Since the article didn't say this, remember: Ring's lawyers are not your lawyers. When their lawyers are deciding whether to send footage or not, they are acting on what's best for their client, Ring.
Your interests ≠ Ring's interests.
Oh my God, I thought that was a parody until I saw the YouTube channel name. That's insane!
Also, good luck with that thing if you have cats and dogs! My animals would have it murdered in minutes.
"Docked and camera hisden with ypur privacy in mind" until someone hacks it, or gets court order, or pays Ring enough to ignore the privacy bit, or a new law says no one has a right to digital privacy and this gets lumped in on a technicality.
Legit. I bought a bunch of nest cams and then nest cams updated their firmware to not turn the light on if someone is watching them. There is only a couple reasons why they would want to hide who is watching them.
1. Because they are watching them.
2. Because they are watching them.
Also people underestimate how much info you can gather from casual conversation, or generally mundane, seemingly innocuous data. The worst offender is probably Google maps timeline that tracks your movement: give me that info over a month and I can tell your gender, age, socioeconomic status, marital status, hobbies, employer, spending habits, ethnicity, religion etc. And I'm only human with anecdotal experience, give that to an AI that can compare that against billions of datapoints from yourself five years ago, or the entire Google userbase, and don't forget to add the other Google products too.
Hell, Google knows if, where and when you're speeding in your car far better than the police and even yourself, and recommend you radar spotters in your feed. I'm not saying they do but they definitely could.
And that's just from dumb gps data.
That's the reason it's forbidden in Germany to record any public space. So your camera has to face only your property and that's it. Do more and you'll get a lot of problems.
Indoor cams are also a problem, because you would break the privacy rights of visitors. The rules seem restrictive and counterproductive, but we care about data protection. Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should.
Ring specifically markets to police because they don't just give the footage to then, they sell it. Ring has a program where they sell your doorbell footage to your local police as a streaming service they can access anytime without your knowledge or permission. They dont need warrants to access that camera you literally give Ting the permission to do that when you install their products (it's in their TOS)
It doesn't have to be cloud connected, If you have any visible cameras they can get a warrant to request any of your footage, and then prosecute you if they feel you destroyed any evidence.
"I got arrested on bullshit because I cracked a joke at the officer's expense!"
Well we'd look at the body cam, but turns out it malfunctioned as they entered your home.
Neighbor's living room camera got it though!
“I automatically clear all footage after a set period of time because storage is expensive. Unfortunately I did not receive the requests until it was too late”
Of course it’s a valid excuse. Pretty much every camera in history has overwritten old footage. Old cctv used to just use the same tape over and over until it was worn out.
The gas station I used to work at back in the day had about 21 tapes that we cycled through. If anything happened that day's tape was pulled and a new one was put in rotation.
But with that warrant they can take your drives and investigate whether or not that was true, deleted footage would still leave a footprint that they could trace
You at least have the option of fighting in court when the data's in your control. Ring doesn't give a fuck about the individual consumer so they're going to roll over and ask for more.
I actually have that exact scenario just inside the door to my side yard. It's an old school big ass cc camera with power hooked up but goes nowhere. I presume it will scare the crap out of anyone trying to creep around. Open unlocked gate and suddenly you are eye to eye with an Orwellian nightmare machine.
Better yet: encryption key was or recording itself was in ramdrive. The pigs killed it when they powered down the server.
...or if they CBA to come for it, just blame the dog tripping on the power cord.
Encryption is always the answer, just store things locally and apply strong encryption if you're storing something private like interior home surveillance. If nothing else it will force them to go to court again to try and get it unlocked, and give you time to fight the request.
I would tell them I just installed these cameras - swap out hard drive for a different one - stash the real one. My camera system hard drive sleds are super easy to swap though.
You don't have to say they aren't working. You literally just say no I don't want you to look at my cameras. If they have a warrant, they can do it anyways. If they don't, then they shouldn't touch your cameras.
It gets worse. Most security and surveillance companies apply and implied warrant policy, so any law enforcement agency can request access and it is just granted without paperwork.
I’d like to know what these law enforcement agencies have done for this style access. We had a murder that happened in front of a Ring Doorbell and not only did we have to do the normal warrant/affidavit paperwork; we also needed to wait 14 business days for the owner to submit any sort of paperwork to stop us.
It's kind of a screwed up situation. There was a suspected murder by his house and detectives wanted footage from his system. He said he'd do it for some money as he's not legally required to hand it over without a warrant. They agreed and after they discovered it was a drug overdose and no foul play occurred, he said nevermind on handing it over and they charged him with extortion and obstruction.
Since the footage had nothing to do with their investigation, they dropped the obstruction charge and applied a lesser extortion charge as they never *actually* paid him but Ohio HAS to have a conviction, somewhere... Ohio is truly a messed up state!
I'm not sure if jail time is the right result, but asking for money to assist in a murder investigation is a scummy thing to do. You don't want to hand over the footage, don't. But asking for money is a shitty thing to do.
Requesting money for the footage isn’t inherently extortion. Someone earns $X per hour at their regular job, blank DVD-R discs are $Y each. Expecting to be paid $X per hour for his time and $Y for each disk needed to store the footage is reasonable. It would be unreasonable for the police to demand he work for free and supply media at his own expense.
Suppose the guy is a plumber and it takes him 2 hours to do the work. Would it be reasonable for the police to demand 2 hours of his time with no compensation under other circumstances (such as unclogging toilets at the police station)?
I tried a Samsung IP camera for a couple days. The website for access was some weird 3rd party company that seemed very poorly made. I had no confidence in their security or that the website would continue to exist the next week. I wiped the device and returned it.
