US administration.
- Not too long ago, that statement would have sounded controversial or even crazy. Nowadays though, I’m shocked how much sense it makes to me. Never thought that I would agree with something like that.
  
  Yeah. It's crazy. I would choose neither because I can DIY something secure but for non-technical folks in North America today, the Chinese gov't having your video is safer than a private US corporation. I didn't imagone I could make this judgement back in 2022.
  
  To be honest china is more likely to come to their defense than american police are.
- Or you could choose an option that does neither. Why feed the autocrats at all?
  
  eh, you might have a spare day to source a completely uncompromised camera and find someone in a trusted neutral country who runs an unproblematic hosting service and configure a system to do offsite storage in a secure way, but I've got other stuff going on. If you can source me a reasonable alternative I'm happy to use it when it comes time to renew my subscription.
  
  Just buy a Reolink Doorbell. Pop in an SD card. Put in on your wifi or LAN and access it with your browser. You're done. It's all local. There's an optional app that does need an external server, but that's optional and there is no subscription.
  
  Reolink devices still reach out to a bunch of different servers across the world as soon as you connect them to a network.
  Always isolate an IP doorbell or camera on its own access point or virtual network, where it can't see or interact with other devices on your local network, and then block it from WAN access.
  
  Ok, but one of the most important use cases is non-local access.
  If I'm at home I can just go to the door.
  
  Wireguard/tailscale in?
  
  This is highly unlikely to be able to notify you of someone ringing the door. It's doable, but takes some tinkering which most people are not able to do because of all the reasons mentioned in previous comments.
  
  I don't know anything about this product, but if the data is just on an SD card attached to the doorbell, couldn't someone just steal the SD card? Like, this is why offsite storage for cameras is useful.
  
  Sure. That's why I have my Reolink doorbell hooked up to Frigate NVR running on my home server. And frigate is hooked up to my home assistant. But that's the thorough and secure solution, not the quick and easy solution that the grandparent poster was asking for.
  
  An offsite server is not under your control and accessible by who knows. Surely it is still a privacy concern.
  Privacy is like security in that it costs time. Most people don't spend time on even having a conversation like this but if something bothers you then finding a spare day is easier.
  
  Besides that I would trust a Chinese cloud way more than a murican one (I'm non-US), this really is a lazy excuse. This apathy paired with ignorance or being technically challenged is the main reason dystopian shit like ring even sells at all. Or all those silly "smart" assistants like Alexa.
  Phrases like "renewing my subscription" in context of a fucking doorbell itself sounds so absurd to me.
  E.g. A raspberry (or the likes) with some run-of-the-mill ip-cam, some wifi-doorbell and AgentDVR would do the same for even less moneyz. And just for you, not the whole world. Wouldn't take more than some hours of setup.
  
  Phrases like “renewing my subscription” in context of a fucking doorbell itself sounds so absurd to me.
  Why? It's logical to want your video footage held offsite so that burglars don't just take the device you're storing the footage of them on. Which means paying someone to store it for you. Which means a subscription. Even if you're running AgentDVR on an offsite server that you control, you're still paying money to the hosting company.
  A raspberry (or the likes) with some run-of-the-mill ip-cam, some wifi-doorbell and AgentDVR would do the same for even less moneyz. And just for you, not the whole world. Wouldn’t take more than some hours of setup.
  Wow. Do you have any idea what you sound like there?
  (also, it's not even true on its own terms. A raspberry pi plus all the components and equipment necessary to set up what you're describing would be easily over $100, I paid $19 for my Chinese internet camera)
  
  Why do I need the footage offsite? Because the burglar might've stolen the server/raspberry? I actually have my server storage hidden, if that would even be on the radar of a thief, which I really doubt.
  But even if, an encrypted storage of your own choosing still beats random access by who-the-fuck-even-knows.
  OK, granted, your 19-moneyz-solution is financially hard to beat, and probably no Chinese really gives a rats ass about your data. But even the thought that some random cloud-admin might just take a peek out of boredom...ugh. But OK, I'm a very private person.
  A proper solution that does not suck probably costs a bit more than a ring (dunno what they cost though), but if one owns a house, one probably has a few spare hundreds or thousands for a secure surveillance.
  
