Ring introducing new feature to allow police to live-stream access to cameras

Tell your parents a stranger somewhere faraway really, sincerely appreciates them. And you can tell them too, objectively, that they're 1 (or 2) in a million.

The Ring situation was already slimy, having smoothly accessible channels for LE to bypass customer's refusal to cooperate with informal footage requests. Live streaming at will, would really put things in perspective, exalting the morose, lone clinical cynic to an urban archetype.

I understand folks who are into traipsing through life before a perennial, unblinking audience of strangers. I've been afflicted with diseases myself. But foisting it on neighbors seems biblically ungood.

I know it's socially acceptable to mock and belittle snowballs, but I think this will be a big one.

We have a number of Ring devices and are overall happy with them but your 12 menus deep comment is on the money.

Even workaday settings for devices are scattered haphazardly hither and thither through the many pages of their app’s interface and I regularly find myself having to Google for the location of settings.

It’s crying out for, at least, some sort of smart search box.

So “hard to find” for something like this is practically guaranteed.

Also any update resets your selected options.

SMS isn't viable, this is about *realtime*--the cops are trying to use cameras to find or follow somebody.

And the reality is such cameras are designed to be pointed at public spaces. So what if the cops can see it? Using technology to expose that which is otherwise invisible should require a warrant, but I don't mind technology that simply provides eyeballs on what's public anyway. (Note that I feel differently about security cameras in general--they are often pointed at non-public spaces and access should be opt-in on a camera by camera basis. Cameras covering the front entrances, fine; cameras covering back entrances, ask or get a warrant!)

Good bet.

What’s the Comcast story? (just did a quick search)

Yes, this is my take as well, and I think it's the correct one from both a technical and legal POV. It's one thing for the government to try to compel an organization or person to create a feature they want from scratch. They have made noises in that direction in the past (like the FBI vs Apple trying to invoke the All Writs Act) but it's been on very shaky ground, on both 1st and 13th Amendment grounds as well as others. But the government can be a lot more aggressive and courts a lot more permissive when it comes to merely making use of functionality that already exists. Even putting aside all the massive numbers of perverse incentives, but the thing is of course those shouldn't be put aside, we've seen this movie before over and over and over again. Once a feature exists that can generate a lot of direct revenue for a company and the only thing that keeps them from turning the knob up is "we're totally not evil cross our hearts!". Like holy shit, in 2025 who really goes "oh well it's opt-in!"

I think this particular one is pretty important to know about because a lot of people deploy Ring stuff almost by default, and some HNers (including me as it happens) have some level of influence or even control over it. I always meant to put some effort into updating my self-hosted security system efforts but this is a major kick in the butt. Have to know this exists and be able to offer solid credible alternatives.

Edit: to add a direct pertinent example, WE LITERALLY JUST HAD 5 DAYS AGO ON HN A 500+ COMMENT HUGE THREAD ON "Oakland cops gave ICE license plate data; SFPD also illegally shared with feds" [0]. And there are people really claiming "nothing to see here, move along, local and feds would totally never conspire to abuse anything in violation of the law let alone not in violation of the law"!?

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0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44561716

We’re going to get a news article of aome cop is going to be scanning for his ex-girlfriend, I guarantee it

You have to be totally naive to buy a Ring camera in the first place. Of course it will be used in ways you can't control, it uploads everything to "the cloud".

Even if it were to happen, there would be a carve out for the state.

The DHS is collecting a massive database of facial geometry at the moment in preparation for nationwide constant realtime facial recognition, just China has.

The cameras are up and collecting data at every airport, as well as every traffic intersection in Las Vegas (and presumably other cities).

The taliban actually have a fascinatingly (philosophically) based law where it’s illegal to photograph a living thing. I’m not sure about the reason. Maybe derived from the not being okay to depict Mohammed. But I kind of dig the concept especially for living things that can’t consent to be captured in images

> only time you could do any query with a user ID returning multiple rows for further use would be to serve data directly back to the user

What do you mean by that?