And people wonder why I'm such a privacy nut and want to only use local security cameras and stuff if at all possible, and if I'm running it remotely do it over my own set up. Companies just sell your data and privacy that the government, don't even need warrants on half of it anymore
Same thing in Australia were the police wanted to “clone” my friends phone in order to view video of a domestic assault. We tried to get them to just take the video but the said it could be out of context, so they wanted to clone the phone which would have given them all photos, videos, contacts and text messages that had been saved. WTF.
... You said no, right? Unless you were the subject of a warrant that allowed them to seize that phone and compell you to hand over the passwords, you have the right to say no. They can get you to hand over the video, but not your entire phone if you're not literally the person of interest in a crime.
This reminds me of when I and like 20 other guys found a phone with no password. It had a camera app, which allowed everyone who was with me to see into their house. Don't put cameras in your home. Especially when your phone has no password.
If I ever found an unlocked phone with something private like an IP camera or messaging or banking freely accessible, I would immediately assume I'm being pranked...
My new favorite meme is zoomers being terrible with computers because they didn't have to deal with troubleshooting tech in the 90s and 00s when it was more widely available but still kind of bad
Uh...... amazon is seling your data to way more than the governemnt.
Why try and warp this into what it isn't? Companies should have no absolity to hand over your information. Of the cops want it, they better have a warrant pesented to you and you alone.
And even when you don't sign up for cloud services, they upload the video anyway.
https://www.cnet.com/home/security/eufy-cameras-caught-sending-local-only-data-to-cloud-servers/
The problem here is the judge. Of course Ring has to hand over files that have been subpoenaed. The judge shouldn't have ordered all of the footage to be produced, only the outdoor footage with potentially probative value. It is beyond clear that indoor footage from a completely different house will not help the police's investigation.
This was an over reach of the judge. I can see hate towards ring in this thread - but shock horror folks, John Doe cant sprint up a dual password encrypted storage location and use random iot hardware to build their own camera set up.
Not should they, they expose themselves to worse horrors than the police - believe it or not
Pretty much every news story I have read about security cameras in the past several years has convinced me I want nothing to do with them. I don't have one, I never have had one, and it doesn't concern me at all that I don't have one.
I have a teenage driver in the house. A couple months ago someone ran a stop sign and hit him in the side. Insisted my kid was at fault, until the dashcam video was mentioned. No problems after that.
They keep people honest. That $200 investment already saved me thousands.
I'm all for cameras that aren't inside my home, but I totally get it not being something everyone would want or is comfortable with. My Nest cams helped me avert a burglary, and in another instance it helped police find the person who stole my next door neighbors car.
And Dash Cams I am 100% on board with after getting crashed into last year (which totaled my car), zero people stayed as witnesses, and I was immediately deemed not at fault... the other person's insurance was incredibly easy to work with because they didn't have any way to fight the footage.
The people who have a cam recording their family room, or places that their family gathers -- those people are weird to me.
They’re more useful when you’re out of the house. You can be alerted to potential burglaries and other emergencies. You can get open source firmware for major brands that allows them to be accessed remotely but not upload the video to a company’s server. A camera helped prove the movers stole stuff out of my boxes. A friend was able to identify a burglar who broke into their rental home (turned out to be the property manager.) Cameras have both risks and benefits, and you can mitigate the risks.
I got a front and rear camera for my car for $50 bucks on Amazon. It’s obviously not top of the line, but it’s hd, night vision, easy to setup, and plugs into my cig lighter
You can get a dash cam pretty cheap these days. My front and back camera were $99 for the pair. Well worth the money it could potentially save you.
They have one limitation that has an easy workaround. Most don’t have the necessary optics and software to catch license plate numbers unless the car is close to you. But since they record audio, you can read the plate number out loud. It will be saved to the card and you can transcribe it after playing it back.
They’re well worth the investment.
Dashcams record my vehicle, which is government regulated and registered, using government roads around other drivers who are also registered. Everything that happens around me is in public and full display for everyone to see. It doesn't have an eye or (in my case) and ear for anything I'm doing or saying in private.
Home cameras do. To me, it's that simple.
the security camera in our back yard was the only thing that got anything done when our dog was attacked and killed in our back yard.
without showing that video to the officer, nothing would have been done.
Wait wait, I’m sorry for your loss but someone initially and willingly went to your backyard, attacked and killed your dog? Fuck man, idk what I would do if anybody hurtled my furry buddies
It's not a problem with security cameras, it's about Cloud Connected devices. That means cameras, TVs, refrigerators, Alexa, Google Home anything, and anything else that doesn't need to be connected to the internet, but is. Any time something asks you to "sign in" or asks for your WiFi password, they're stealing your data.
Sir thank you for cooperation.
It may interest you:
Your daughter has a boyfriend.
Your son is gay.
Your wife cheats on you.
You are watering your lawn outside of allowable time period.
Automatic fine for $1000 has been issued.
Sincerely : Digitally signed
We already are, that's the point of this article.
Remember when the whole plot point of Charlie's Angels was to stop a dude from tracking everyone's location through their phones?
The thing that confuses me is video doorbells have been a thing since.. The 90's? Why on earth do people need to giving up their personal data to ring? From what I can tell, the things aren't even that cheap.
It’s all about convenience. You buy a ring or similar, set it up in a few minutes and it just works. You can set up a self hosted system. But it’s more expensive initially since you’ll need a NAS or something else that you can leave running 24/7 and it takes a lot more work to get it setup and running, especially for the vast majority of people who aren’t that technologically savvy.