  Nah you're just being lazy. Its really not that hard. At least be ashamed man instead of this defeatist bullshit.
  
  What you're saying makes me think you aren't aware of the technical knowledge of your typical smart doorbell or cam user, which is basically little to none.
  
  And exactly this behavior ("I have no clue about the thing I will do, but I'll do it anyway without educating myself prior") is what makes everything suck more and more because it always gets adapted to the lowest common denominator.
  We're only still alive because people need licenses to drive cars or fly planes.
  
  But this maybe implies that there's a possibility to change this behaviour. Which is infeasible. For many of the same reasons why we don't have people specialize in more than a couple of areas.If you're not implying that and you're just saying that in vacuum, then yeah sure. That said it's not the only reaaon why things suck more and changing this behaviour is not the only way to not have things suck, For example a government in a more democratic system might serve its citizens more than its corporations and ban these practices.
  
  Yeah sure, government shall intervene. But...i can probably expect more from anyone else.
  And no,I didn't imply everyone should be expert at everything. That is beyond impossible, even for fractions of fractions of things. But. If you wanna drive a car, you're forced to learn a shitton and pay like 2k € to be allowed to do so. One of the reasons is safety for others.
  If I had no clue about e.g. doorbells, I would ask a pro I know or search the net or whatever. At least the absolute basics of it. Even setting the pure curiosity aside, just to know what the heck I'm getting at. Admitted, I might have much more spare time than the regular Jane or Joe, but I'd still do that if I had to work. Just less intensive.
  But yes, this mixture of apathy and ignorance is the leading reason why the internet sucks so much nowadays then 30 or even just 20yrs ago. The majority of absolutely clueless people not knowing how they get fucked and where to draw a line. Sure, to some it's just a tool they don't need to know shit about to use it. No judging. BUT that doesn't change the fact.
  
  That's the thing, you correctly see the difference in available time after work. There's more to it. The difference stacks over time. Having read this or that makes you understand terminology, patterns, builds confidence and over time that marginal extra time I have had has made it possible for me to grok a manual in 15 minutes but my father who hasn't had that time takes 45 minutes from his shorter available time. Then there's all the modifying details around kids or no kids, how much more hours the lower parts of the working class have to do to pay rent today vs earlier and so on and so forth. Everyone really but it's just much worse for the lower sections.
  And then there's the problem of availability of products without extensive research. There's few brands owned by few large corpos that spend a lot pushing them left front and center on their digital platforms. That increases significanty the amount of work anyone has to do to avoid surveillance in this case. And as you understand, increasing the amount of work, increases the amount of time, and there's hard cutoffs which lead to the work not being done, which leads to the marketing campaigns succeeding in getting dad to buy a Ring. These people study, research and know well how to get people who seemingly have choices to choose their product 8 out of 10 times. Especially when transacting via their digital platform.
  Which is why we're fighting a losing game if we rely on the individual when they're standing against the corporation which acts as a large collective with collective resources aligned to achieve their goals. This is why individualism is profitable and therefore encouraged. Consumers, employees have to also act as a collective which pools their resources like time, expertise to counteract this. E.g. by having people, supported by the normies, digest, analyse and spit out the results in trivial form (when posaible) that also takes very little time for everyone else to grok, so they make the right decision. Example that come to mind is Consumer Reports.
  
  What? We can't make people read setup manual for 30minutes? Might as well stop living now because whats the point of our society if we are defeated by a pamphlet?
  
  Always has been and it falls on the ones that aren't defeated by the pamphlet to help the rest, since their labour allows the standard of life pamphlet interpreters enjoy. 😂
  
  Its just sheer laziness. These people are dragging our entire society down because they can't spend 30 minutes to read the manual. This should be shameful unjustifiable behavior.
  Betting 100% that the same people are calling someone else lazy every week without any self awareness.
  
  Oh I'm lazy too (in regards to boring stuff). But I know what I don't know and would not start to argue about e.g. car-mechanics or buy something without at least getting a basic grasp of that. Lazyness isn't an excuse for ignorance 😁

63 comments