A Super Bowl ad for Ring security cameras boasting how the company can scan neighborhoods for missing dogs has prompted some customers to remove or even destroy their cameras.
Online, videos of people removing or destroying their Ring cameras have gone viral. One video posted by Seattle-based artist Maggie Butler shows her pulling off her porch-facing camera and flipping it the middle finger.
Butler explained that she originally bought the camera to protect against package thefts, but decided the pet-tracking system raised too many concerns about government access to data.
“They aren’t just tracking lost dogs, they’re tracking you and your neighbors,” Butler said in the video that has more than 3.2 million views.
Why would you wire your house up to this shit anyway.
They’ve backed off this and ended the partnership, claim Flock never got any footage, which I think is a total lie.
They’ll re-partner when the heat is off, or just do it silently, Amazon shouldn’t be trusted. Explain why to your friends and neighbors.
Where did you hear they ended the partnership? (Even if you supply a source, I probably won’t believe it.)
Edit: nm. found it. https://www.engadget.com/home/ring-calls-off-partnership-with-police-surveillance-provider-flock-safety-031717605.html
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This isn’t referring to the flock thing, they put out a commercial in the Superbowl about creating a cam-network to help find lost pets.
I went with industry standard localized cameras that I could rider python on two of my servers at home for. Id love to try to hack up a ring , see if I could extract out what makes it “evil” and leave the rest, to even a relay to another server or something.
Things I think about.
Maybe next time they’re thinking of spending $8M on a Super Bowl ad, they can save themselves some money and pay me half that amount. I’m perfectly happy to tell everyone how Ring cameras are a privacy nightmare and recommend Reolink instead.
“They aren’t just tracking lost dogs, they’re tracking you and your neighbors,”
Uh, yeah. You didn’t get the news about them sharing with ICE?
I think the majority of people don’t even have tech conversations with their friends and coworkers, they just talk about sports or gambling or whatever else normal people do.
Talking trivia instead of consequential stuff…
If I could figure out how to engage with your nonsense I would.
During Superbowl I was talking with a software guy working for a big shopping ( data) company, he was telling us how every interaction on their website is recorded for data analysis, and his own wife was shocked. It came up after I prompted for that conversation, talking about the license plate tracking in parking lots (which she didn’t know about).
People seem suprised when they find out that they capture where their mouse moves, where their finger swipes, the duration, the speed. Everything is a metric.
I don’t talk sports ball, I only talk tech. Want to be friends?
WiFi connected cameras were a mistake. Although, if people are going to use these mass surveillance devices, using it to find dogs is great. It needs cat detection too.
Running cables is not possible in lots of homes and there are plenty of wired cameras that send video to corporate clouds. The mistake is allowing those corporations access to those videos. Camera output should be encrypted and only usable for the camera owner unless they choose to opt in to the corporate spy network.
WiFi connected cameras were a mistake.
Double so, when people are doing auto thefts in neighborhoods, they’re using wifi jammers to block out the footage
does anyone have a link to the original superbowl ad?
Found it: https://youtu.be/hiaIHLwJvPQ?t=1449
Imagine spending millions of dollars on an ad that costs your company millions more in lost sales
And reduced usage by existing customers, reduced network effect, etc…
I honestly didn’t know what they were thinking with that commercial. Why would you proudly advertise that you’ve built a massive surveillance network, during one of the most-watched yearly televised events too for that matter? Did they seriously believe that there wouldn’t be a major backlash? I mean I appreciate the blunt honesty in that commercial so I’ll give them credit for that.
Because the most evil people on the planet are universally convinced that they’re heroes.
My guess is that since Ring has a history of well-known collaborations with police and ICE, they wanted to re-frame their evil surveillance network as a way to save a puppy. Instead, lots of uninformed normies suddenly realized what those cameras are capable of, and had a huge negative reaction given the state of things.
Tbh I think the people at the top still haven’t caught up with the rapid changing sentiments among the population. My zero-tech-savy retired mother in-law was talking to me about Palantir the other day.
I honestly didn’t know what they were thinking with that commercial. Why would you proudly advertise that you’ve built a massive surveillance network
Presumably because most end users are in deep with the “if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about” crowd … and besides it can find a lost dog /s.
They brought these sorts of intrusive cameras in the first place so privacy was not top of mind, or even in 2nd or 3rd place.
I would also put a good bit of the blame on executives and marketing people being way out of touch with the average person.