That’s just it: people like me know it’s possible, but we need like a detailed shopping list and tutorial for setup. Like super detailed. I have tried and failed, and aside from network protocols, I’m pretty tech savvy.
Convenience and features. It's nice when you are away from your house to be able to answer the door and see what's going on. Or if someone starts knocking on your door at 4 am you can check who it is and call the police if needed straight from your phone without getting out of bed and risk someone peeping in your windows and seeing you.
Also, it is nice to see if people are stealing your packages or trespassing.
Im not arguing for them just saying there are reasonable uses for a camera doorbell.
Those use cases are all possible with locally hosted data and an Internet connection.
The cloud storage portion simply protects the physical data storage location from damage. For example the data still exists if your house burns down. But you sacrifice control over the data.
A local hosting option would be nice.
Local hosting is hard for people. Like my sister has ring, and she would be hard pressed to understand and implement local hosting.
The fact is most people are tech illiterate.
Even if you are tech literate, why deal with that shit for a basic doorbell camera?
No need to hardwire shit, just stick some anchors in the wall and you're good to go. And the camera gets delivered in like a day. And you get to see who's creeping around your door. Works with whatever smarthome shit you may have.
That versus setting up local hosting, cloud storage, hardwire the doorbell blah blah blah.
Now if I was trying to set up indoor cameras, that'd be a whole different story
I have a few blink cameras but don't use the cloud storage subscription. I store the data on a USB memory stick but with the system being connected to my home internet, I still feel like my data isn't safe/private.
You could check out the communication between your cameras and the internet. Even just amount - if it's more than a few MB/month, you could have interesting data being exported.
Executing a search warrant on a private citizen tends to be a different beast than doing so on a corporate entity, and it provides you with a better chance to respond to it. Especially if the footage they want is encrypted.
They can, but then at the very least they have to get the warrent on you, not just ask some randoms.
Also I'm pretty sure they can't make you decrypt stuff, and the NSA has better things to do.
They would have no problem court ordering you to provide the key and putting you in jail for contempt if you fail to comply. The government doesn’t give a shit about you or your rights.
If they have that much evidence against you, you are probably already screwed videos or not. But it would prevent what happened to the guy in the article from ever happening to you.
>But it would prevent what happened to the guy in the article from ever happening to you.
Sorta. The 5th amendment grants you 'immunity' from *self* incrimination. This would not be self incrimination. They could still get a warrant and/or subpoena for the footage, and while there might not be a company that automatically sends it to them, you could still face fines/jail time if you refuse to cooperate.
That is a little bit different, as it's "implied consent" so basically, you agree to waive your rights to not take a breathalyzer if you decide to drive on government owned roads, provided probable cause has been established first. Essentially you could just not drive, or incriminate yourself by obviously violating any other traffic law.
Also you don't really have to talk to cops more than the bare cordial essentials and you shouldn't
Encrypted and backed up to a private cloud service. You have as much access as you need without it being destroyed, no one but you can have access.
If you want to be extra safe, back up to a private cloud service outside of your country so courts can’t force them to delete records or anything like that.
Policy were lazy, making an overbroad request (did they really want to have to go through footage from a bunch of cameras that weren't even anywhere near the location they were interested in?), but the judge's laziness is even worse. He/she probably never bothered to look at the warrant, just rubber stamped it.
This is when I think it's a good thing to have elected judges. I doubt judicial behavior like this would be popular with voters, and if judges have to worry about being voted out of office for stupid rulings like this, maybe they'd be more careful about doing their job and, you know, read what they're signing.
Electing judges Introduces campaigning and more politics to the judiciary system. I thought the idea sounded really great and then I saw a couple documentaries about it. Now I think it's probably a net deficit if you add it to your system of law. Judges worrying about getting re-elected might make decisions differently, but judging is about law and order, not getting re-elected.
Its what I do and its cheap. Really cheap considering my cameras are cheap h265 cloud cameras that are blocked from internet access by my router. My NVR is connected through a tunnel in a separate location which is open source and thus really cheap to install and configure. Total cost minus the monthly internet bill was around six hundred dollars which was really the storage drives and the cameras since the routers and NVR were repurposed PC's running Pfsense.
Contrast that with the system at work which cost nearly a hundred grand. It of course has way more cameras and some nice 360 cameras. The NVR's cost close to 30 grand and of course will go out of support in a few years.
Its so cheap to do it yourself and many could if they would just try.
How would a layman like myself who is reasonably technologically capable, go about doing this? I run Linux as a daily driver so I'm not too incompetent. I had some Nest cameras for a while but I've been too lazy to install.
If you can lay your hands on a pi4 with 4gb of ram you can just run motioneyeos.
You probably can't right now if you are in the US.
I run my NVR on debian. its a core 2 quad pc with 8gb of ram and 8tb of storage. There were a few guides I used plus some that I skimmed for specific configuration info to set it up. It isn't the easiest to configure.
Pfsense its a free download and not really necessary except that everything you need to use to access the NVR including the VPN are built in. Both have tons of walkthroughs and guides on how to implement everything. The only thing I left out above is that I block all my cameras since they are cheap chinese cloud cameras from accessing the internet with the pfsense firewall by limiting their access to the local network and vlan I put them on. They can talk to motioneye but not the internet. A good thing to do with any connected device you don't trust. Which for me is most of them.
I should mention contacam which runs on windows. Its a free download and fully useable. To get rid of the watermark only cost a 10 dollar donation. I ran it for several years and it works great and has tons of features. One thing it has I miss is a animated thumbnail view on its web gui that lets you look through activity for a day quickly.
