Amazing how often people do that. Corporations have very little incentive to be truthful and often have good reason to be dishonest. I notice it particularly wrt video games, gamers are always taking studio’s messaging as gospel and not corporate comms.

So they'd rather lie in their press release.

It is not really cheap, nor best "value for the dollar", but I am extremely satisfied with UniFi [0]. Nearly instant setup, decent mobile apps, web interface, basically just works as you need.

[0] https://unifi.ui.com/

This is only half the problem.

The other half, at least for Ring doorbells, is making it easy to get push notifications when button pressed, with instant two-way connection for chatting through the camera.

It's already hard enough as a "certified homelabber" to get these things set up and running.

> Unless you explicitly enable Advanced Protection mode for all your devices

This is very easy though, you just go to your iCloud account settings under the settings app and enable it. It should be on by default imo, but I understand the argument for why it isn't.

Either way, enabling it is not a barrier and ICE cannot be granted access once you do unless you yourself give them that access.

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

Frigate NVR tied to a home assistant instance has my phone getting proactive notifications about people, birds, and buses (in their select areas...). It's not the easiest thing to setup, but if you're using ethernet cameras it seems to work very very well. The few POS wyze cameras's I have on the system tend to cause some problems, but I know for a fact it's 100% a combination of a) wifi (no matter how 'quality') b) wyze.

So, yeah. Look into frigate.

Icloud subscription.

McDonald's can give my data to the feds through an NSL, yet I still buy their fries every now and then despite the risk.

iCloud data can be end to end encrypted (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108756)

Do you have evidence of that?

Citation needed

Why? I like to keep an eye on my dogs when we're away, and it's all done securely using HomeKit video. My iCloud is e2e encrypted and the camera doesn't upload anywhere besides there.

What's the invasive part? Not giving my dogs privacy when we're out of the home?

Approximately nobody was using everything x years ago. That's not really a measure of what's nice to have and what's not, it's a measure of how long the nice to have has been around.

A 1080p cam with night vision a mic and speakers is 20 bucks. Baby monitors where more expensive in the past (audio only).

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

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

I always wonder what the overlap of this economically is. If you can afford all this home surveillance gear aren't you already likely to live in a place that's comically safe? Why are in particular Americans with their gated communities full of soccer moms and Labradors putting cameras on their house as if they're living on a US military base?

Early audience response suggested the message struggled to land. According to an iSpot survey of 500 viewers, the ad’s likeability score placed it in the bottom 3% compared with Super Bowl ads over the past five years. Its top-two-box purchase intent scored 24% below Super Bowl norms and 19% below ads in its category that aired over the last 90 days. Viewers most commonly described their reaction as “WTF,” signaling confusion around both the message and the execution.

https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/super-bowl-revealed-a...

The problem now is how can you trust any of these companies? The infrastructure is there to link this data if you have cameras that connect to the internet. How can you ever be sure this wont happen in secret? We have no guarantees that companies will follow the laws and laws are not even being enforced.

> It just takes a C-suite/board/founder to have the moral fortitude ...

Just for context, could you provide some examples of such people?

No it is not. Your mandate is to grow your company’s revenue and profits, not act according to your conscience as an executive, especially if something is not illegal.

This is why regulations are extremely important. There need to be a strong enough counterincentive or companies will eventually always follow the path of least resistance to growth. Ethics when present may create some form of friction along some specific paths, but it’s never enough for those to not become, eventually, that very path.

Can you elaborate? This is interesting

If there was an IP setting users could change, all the self-hosting etc. forums would be talking about how to change it instead of explaining other options. I'd expect not just fixed hosts and an ecosystem dependent on their proprietary protocols, but also pinned certificates and secure boot so you can't change any of it.

N.B. Flock isn't really targeting the consumer market.

I know this is not constructive, but fuck 'em and their convenience!

Is it a struggle for them? Clearly they're pressing both buttons.

The success case for much of silicon valley seems to be government contracts. Gov't is the polite way of saying military

It has been a long decent. I blame advertising, because I doubt we would have put up with as much enshittification if the majority of our digital lives wasn't free, paid for by advertising, like it currently is.

> Yep. Anyone got alternatives?

The self-hosted and home-automation and home-assistant subreddits are _full_ of discussion threads on this. The good news is that you have a TON of options to pick from. The bad news is that they're all deficient in one way or another so you really do have to spend a bit of time to figure out who executes best on the things you care most about.

If you don't mind the lock-in, Unifi is nice. Reolink (and the other DaHua re-brands) usually leave a lot to be desired in terms of software / quality but they are cheap and they reliably spit out a regular video stream that can be used with just about any software. Just don't let them onto the WAN!

Reolink has doorbell cameras[0] that you can keep disconnected from the internet. They also have some pretty useful local recording hubs if self-hosting is not your deal[1].

[0] https://reolink.com/ca/product/reolink-video-doorbell-wifi/

[1] https://reolink.com/ca/product/reolink-home-hub/

Got the UniFi Doorbell from Ubiquiti and I'm really happy with it. It's hooked up to my Dream Machine, records video on disk and I access it via Tailscale. Not paying any subscription and it doesn't live in a cloud.

you can use a company that is self hosted like Unifi and have complete control over your data, still have remote access, and not pay a subscription. “self hosted” scares people off but its literally a box you plug in and forget about. Pretty trivial.

I dont understand why anyone chooses Ring when the costs of Unifi are so much better.

The ring app also sucks imo and all their hardware is quite slow.

Normal door bells are pretty great and have less overhead and maintenance...

All tech puts it's best foot forward, some of it's really nifty, but a camera on every street corner is always going to pose more risks than it's worth IMO...

It's work to go back to the old ways but I think this is one we step we should really all take.

Frigate is incredible. I have 3 instances of it (different homes across the family) running using various amcrest and reolink local-only PoE and Wifi cams. I access the remotely using wireguard. One is running on a 2017 miniatx box (Intel i7-7700T) using openvino to do local-only object detection with the 2017 intel CPU. One is using a Beelink EQ14 Mini PC, Intel Twin Lake N150, also using openvino for object detection (people, dogs, cars, etc). One is using a nvidia 5070 gpu. All notifications are processed via the home assistant integration.

Truly top-notch quality, full-featured, very low maintenance, easy to set up, cheap to operate. I'm glad so many people are using it now.

For video doorbell I just have a cam that can see the front door and I drew a box around the area I want notifications for. When a person enters the box, I get a notification and snapshot.

https://docs.frigate.video/

I use Amcrest's AD410. I don't pay for their cloud, have my own NVR, and can access them through Wireguard if I'm out of the house.

Reolink with Frigate NVR. Can also put Home Assistant on the same box. Pretty much any 12+ gen intel CPU with QSV should be able to handle the encoding for streaming to your device. Probably will want to use tailscale so that you don’t have to open any ports.

I have a Reolink doorbell. It records to a SD card and works great with my Home Assistant setup. So much better than the Ring it replaced.

I’ve been pretty happy with Reolink. No subscription required and uses local storage. Notifications are done through smtp which works pretty well. Mobile app is pretty solid as well.

We've got an analogue video phone on our apartment. Works flawlessly. No digital path other than the ring selection. Has a flat monochrome CRT which is kind of cool.

I made it half a century without a doorbell in my phone. I don't need it now.

The difficult lesson is that getting off the treadmill of always chasing greater convenience is the only way to stop the bleeding of increasing dependence on technology.

Yi cameras are supposed to be local if you dont get a subscription.

None of these agencies get your video data without your consent. The feature was designed so they have an easy way to present you the request for footage.

Unfortunately a portion of the information getting circulated is the complete opposite.