These people are so fucking out of touch that it’s ridiculous
People are really fucking stupid to buy their products in the forst place. So that’s what they were thinking and they were right.
Because in 3 weeks most people will forget about it. It’s brazen. They’ll still be the biggest doorbell company in America
They product does exactly what their customers want. Just the latter had not realised the implications for their own privacy, before the commercial, apparently.
In regards to flock I wonder if there’s any material we can use on our dash or license plate that the cameras cannot see. I think I saw something like that but unsure if it’s effective.
Ben Jordan has several videos on flock cameras on YouTube. Excellent series of videos. Here’s one where he uses modified license plates to fuck with them.
I put Google cameras on my house years ago out of convenience and this is it, I’m spending the money on a PoE system where my footage stays on my own hardware.
Reolink is decent
Very happy with my Reolink cameras and NVR. Works better than the rings ever did.
I don’t even have their NVR and am impressed that the camera works both in an NVR / LAN / and direct to PC
What does PoE have to do with it?
Check out frigate.
Why? They finally woke up to the fact they were being spied on and that they pay money for the privilege of doing so…
My only regret is that I can’t smash one because was never stupid enough to trust these things to begin with.
My friend, have you heard of Flock cameras?
Yes and I hate them cause it’s a pain in the ass having to route all my drives around them. Some trips take me 3x as long as they should cause of that stupid privacy-invading bullshit.
Well, I wouldn’t suggest doing crimes to physically break them, but you can break their little AI brains with a bit of adversarial noise and someone with a printer that can print on some sort of clear backing.
Benn Jordan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
I clicked the link just to get a brief look at this video and ended up watching the whole thing and subscribing to Benn Jordan. Thank you for sharing!
I did the same thing. The one about ‘gifts for people who don’t trust the government’ is what got me when someone posted it here or in c/privacy. I’m glad I could pass it along!
I like his viewpoint, he always has interesting projects and his music background adds a nice little touch to the production values of his content.
e: Also, if you’re into math and physics check out 3Blue1Brown (Neural Networks math: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk) and Art of the Problem (Explaining how energy can turn into rocks, physics explainer: https://youtu.be/f8O3XMrC8hg)
Paintball
Don’t buy one just so you can smash it! I know it’s satisfying to hear the plastic crack and see its tiny lens pop free like a smooshed eyeball. Yeah. That I guess would be good. But don’t.
You can just break the ones that others have bought. It’s even more satisfying.
I hope what really gets people to pay attention is how the FBI said they searched that news ladies’ moms’ ring camera footage even though she didn’t have an active subscription.
It was a NEST camera from Google, which is only a meaningful distinction because it means they ALL do this shit.
The only ones that don’t are ones that only send data to your data storage.
And the NEST camera apparently has some sort of free tier that saves a short amount (the last few hours) of video by default, so NEST users shouldn’t be surprised at all that their video feed is sent to the cloud as its one of the features of the subscription-less model.
The problem isn’t that it’s being sent to the cloud, the problem is that it’s not being encrypted and Amazon is doing whatever they fuck they want with it, including giving it to law enforcement without a warrant.
encryption wouldn’t solve the problem, just raise more questions. how is it encrypted, with what algorithm? was the alg implemented securely? who has the decryption keys? how were the keys generated? were they generated from a good enough entropy source? these are non-trivial questions that have to be asked in an encrypted system where encryption is not just a gimmick or a marketing buzzword.
having encryption and “secure!” plastered all over the box and the phone app does not mean anything, especially when you need protection against the manufacturer.
When people in this community say “encryption” it should be obvious we’re referring to effective encryption, not a marketing claim on a product box.
yes, that would be ideal, but at any point in time we will have newcomers, for them it won’t be obvious
Your prior comment was for newcomers?
"How is it encrypted, with what algorithm? was the alg implemented securely? who has the decryption keys? how were the keys generated? were they generated from a good enough entropy source? "
This was obviously written for people with quite a bit of knowledge. Most newcomers would have absolutely no idea what any of it means.
Just to note here, they are referring to nest which is google.
A big exception to the rule are the HomeKit secure video cameras that work in Apple’s ecosystem. If your HomeKit compatible camera is going straight into HKSV, and isn’t paired with manufacturer’s own cloud video service, then it’s all E2EE and it can’t be accessed by Apple, even with a warrant.