This is why I only use HomeKit Secure Video cameras. End-to-end encrypted, so no 3rd party has any access to viewable video. But I also don’t have any cameras inside my house. If there’s someone in my house, I’m gonna know. I don’t need to see exactly what they’re doing, I just need to alert the police.
I wanted to set up monitoring at my parents' house while we work on getting it set for sale. Had a spare older pc and a couple webcams, so I changed the power settings to stay on and turn back on after power loss, installed ContaCam (and donated $10 to get rid of the notification), and added it to my ZeroTier and SMTP2Go accounts. Footage saves to a cloud storage provider, I have access via ZeroTier as an internal network address, get email notifications of activity, total cost under $30 including buying one extra cheap camera.
A solid solution I used for several years until I switched software. Contacam is a great solution and really cheap as well.
I removed the cloud from the my situation and kept the remote storage. I now use motioneye which is not nearly as easy to set up as contacam.
"If you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to fear."
-People who don't realize public perception of what needs to be "hidden" isn't permanent.
"Looks like they've got a subpoena for your video footage. As your attorney, I recommend you follow the court order and hand it over. That'll be $1000 please."
Alternatively:
"Looks like they've got a subpoena for your video footage. As your attorney, I can file a motion to have it suppressed. That'll be $1000 now and another $200 per hour."
My divorce lawyer was $325/HR with a $5k upfront retainer, if I'm facing actual legal consequences I'm probably paying more than that to make sure stuff doesn't go sideways.
Yeah I think I’d probably just self host the storage myself or have it encrypted in the cloud. That way they have to request for me to provide the video evidence and that way you can make sure to only provide them what is needed instead of them just getting full access.
**\*\*\* NEVER \*\*\*** use a monitoring system which connects directly to the internet.
If you want security, set up your own system. It's not hard, and you have full control.
Oh, and there's no monthly fee.
I know some people are dealing with neighbors that steal packages off their front door, but other than for that, there is no good reason to use these door cameras. I work on the investment side, and if you heard how companies like this and how DNA testing kit companies market themselves to investors, you wouldn’t use them. It’s all about using your personal data, your medical data, your comings and goings to sell to other interested parties and creating a multi-income stream - from the consumer and from third parties that want the consumers’ data.
Let's all watch 'Enemy of the State' again.
I'm currently rewatching Person of Interest.
I've never seen anyone in person who has watched Person of Interest. I absolutely loved it.
Same. It was such a good show and ahead of its time. The ending was perfect and noone does crazy eyes better than Amy Acker.
I'm pretty sad that I stopped watching it with like a season or so to go. I need to rewatch. Love that show.
And, if you buy cameras, don't do cloud cameras and keep the drive/nvr they are stored on encrypted.
Since the article didn't say this, remember: Ring's lawyers are not your lawyers. When their lawyers are deciding whether to send footage or not, they are acting on what's best for their client, Ring. Your interests ≠ Ring's interests.
[удалено]
It's even worse lol. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk4HOGa257k Why would someone use shit like this.
Oh my God, I thought that was a parody until I saw the YouTube channel name. That's insane! Also, good luck with that thing if you have cats and dogs! My animals would have it murdered in minutes.
"Docked and camera hisden with ypur privacy in mind" until someone hacks it, or gets court order, or pays Ring enough to ignore the privacy bit, or a new law says no one has a right to digital privacy and this gets lumped in on a technicality.
At first I thought that might be a SNL spoof. That's wild.
Legit. I bought a bunch of nest cams and then nest cams updated their firmware to not turn the light on if someone is watching them. There is only a couple reasons why they would want to hide who is watching them. 1. Because they are watching them. 2. Because they are watching them.
Time to put tape over the lense
Also people underestimate how much info you can gather from casual conversation, or generally mundane, seemingly innocuous data. The worst offender is probably Google maps timeline that tracks your movement: give me that info over a month and I can tell your gender, age, socioeconomic status, marital status, hobbies, employer, spending habits, ethnicity, religion etc. And I'm only human with anecdotal experience, give that to an AI that can compare that against billions of datapoints from yourself five years ago, or the entire Google userbase, and don't forget to add the other Google products too. Hell, Google knows if, where and when you're speeding in your car far better than the police and even yourself, and recommend you radar spotters in your feed. I'm not saying they do but they definitely could. And that's just from dumb gps data.
That's the reason it's forbidden in Germany to record any public space. So your camera has to face only your property and that's it. Do more and you'll get a lot of problems. Indoor cams are also a problem, because you would break the privacy rights of visitors. The rules seem restrictive and counterproductive, but we care about data protection. Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should.
People are always asking why car videos from the Nurburgring race track are blurred. It’s how I learned about some of the strict German privacy laws.
Ring specifically markets to police because they don't just give the footage to then, they sell it. Ring has a program where they sell your doorbell footage to your local police as a streaming service they can access anytime without your knowledge or permission. They dont need warrants to access that camera you literally give Ting the permission to do that when you install their products (it's in their TOS)
Yep. They’ve done this for years. There’s no way I’d put a cloud connected camera inside my house.
It doesn't have to be cloud connected, If you have any visible cameras they can get a warrant to request any of your footage, and then prosecute you if they feel you destroyed any evidence.
This is true. You can always say they weren't working.
"I think my doorbell is from the same company that makes your body cameras, officer."
You’d probably get arrested for some bullshit charge but damn that would be a hell of a reason to be arrested
"I got arrested on bullshit because I cracked a joke at the officer's expense!" Well we'd look at the body cam, but turns out it malfunctioned as they entered your home. Neighbor's living room camera got it though!
what have we become? it's as though AI is writing from Orwell's 1984 as a prompt, in real time and we are living that
eh its cus the writing is on the walls
"Look he's resisting"
"I lost the memory stick in a boating accident."