> In a broader vein, it's time for regulation forbidding the retention or aggregation of any person's data for any commercial purpose other than the one most proximal to the actual transaction in which the person engaged, unless they explicitly opt in.

This is basically GDPR

> It's time for regulation that no images of people may be retained for any commercial purpose

And we know exactly how such a regulation will be met by both companies and the tech crowd. See GDPR, AI Act etc.

Fuck people for installing this shit. Parasites need a host.

Synology Surveilance Station [1], it supports 2 cameras per NAS for free, extra cameras $50 per device. I use an old 2 HDD NAS with 2 cameras for a few years already, it works perfectly well. (One Reolink camera, another Amcrest, both record video in h264).

[1] https://www.synology.com/en-global/surveillance

Just use some Reolink or similar ONVIF cameras like Axis or Dahua. Block traffic from them to anywhere other than your NAS. They're pretty simple, mine have the ability to just FTP captures to a given system, and thus I've got redundant captures (on a system with a bunch of drives, and on the microsd cards in the cameras). Maybe there's some spooky backdoor crazy way they can phone home, but I doubt it given how they're PoE and access to basically every other system is locked down my firewall.

Trying to find an affordable camera / baby monitor that was both secure and offline was a tough one for me, it seems every single consumer oriented camera has a remote access functionality (= a backdoor) nowadays, and the baby monitors that don’t use wifi are only secure through obscurity with some of them being as easy to hack as buying the same model.

I ended up with an Amcrest IP2M-841 and Tinycam on Android (as I understand using RTSP), and blocking internet access of the camera through the router. As I found out, just connecting it to the internet will automatically connect to servers for allowing “easy setup” of the remote access feature.

I'm full Unifi. With all of Ubiquiti's faults considered. I still feel 10000000x better about it than Ring.

I've got a bunch of POE Reolink cameras and their doorbell cam. LAN only, no centralized cloud server. So far happy with them.

They're a little pricey but https://www.ui.com is nice. It's what I want to replace my Ring with

HomeKit Secure Video has a cloud, but it’s locally encrypted with keys Apple doesn’t have before it leaves the house. It supports a bunch of cheap cameras and doorbells (which will try to phone home, but you can block them from internet access without breaking local HomeKit).

Not exactly what you’re asking for, but great ease of use at a good price, and good privacy.

I use a local NVR containing a couple of hard drives totalling maybe 8TB of storage attached to same-branded cameras (ranging between $80 and $150 each) that I can access locally, and remotely via Wireguard.

I'd say it's economical in comparison to cloud options, but, yes, not all that practical to the less technical crowd.

I specifically block the camera and NVR local IP addresses from accessing the internet. I don't really want the possibility of an private company accessing live (or recorded) video of where I live.

Brand is Reolink. I've been slowly building up the system over five-ish years and have not yet found any reason to kick myself for choosing that brand. I also have some TP-Link Tapo cameras for more temporary things, like monitoring pets.

I've also setup Frigate as an alternative system, both for my own interest and as a way to aggregate different camera brands to a single interface. Frigate can be a bit complex.

Ubiquiti's ecosystem. You own the NVR, it stores locally and they have a doorbell w/ camera.

>home-rolled a means to access the cameras remotely, but it’s not exactly economical or practical

Cloudfare tunnels are free. You just pay for your domain name. Ngrok is also an option.

If you want to be extra secure, you can do ssh port forwarding through the cloudfar

Personally I'd look through the brands listed in the Home Assistant integrations, either Local Push or Local Polling :

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/?cat=camera&iot_c...

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/?cat=camera&iot_c...

The documentation for setting up the integrations should also indicate whether there's any cloud involved.

The TP Link Tapo ecosystem is really good and can record directly onto SD cards. Seamlessly works with Google Home, I can access my cameras outside of the house without signing up for their cloud option.