Problem is, camera offerings are limited, and scrolling clips in HomeKit is paaaainful. Also, if you’re not in Apple’s ecosystem, you can’t use it.
My wife and I recently moved to a home with ring cameras preinstalled, but no subscription of course. We can only access a live feed via the cloud service. I told my wife, I don’t think it matters whether we have a subscription or not… if they want to use the footage from our home cameras for any reason at all, it’s in their power to do so. They can save it, scan it, watch it, … they don’t even need to save the video, they can save results from a scan to get out the important details more efficiently.
My wife didn’t want to hear it. She said we aren’t paying them, so there’s nothing they can do. Then this news story dropped about Google Nest. I showed my wife. We no longer have the ring cameras.
Theoretically they wouldn’t have internet access if a previous occupant set them up unless one of your neighbors has an unsecured AP. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding you and you’re saying you set them up on your wireless network after you moved in. Still a good move to get rid of them but I wouldn’t be as concerned about them if the only AP they were set up to use was no longer present.
Interesting, I didn’t think about that nor did I know about the mesh network someone else mentioned in a reply to you. In my case, I’m renting the home. The landlord pays for a very small internet package that is reserved for the cameras. He stopped paying for the subscription at some point but he still pays for the Internet it connects to, which is how we were able to access live footage in the past.
When I said “we no longer have the ring camera.” More accurately I could have said “we stopped charging it.” The landlord would probably have a minor aneurism if we tried explaining why we want to replace the camera he mounted a case for into the stucko by the front door.
Initially, NBC Nightly News (Savannah Guthrie’s network) stated that Ring cameras could only record 4-6 hours before the footage would start to rewrite over itself. Yet being able to uncover what they did after the fact seems hella sketchy.
Not at all, that’s tons of time.
That was a nest and I don’t know about them, but for Ring they store snippets activated by motion or ringing the bell. Once you’re only saving snippets, 4-6 hours video could be weeks
Ring can also save snapshots, at regular intervals, but that’s a still photo taking much less storage.
I used to have a nest doorbell. You can set it to record continuously, just FYI.
E: that will also require a subscription, which includes 60 days of saved footage (and other stuff)
amazon likely has a backup anyways somewhere, eventhough the customer doesnt.
Yet being able to uncover what they did after the fact seems hella sketchy.
Not really if you know how this kind of computing/information technology works.
A file consists of the data itself, and a pointer to the data location on the storage device or index record. When the computer wants to retrieve the data, it looks at the index to get the data location, then goes to that location to get the data. This is how the majority of computers/devices work. When a file is “deleted” the index is usually the only thing that goes away, not the data itself. Over the course of time, the data is eventually overwritten as its in areas marked as “free space”. So other new files will occupy some or all of that space changing it to hold the new file data.
If you want to get rid of the data itself, that is usually considered “purge” where the data is intentionally overwritten with something else to make the data irretrievable.
What the Google engineers were able to do was essentially go through all the areas marked as “free space” across dozens (hundreds?) of cloud servers that hold customer Nest camera data and try to find any parts that hadn’t been overwritten yet by new data. This is probably part of why it took so long to produce the video. Its like sorting through a giant dumpster to find an accidentally discarded wedding ring.
The subscription is ostensibly to cover the cost of bandwidth. But of course they’re uploading anyway…
my next door neighbor has a camera that seems to look like a ring… I mean I’m not gonna approach their door for no reason to check if it is a ring, but like… if it is a ring… then oh well, NSA is right by my door.
And I’m in a deep blue city btw… neighbor is a renter and is Black, so… yeah… minority working class inadvertantly have a spy camera on their door
Front door is like right next to each other… like the camera can see me walking in the the path into my own house, it makes a sound when it detects movement and I heard the sound thing trigger even when walking only on my side of the yard
…And my family are immigrants…
so yay, our movements are probably in an ICE database
Do you still have chinese citizenship? A few immigrant friends have gotten the paperwork ready, either to return to their home country or immigrate elsewhere, just incase ICE picks them up, they can agree to self-deport instead of ending up in a salvadorian concentration camp indefinitely.
IDK how the chinese US citizenship thing works, maybe China’d accept getting literally deported as proof you’re not a US citizen.
According to google (I am not a lawyer) I don’t have it anymore the moment I got US citizenship since they don’t do dual citizenship and honestly I don’t really want to live in mainland China.