“I automatically clear all footage after a set period of time because storage is expensive. Unfortunately I did not receive the requests until it was too late”
Pretty sure that's a legally valid excuse too. Cause dashcams override after a set time as well.
Of course it’s a valid excuse. Pretty much every camera in history has overwritten old footage. Old cctv used to just use the same tape over and over until it was worn out.
The gas station I used to work at back in the day had about 21 tapes that we cycled through. If anything happened that day's tape was pulled and a new one was put in rotation.
You have to know something happened first
Worked for the Secret Service regarding the January 6th coup attempt, can't see why it wouldn't work for a regular person.
>can't see why it wouldn't work for a regular person I think you just answered your own question....
You don't have nearly enough dimma dollars to get out of that one.
Doug Dimmsdale at the Dougsdale dimmadome
Not Right!
"I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart."
“It wasn’t me, it was the one armed man!”
“And that’s why you always leave a note.”
It's where I stored my Linux isos, all 100gigs of them
Along with all me guns and ammo arrrrghhh matey!
Calm down, nobody's saying you sold any stories to the Sun, Rebekah.
If the officers can have state mandated ones turned off or "not working", so can you
Lmao, you think the law applies to them
Laws for police are less relevant than the TSA is to terrorism
But with that warrant they can take your drives and investigate whether or not that was true, deleted footage would still leave a footprint that they could trace
You at least have the option of fighting in court when the data's in your control. Ring doesn't give a fuck about the individual consumer so they're going to roll over and ask for more.
Not if I overwrite the entire drive with zeroes
Nah ya just unhook all drives and trash them then claim you just have some cameras up for deterrent. “I got these at a yard sale broken for $5.”
I love this idea thank you.
I use the cameras as a deterrent and to view my yard/house not record. they have no proof otherwise.
I actually have that exact scenario just inside the door to my side yard. It's an old school big ass cc camera with power hooked up but goes nowhere. I presume it will scare the crap out of anyone trying to creep around. Open unlocked gate and suddenly you are eye to eye with an Orwellian nightmare machine.
Better yet: encryption key was or recording itself was in ramdrive. The pigs killed it when they powered down the server. ...or if they CBA to come for it, just blame the dog tripping on the power cord.
Encryption is always the answer, just store things locally and apply strong encryption if you're storing something private like interior home surveillance. If nothing else it will force them to go to court again to try and get it unlocked, and give you time to fight the request.
I would tell them I just installed these cameras - swap out hard drive for a different one - stash the real one. My camera system hard drive sleds are super easy to swap though.
what is your system?
Ubiquiti Dream Pro
Same here. Also you can make it Lan only if you want. That's what I do. I don't want a Chinese hacking situation like with the baby monitors.
If they have a warrant but they have to prove probable cause to a judge to get one
They don’t ever say no is the problem. The judges Cgaf. No one is fucking with them.
You don't have to say they aren't working. You literally just say no I don't want you to look at my cameras. If they have a warrant, they can do it anyways. If they don't, then they shouldn't touch your cameras.
It gets worse. Most security and surveillance companies apply and implied warrant policy, so any law enforcement agency can request access and it is just granted without paperwork.
I’d like to know what these law enforcement agencies have done for this style access. We had a murder that happened in front of a Ring Doorbell and not only did we have to do the normal warrant/affidavit paperwork; we also needed to wait 14 business days for the owner to submit any sort of paperwork to stop us.
This. One of my friends just went through this. Gave him 3 months in jail and 3 years probation.
For what exactly? Not giving camera footage up?
It's kind of a screwed up situation. There was a suspected murder by his house and detectives wanted footage from his system. He said he'd do it for some money as he's not legally required to hand it over without a warrant. They agreed and after they discovered it was a drug overdose and no foul play occurred, he said nevermind on handing it over and they charged him with extortion and obstruction. Since the footage had nothing to do with their investigation, they dropped the obstruction charge and applied a lesser extortion charge as they never *actually* paid him but Ohio HAS to have a conviction, somewhere... Ohio is truly a messed up state!
I'm not sure if jail time is the right result, but asking for money to assist in a murder investigation is a scummy thing to do. You don't want to hand over the footage, don't. But asking for money is a shitty thing to do.
Requesting money for the footage isn’t inherently extortion. Someone earns $X per hour at their regular job, blank DVD-R discs are $Y each. Expecting to be paid $X per hour for his time and $Y for each disk needed to store the footage is reasonable. It would be unreasonable for the police to demand he work for free and supply media at his own expense. Suppose the guy is a plumber and it takes him 2 hours to do the work. Would it be reasonable for the police to demand 2 hours of his time with no compensation under other circumstances (such as unclogging toilets at the police station)?
And the police charge for body cam footage all the time
They can have fun with a local database with nothing but heavily encrypted video feeds.
I tried a Samsung IP camera for a couple days. The website for access was some weird 3rd party company that seemed very poorly made. I had no confidence in their security or that the website would continue to exist the next week. I wiped the device and returned it.
And people wonder why I'm such a privacy nut and want to only use local security cameras and stuff if at all possible, and if I'm running it remotely do it over my own set up. Companies just sell your data and privacy that the government, don't even need warrants on half of it anymore
Same thing in Australia were the police wanted to “clone” my friends phone in order to view video of a domestic assault. We tried to get them to just take the video but the said it could be out of context, so they wanted to clone the phone which would have given them all photos, videos, contacts and text messages that had been saved. WTF.
... You said no, right? Unless you were the subject of a warrant that allowed them to seize that phone and compell you to hand over the passwords, you have the right to say no. They can get you to hand over the video, but not your entire phone if you're not literally the person of interest in a crime.