I think you would basically want to do custom firmware on your camera basically.

There's also thingino, I have not gone this route yet.

https://thingino.com/

If you have cameras the police can get a subpoena to force you to provide what you have saved. If you don’t have cameras, you can’t give what you don’t have.

There exist third party firmware for $10-20 cameras available on Amazon.

Install that and your open source backend of your choice and Bob's your aunty.

There's lot's of generic NVRs and cameras for relatively cheap at the usual far-East retailers.

Eufy Security?

Yes, they have a feature with their 'Pro' base station and Premium subscription, to store video locally on SD card, but still the only way to access the video is through the Ring app. IMO they are just choosing not to compete with the on-prem closed circuit systems, which represent a niche market compared to normies who want a notification when someone rings their video doorbell.

https://ring.com/support/articles/pmod0/Using-MicroSD-Cards-...

That is wild, I think being able to record onto an SD card or whatever should be the bare minimum requirement. I personally would never buy anything that does not have an offline option.

At the rate the US is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes illegal. Add that most of these cameras are chinese and then maybe you won’t have that choice anymore.

> It seems like people are missing the fact that it's opt-in from the police to the consumer.

There is no such thing short of a physical switch. To believe otherwise is the absolute height of naïveté.

This has been in Ring for years and police have their own dashboard. Most importantly, it was already found Ring or Police have enabled access on their own.

Based on the articles, do you really think Ring and police cannot just get whatever they want?

https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2023/05/rings-priva...

https://www.reviewed.com/smarthome/features/ring-changes-pol...

https://www.silicon.co.uk/e-regulation/surveillance/amazon-r...

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/10/amazon-ring-security-cam...

People aren't missing the fact - they're getting bad information from a supposedly reputable source. I don't really know how to solve that problem.

Did you audit the code?

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>Opt in means nothing in the face of a legal subpoena

Or scarier, a National Security Letter the government claims the company can't even talk about except maybe in secret court. Or perhaps scariest, a """"National Security Letter ;^)"""", ie, the company absolutely wants to gleefully cooperate with the government and give it whatever it wants for the right price, but also wants to maintain a veneer of "we totally care" and the government obligingly produces some demand and the company then goes "oh geez we totally place customers first and privacy is our highest priority ....but we had to because of terrorist pedo murder rioter jaywalkers, the government ORDERED us to not our fault nothing we could do!" while facilitating it without any challenge at all.

In that case they don't need consent anyway and it's not about this new feature.

But I can't avoid it. 2 of my 4 neighbors have this installed. So now, everytime we are outside, on my own property, we're being captured without consent.

Let me know if you find a good privacy-focused alternative. I’m absolutely replacing mine after this.

+1 here.

The last time I checked, they're custom (read: expensive) and require building out your own backend video storage.

Google added exactly this to SWE role attributes, to be checked each performance review cycle. Managers managing managers, directors managing directors. Are you shorting GOOG right now?

There are plenty, but they're all very DIY and I don't think there are any turnkey solutions that you can just plug in and have work.

I think a better question is... why do we all need this? I get that everyone these days is afraid of everyone and everything, but it's not rational. Very few people actually need a doorbell camera.

And if something actually does happen where you think video evidence might be useful, nine times out of ten the police aren't going to help you anyway.

I personally use unifi doorbell, mostly because I already had dream machine, but AFAIK they have also less expensive options.

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The owner isn't the only party whose privacy is being affected unless you believe these cameras will never capture anything other than the owners.

They could use dark patterns. E.g. make you click yes in an inattentive moment.

Or use a checkbox that mysteriously takes on the checked state while you are sure you didn't check it.

So you are telling me the can get the data my Facebook, Google and any other US company without my consent but in this case it's somehow actually enforced?

You’re missing the point. The last report in 2021 stated that they sold 1.7 million units in that year alone. The effect is that nearly every square inch of any populated area now has a camera pointed at it that police can access. Please tell me how you opt out of that.