If I had to leave the US, I rather go to Canada, Australia, or perhaps EU for asylum…
Or perhaps Taiwan, or maybe Singapore.
I know from your post history, you seem to like PRC, but please understand that I have a personal grudge against the CCP, I was the second child (precisely a second son so there was no exemption whatsoever) in my family born during the One Child Policy, I really hate the fact that they tried to terminate me when I was still a fetus, then afterwards deny my existence by refusing to issue my legal documents until they made my parents pay a huge fine… which feels like extortion IMO.
I feel like my existence in China is “illegal”, I feel rejected. I don’t wanna be there.
I have an existential crisis over it… I’m not even supposed to be alive in this world, I’m an anomoly.
According to google (I am not a lawyer) I don’t have it anymore the moment I got US citizenship
Yes, but if the US says you never actually had citizenship, maybe China will accept that.
If I had to leave the US, I rather go to Canada, Australia, or perhaps EU for asylum
I’ve heard they’ve made it harder to get asylum, and there’s often poor outcomes for asylum seekers, after Arab Spring. If you have a US passport and money to start a business or any extended family, you can stay for quite awhile. This applies to most of Asia too where US passport gets you 90 days on arrival, or 90 day evisa for vietnam. US passports are pretty powerful.
Or perhaps Taiwan, or maybe Singapore.
Never been to either, can’t tell you about it.
I have an existential crisis over it… I’m not even supposed to be alive in this world, I’m an anomoly.
Eh, it’s a different place now. My family who worked there in the 90s and 2000s had completely alien experiences to when I went there in last year. All I’m saying is it’d be wise to be aware of what options you have.
Eh, it’s a different place now. My family who worked there in the 90s and 2000s had completely alien experiences to when I went there in last year. All I’m saying is it’d be wise to be aware of what options you have.
Mental health acceptance is stilk a huge issue. My mom told me about a story where allegedly someone in either her village or a neighboring village (can’t even understand what exactly she said because I’m not as fluent in Cantonese as English) had a family that has a son that “doesn’t act normal” and instead of trying to help, they perceived him as a threat and just locked him inside the house, barely treated him like a human being and only fed him out of pity… like an animal on a barn…
And also my mom just told me a story on WeChat about in Guangdong, an autistic person that got accepted into a University but then they found out about his autism so they expelled him for that after he already got accepted. So yeah… that would’ve caused outrage in the west. There is not really an ADA equivalent in China.
My mother kinda lowkey hates me for having depression… can’t imagine what’s its like in China, everyone would just call me “lazy” or “useless eater” or some shit… China is very conservative, its MAGAland but with Chinese Characteristics.
Also, if I posted any of my posts that I posted here about my mother’s behaviors on the Chinese internet… oh jeez they’re gonna just attack me for being “unfilial”, at least westerners sort of sympathize. In China, parents are always right, the kids are always wrong.
My ideal country would be one with a lot of Asians (or more specifically, ethnic Han Chinese) but that are westernized. Cuz then I have safety of not having to deal with racism, but also not having to deal with conservative culture bullshit.
Like just build one massive island then gather all the Westernized ethnic Han Chinese there, build our own country, without authoritarian bullshit, then I’d be safe.
Mental health acceptance is stilk a huge issue
Yes, definitely. Mental health (and regular healthcare in some specific ways) definitely has room for improvement. Only panhandler I remember was a guy asking people for money, with what looked like his mother, saying he had depression.
Also, if I posted any of my posts that I posted here about my mother’s behaviors on the Chinese internet
Depends on who the audience is. I’ve seen quite a few Chinese, particularly LGBT+ posting about their parents on xhs, but presumably there’s not a lot of boomers in their algo.
My ideal country would be one with a lot of Asians (or more specifically, ethnic Han Chinese) but that are westernized
If you have Chinese citizenship, but your hukou is mainland China, can you get a job in Hong Kong? I didn’t like the few hours that I spent there, it’s expensive and charmless, but it’s pretty westernized.
Also maybe talk to people who live there, your mother sounds like she might have a specific agenda in which experiences she shares. That’s not to say abusive families aren’t a major issue. One chinese was confused that americans don’t beat their children, “even if the child is intentionally misbehaving”. She seemed to accept “children learn from their parents, so hit someone who doesn’t do what you want isn’t something I want to teach” tho. I didn’t investigate if that meant she sometimes beats the kid for behavior she believes is unintentional too.
His icon suggests Taiwanese.