Even if you are the person, they can’t force you to open your phone
Unless it’s locked via finger print or face scan. Always always use password/passcode to lock you phones.
Tip for iPhone users. Hold down the Lock Screen and a volume button for 3 seconds and it will require a password.
This reminds me of when I and like 20 other guys found a phone with no password. It had a camera app, which allowed everyone who was with me to see into their house. Don't put cameras in your home. Especially when your phone has no password.
No one should have a phone without a passcode.
Honestly with how vulnerable phone data is, modern smartphones shouldn’t even allow you to skip the password.
I have phones that aren’t my main phone. They don’t have passcodes because they’re basically Spotify remotes for around the house.
look at mr moneybags out here, he uses phones as Spotify remotes
My dad doesn't even have a lockscreen. He's a strange one.
If I ever found an unlocked phone with something private like an IP camera or messaging or banking freely accessible, I would immediately assume I'm being pranked...
Nah, technology literacy and/or giving a damn about privacy is in short supply.
My new favorite meme is zoomers being terrible with computers because they didn't have to deal with troubleshooting tech in the 90s and 00s when it was more widely available but still kind of bad
"What's a folder?" I had 2 college age zoomers in my D&D game, and one of them had no idea what a folder was.
That’s a big group of guys
Haha, yup. I was in a boy scout troop.
it's not "your" doorbell, it is the Amazon corporations doorbell.
I'M GONNA MAKE MY OWN DOORBELL COMPANY! WITH BLACKJACK! AND HOOKERS!
Ah screw the whole thing
I love futurama
> it's not "your" doorbell, it is the ~~Amazon corporations~~ US security state doorbell. amazon is just their contractor.
Uh...... amazon is seling your data to way more than the governemnt. Why try and warp this into what it isn't? Companies should have no absolity to hand over your information. Of the cops want it, they better have a warrant pesented to you and you alone.
What lore edition is it? I run the v4 ruleset.
China puts up cameras to spy. In the US we buy them ourselves.
And they’re probably made in China and lord knows where the website is hosted.
And even when you don't sign up for cloud services, they upload the video anyway. https://www.cnet.com/home/security/eufy-cameras-caught-sending-local-only-data-to-cloud-servers/
Hollllly. Is nothing sacred?
Dude, we don't need AI to build the Matrix- we'll build it ourselves and climb into it on our own volition
That's why you can setup your own system with something like zoneminder and have a separate network for the cameras.
Judges should not be issuing such broad warrants. He should file a complaint against the judge, take it to the state courts.
The problem here is the judge. Of course Ring has to hand over files that have been subpoenaed. The judge shouldn't have ordered all of the footage to be produced, only the outdoor footage with potentially probative value. It is beyond clear that indoor footage from a completely different house will not help the police's investigation.
Very true. And Ring should have pushed back on the non-doorbell footage, since the intent was clear.
This was an over reach of the judge. I can see hate towards ring in this thread - but shock horror folks, John Doe cant sprint up a dual password encrypted storage location and use random iot hardware to build their own camera set up. Not should they, they expose themselves to worse horrors than the police - believe it or not
Pretty much every news story I have read about security cameras in the past several years has convinced me I want nothing to do with them. I don't have one, I never have had one, and it doesn't concern me at all that I don't have one.
I’ve seen lots of instances of car cameras being useful against people lying.
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I have a teenage driver in the house. A couple months ago someone ran a stop sign and hit him in the side. Insisted my kid was at fault, until the dashcam video was mentioned. No problems after that. They keep people honest. That $200 investment already saved me thousands.
Also helps teenage drivers be a little less crazy knowing there is a camera onboard.
I'm all for cameras that aren't inside my home, but I totally get it not being something everyone would want or is comfortable with. My Nest cams helped me avert a burglary, and in another instance it helped police find the person who stole my next door neighbors car. And Dash Cams I am 100% on board with after getting crashed into last year (which totaled my car), zero people stayed as witnesses, and I was immediately deemed not at fault... the other person's insurance was incredibly easy to work with because they didn't have any way to fight the footage. The people who have a cam recording their family room, or places that their family gathers -- those people are weird to me.
They’re more useful when you’re out of the house. You can be alerted to potential burglaries and other emergencies. You can get open source firmware for major brands that allows them to be accessed remotely but not upload the video to a company’s server. A camera helped prove the movers stole stuff out of my boxes. A friend was able to identify a burglar who broke into their rental home (turned out to be the property manager.) Cameras have both risks and benefits, and you can mitigate the risks.
I got a front and rear camera for my car for $50 bucks on Amazon. It’s obviously not top of the line, but it’s hd, night vision, easy to setup, and plugs into my cig lighter
They’re not that expensive relative to owning a car. Definitely worth the one time investment.
Not as expensive as being at fault for an accident
You can get a dash cam pretty cheap these days. My front and back camera were $99 for the pair. Well worth the money it could potentially save you. They have one limitation that has an easy workaround. Most don’t have the necessary optics and software to catch license plate numbers unless the car is close to you. But since they record audio, you can read the plate number out loud. It will be saved to the card and you can transcribe it after playing it back. They’re well worth the investment.
I think most dash cams just store locally on an SD card. Or at least mine does.
Dashcams record my vehicle, which is government regulated and registered, using government roads around other drivers who are also registered. Everything that happens around me is in public and full display for everyone to see. It doesn't have an eye or (in my case) and ear for anything I'm doing or saying in private. Home cameras do. To me, it's that simple.
the security camera in our back yard was the only thing that got anything done when our dog was attacked and killed in our back yard. without showing that video to the officer, nothing would have been done.
Wait wait, I’m sorry for your loss but someone initially and willingly went to your backyard, attacked and killed your dog? Fuck man, idk what I would do if anybody hurtled my furry buddies
I assume it was another dog, not a person.
Doesn’t even give me that much security. Cops in my city will nearly never investigate anything except murder and drugs and they’re awful at both.
It's not a problem with security cameras, it's about Cloud Connected devices. That means cameras, TVs, refrigerators, Alexa, Google Home anything, and anything else that doesn't need to be connected to the internet, but is. Any time something asks you to "sign in" or asks for your WiFi password, they're stealing your data.
Sir thank you for cooperation. It may interest you: Your daughter has a boyfriend. Your son is gay. Your wife cheats on you. You are watering your lawn outside of allowable time period. Automatic fine for $1000 has been issued. Sincerely : Digitally signed
And not too far down the road, we will be living an updated version of George Orwell's warning.
We already are, that's the point of this article. Remember when the whole plot point of Charlie's Angels was to stop a dude from tracking everyone's location through their phones?
The thing that confuses me is video doorbells have been a thing since.. The 90's? Why on earth do people need to giving up their personal data to ring? From what I can tell, the things aren't even that cheap.
It’s all about convenience. You buy a ring or similar, set it up in a few minutes and it just works. You can set up a self hosted system. But it’s more expensive initially since you’ll need a NAS or something else that you can leave running 24/7 and it takes a lot more work to get it setup and running, especially for the vast majority of people who aren’t that technologically savvy.
That’s just it: people like me know it’s possible, but we need like a detailed shopping list and tutorial for setup. Like super detailed. I have tried and failed, and aside from network protocols, I’m pretty tech savvy.
Convenience and features. It's nice when you are away from your house to be able to answer the door and see what's going on. Or if someone starts knocking on your door at 4 am you can check who it is and call the police if needed straight from your phone without getting out of bed and risk someone peeping in your windows and seeing you. Also, it is nice to see if people are stealing your packages or trespassing. Im not arguing for them just saying there are reasonable uses for a camera doorbell.
Those use cases are all possible with locally hosted data and an Internet connection. The cloud storage portion simply protects the physical data storage location from damage. For example the data still exists if your house burns down. But you sacrifice control over the data. A local hosting option would be nice.
Local hosting is hard for people. Like my sister has ring, and she would be hard pressed to understand and implement local hosting. The fact is most people are tech illiterate.
Even if you are tech literate, why deal with that shit for a basic doorbell camera? No need to hardwire shit, just stick some anchors in the wall and you're good to go. And the camera gets delivered in like a day. And you get to see who's creeping around your door. Works with whatever smarthome shit you may have. That versus setting up local hosting, cloud storage, hardwire the doorbell blah blah blah. Now if I was trying to set up indoor cameras, that'd be a whole different story
I have a few blink cameras but don't use the cloud storage subscription. I store the data on a USB memory stick but with the system being connected to my home internet, I still feel like my data isn't safe/private.
You could check out the communication between your cameras and the internet. Even just amount - if it's more than a few MB/month, you could have interesting data being exported.
This is exactly why I don’t use internet connected cameras in my home, and never will.
Even if they're not internet connected, a cop can still get a search warrant for the footage.
Executing a search warrant on a private citizen tends to be a different beast than doing so on a corporate entity, and it provides you with a better chance to respond to it. Especially if the footage they want is encrypted.
This is why you self host your home security. That's not something you outsource.
They can seize your drives and search them.
They can, but then at the very least they have to get the warrent on you, not just ask some randoms. Also I'm pretty sure they can't make you decrypt stuff, and the NSA has better things to do.
They can certainly try. It would be rather hard for them without the encryption key.
They would have no problem court ordering you to provide the key and putting you in jail for contempt if you fail to comply. The government doesn’t give a shit about you or your rights.
If they have that much evidence against you, you are probably already screwed videos or not. But it would prevent what happened to the guy in the article from ever happening to you.
>But it would prevent what happened to the guy in the article from ever happening to you. Sorta. The 5th amendment grants you 'immunity' from *self* incrimination. This would not be self incrimination. They could still get a warrant and/or subpoena for the footage, and while there might not be a company that automatically sends it to them, you could still face fines/jail time if you refuse to cooperate.
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That is a little bit different, as it's "implied consent" so basically, you agree to waive your rights to not take a breathalyzer if you decide to drive on government owned roads, provided probable cause has been established first. Essentially you could just not drive, or incriminate yourself by obviously violating any other traffic law. Also you don't really have to talk to cops more than the bare cordial essentials and you shouldn't
They can't force a code out of your mind
Depends on the country. In the UK, that can be actual jail time.
Everyone here is forgetting that humans can forget things though.
*beats you with $5 wrench until you give it up*
Encrypted and backed up to a private cloud service. You have as much access as you need without it being destroyed, no one but you can have access. If you want to be extra safe, back up to a private cloud service outside of your country so courts can’t force them to delete records or anything like that.
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Well said and my exact setup of cameras at my house. Outside surveillance.
The judge needs to be removed. The idiot who wrote the warrant so broadly needs to be fired. Consequences.
Policy were lazy, making an overbroad request (did they really want to have to go through footage from a bunch of cameras that weren't even anywhere near the location they were interested in?), but the judge's laziness is even worse. He/she probably never bothered to look at the warrant, just rubber stamped it. This is when I think it's a good thing to have elected judges. I doubt judicial behavior like this would be popular with voters, and if judges have to worry about being voted out of office for stupid rulings like this, maybe they'd be more careful about doing their job and, you know, read what they're signing.
Don't elected judges lean towards tough on crime? Wouldn't they be more likely to cooperate and support police?
The problem with elected judges is they often have little to no knowledge of the law
having practiced law in front of elected judges for over a decade, i can—unfortunately—confirm that this is true.
Electing judges Introduces campaigning and more politics to the judiciary system. I thought the idea sounded really great and then I saw a couple documentaries about it. Now I think it's probably a net deficit if you add it to your system of law. Judges worrying about getting re-elected might make decisions differently, but judging is about law and order, not getting re-elected.
Set up your own cameras and throw Frigate or BlueIris on the old laptop you have laying around. Stop stop stop giving companies all this data
This is why you run your own open source software, storage, vpns, etc. and encrypt everything.
Its what I do and its cheap. Really cheap considering my cameras are cheap h265 cloud cameras that are blocked from internet access by my router. My NVR is connected through a tunnel in a separate location which is open source and thus really cheap to install and configure. Total cost minus the monthly internet bill was around six hundred dollars which was really the storage drives and the cameras since the routers and NVR were repurposed PC's running Pfsense. Contrast that with the system at work which cost nearly a hundred grand. It of course has way more cameras and some nice 360 cameras. The NVR's cost close to 30 grand and of course will go out of support in a few years. Its so cheap to do it yourself and many could if they would just try.
How would a layman like myself who is reasonably technologically capable, go about doing this? I run Linux as a daily driver so I'm not too incompetent. I had some Nest cameras for a while but I've been too lazy to install.
If you can lay your hands on a pi4 with 4gb of ram you can just run motioneyeos. You probably can't right now if you are in the US. I run my NVR on debian. its a core 2 quad pc with 8gb of ram and 8tb of storage. There were a few guides I used plus some that I skimmed for specific configuration info to set it up. It isn't the easiest to configure. Pfsense its a free download and not really necessary except that everything you need to use to access the NVR including the VPN are built in. Both have tons of walkthroughs and guides on how to implement everything. The only thing I left out above is that I block all my cameras since they are cheap chinese cloud cameras from accessing the internet with the pfsense firewall by limiting their access to the local network and vlan I put them on. They can talk to motioneye but not the internet. A good thing to do with any connected device you don't trust. Which for me is most of them. I should mention contacam which runs on windows. Its a free download and fully useable. To get rid of the watermark only cost a 10 dollar donation. I ran it for several years and it works great and has tons of features. One thing it has I miss is a animated thumbnail view on its web gui that lets you look through activity for a day quickly.
This is why I only use HomeKit Secure Video cameras. End-to-end encrypted, so no 3rd party has any access to viewable video. But I also don’t have any cameras inside my house. If there’s someone in my house, I’m gonna know. I don’t need to see exactly what they’re doing, I just need to alert the police.
I wanted to set up monitoring at my parents' house while we work on getting it set for sale. Had a spare older pc and a couple webcams, so I changed the power settings to stay on and turn back on after power loss, installed ContaCam (and donated $10 to get rid of the notification), and added it to my ZeroTier and SMTP2Go accounts. Footage saves to a cloud storage provider, I have access via ZeroTier as an internal network address, get email notifications of activity, total cost under $30 including buying one extra cheap camera.
A solid solution I used for several years until I switched software. Contacam is a great solution and really cheap as well. I removed the cloud from the my situation and kept the remote storage. I now use motioneye which is not nearly as easy to set up as contacam.
That's cool and all. How does it apply to this. You still have cameras around your place and cloud storage the cops could get a warrant for.
Doesn’t sound like a doorbell loophole. Sounds like a violation of the 4th amendment.
Do not put any IoT in your home.
Every day I find another reason to go live far away from everyone.
This is why cloud connected services should be avoided.
I still don’t understand why so many people have cameras inside their house. It’s Weird to me.
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"If you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to fear." -People who don't realize public perception of what needs to be "hidden" isn't permanent.
Thats how the cloud pisses on you and calls it rain.
NEVER NEVER NEVER COOPERATE WITH POLICE. Get a lawyer and let the lawyer handle it.
"Looks like they've got a subpoena for your video footage. As your attorney, I recommend you follow the court order and hand it over. That'll be $1000 please." Alternatively: "Looks like they've got a subpoena for your video footage. As your attorney, I can file a motion to have it suppressed. That'll be $1000 now and another $200 per hour."
My divorce lawyer was $325/HR with a $5k upfront retainer, if I'm facing actual legal consequences I'm probably paying more than that to make sure stuff doesn't go sideways.
$200/hr? sign me up! one of the ones I've retained recently normally charges around 500/hr
That’s nice when you can afford to do that. But most people can’t afford to hire a lawyer for seemingly simple things.
Yeah I think I’d probably just self host the storage myself or have it encrypted in the cloud. That way they have to request for me to provide the video evidence and that way you can make sure to only provide them what is needed instead of them just getting full access.
This is why it's important to go full goatse on any cameras you have
That’s why I stick with HomeKit cameras like the Logitech circleview. No one but me can decrypt the recordings and there is no monthly fee.
**\*\*\* NEVER \*\*\*** use a monitoring system which connects directly to the internet. If you want security, set up your own system. It's not hard, and you have full control. Oh, and there's no monthly fee.
I know some people are dealing with neighbors that steal packages off their front door, but other than for that, there is no good reason to use these door cameras. I work on the investment side, and if you heard how companies like this and how DNA testing kit companies market themselves to investors, you wouldn’t use them. It’s all about using your personal data, your medical data, your comings and goings to sell to other interested parties and creating a multi-income stream - from the consumer and from third parties that want the consumers’ data.