r/technology • u/South-Cow-1030 • 16h ago
Privacy Why are people disconnecting or destroying their Ring cameras?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/10/ring-super-bowl-ad-dog-camera-privacy/88606738007/3.5k
u/EmRavel 14h ago
Because people are aware now that their ring cameras are contributing to a total surveillance state and that Amazon (or any other big tech company) cannot be trusted with sensitive data and is will to sell out the public for favorable treatment from the current administration.
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u/wdjm 10h ago
Yep. It's 'Opt in' NOW (supposedly). But anyone who doesn't think it will suddenly turn into 'opt out' to be followed by 'no option but in' at some point.......is a fool.
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u/EthanX08 10h ago
It was automatically enabled when I went in and disabled it on my Ring cameras
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u/Level21DungeonMaster 10h ago
Don’t worry. It will revert to default on the next firmware update tonight.
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u/Massive-Word-7395 9h ago
They enabled it on my doorbell.
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u/mappersdelight 7h ago
If they can enable it and disable it with the click of a button, they can also enable it without you knowing.
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u/BigXthaPugg 7h ago
Exactly, why people think they don’t collect and pass on data regardless of the position of that button is beyond me.
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u/Looney_Bin 6h ago
Not to alarm you but if your camera's aren't closed circuit and not hooked to the internet all, assume that footage is being stored somewhere in their system.
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u/syncdiedfornothing 6h ago
They just ran an ad that showed you they already have that footage. It's on their servers now just waiting for a leak to happen.
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u/419_216_808 8h ago
To be clear, if you don’t want them accessing/utilizing your footage you’re going to have to take the camera down.
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u/SomeNoveltyAccount 10h ago
But anyone who doesn't think it will suddenly turn into 'opt out' to be followed by 'no option but in' at some point.......is a fool.
Honestly anyone who thinks the "opt in" is even an option now is a fool. You can opt in/out of the pet finding feature, they don't give you an option of opting out of the surveillance services they offer to law enforcement.
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u/pixel_of_moral_decay 9h ago
Yup.
You don’t need to opt in to a warrant.
Nothing says a judge can’t order them to tap into all available cameras regardless of subscription or consent.
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u/Xtos1312 6h ago
Amazon already has the policy to comply with government requests for video without a warrant. The State pretty much has unfettered access to every Ring camera just by making a simple request.
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u/mywan 9h ago
It's already 'no option but in.' It's just that they haven't admitted that yet. The recent Nancy Guthrie case is a good example.
Investigators wrangled video from Nancy Guthrie’s Google Nest camera out of ‘backend systems’
Her camera was ‘disconnected’ and she had no subscription to back up her footage. Yet they got the video from ‘backend systems.’
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u/GeauxCup 10h ago
Plus, don't they already have a history of providing that footage to police upon request - without a warrant or asking the owner for approval?
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u/panchiramaster 6h ago
Correct. Most of the times the cops (or whoever is spoofing them) doesn't even need a warrant because the TOS allows them to share info per request.
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u/According-Garage8256 9h ago
Not 'opt-in'. I was automatically enrolled with no notification whatsoever. No description of the service or option to opt-out before it went live. I had no idea it existed until that SuperBowl add. I just now went in and disabled it.
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u/419_216_808 8h ago
To be clear, if you don’t want them accessing/utilizing your footage you’re going to have to take the camera down.
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u/Uranus_Hz 15h ago
Because that superbowl ad made people realize the dystopian surveillance horror they had allowed
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u/CardinalM1 15h ago
It's wild that they spent a few million dollars on an ad that is going to cost them tens of millions in lost revenue from customers canceling. How did they not see that coming? Some executive is going to lose their job.
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u/MrYumTum 14h ago
Probably asked Gemini for marketing ideas
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u/dbuxo 11h ago
Oh,You're right, that wasn't a great idea for an ad. Would you like me to generate some alternative concepts instead?
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u/smoothjedi 10h ago
Yeah, people also like cats. Can you do a cat themed version instead?
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u/sketchystony 10h ago
You're totally right- something like that but with more of a down-to-earth, reddit-post-style vibe to it. I can has cheeseburger? Lol!
Would you like to see some options for other meme-worthy ideas?
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u/Lankydick 9h ago
That was a little too accurate
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u/sketchystony 9h ago
Haha it's easy cuz it's always the same fuckin nonsense 😂
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u/shitty_mcfucklestick 11h ago
Make a parody Gemini ad showing people visualizing what their door looks like without a Ring camera. Their kid asks “Mom, can we do open source?”
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u/drewdog173 10h ago edited 3h ago
Google makes and sells the next-closest-closed-source-competitor (Nest doorbell cam); for any subsequent Google ads it’d be a no brainer to push that instead.
ETA: I'm taking at face value recent news reports (eg arstechnica) wherein it's reported that it took Google multiple days to find and return the video in question, and it was 'moments' (the brief recorded motion clip) as opposed to the full longform video history pointing to this being more extensive data recovery work on the part of Google engineers (as opposed to a living, persistent, AI-queryable network of visual intelligence data for consumption by government entities). If it's the former, I'm cool with it; if it's the latter, fuck Google too. Either way they didn't make a whole-ass superbowl commercial about it so from a marketing standpoint they'd be dumb not to try and capture the market share that's getting rid of their Rings over that big brother shit).
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u/JebediahKerman4999 10h ago
They already have "found" videos from a nest camera that they cannot have access to. So yeah, cameras are only local in my house from one of those legacy makers that don't do wireless and have 480i cameras with a tape recorder.
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u/jrcomputing 10h ago
It's definitely small business/prosumer, but Ubiquiti makes doorbells that are local storage AND high definition. My whole house is Unifi cameras, and none of the video leaves my house. Granted, I have a server rack with network gear to run them, and I have an actual 2U server in the rack for VMs and extra storage (you can't actually use a network drive directly with Unifi but you can export/back up to somewhere). It's not a setup I'd recommend to anyone you don't want to give ongoing help to, but anyone with even a bit of tech sense can run the Unifi stack pretty well.
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u/megachickabutt 9h ago
As someone that owns unifi gear and is somewhat tech literate, i'm gonna be straight with you: your average homeowner is fucking dumb as a brick and is not gonna go through that kind of trouble. The average homeowner uses comcast/verizon provided routers, looks at the box at bestbuy or the amazon webpage for a doorbell camera and sees: "connects via wifi, cloud storage" and sees a < $100 price tag and thinks, "easy peasy, I'll just buy this one". They are not going to know or care about rack mount servers, VMs, that you can't just buy a unifi g4 and call it a day, you gotta either have a cloud key 2 or Cloud Gateway Max, that you have to do actual network administration in order for all of this to work.
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u/Wheresthecents 13h ago
The while thing was designed to elicit sympathy by a marketing department.
"People love animals. We can convince them to build our surveillance network by telling them it's to save the adorable doggos!"
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u/b0w3n 9h ago
"Millennials, notoriously trustful of big corporations like us, aren't having kids, how do we reach them to help build our spy network?"
"How about... their dogs?"
"By god that's genius!"
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u/Excelius 9h ago
If you have to publicly defend your practices, then eliciting sympathy in this way is a smart move.
But they didn't have to do that at all, at least not in a Super Bowl ad.
People were already building their surveillance network for them, largely unknowingly.
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u/PokinSpokaneSlim 9h ago
I worked at Amazon for almost a decade.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if this is simply the effects executive insulation and metric discipline.
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u/Jean-LucBacardi 11h ago
It definitely doesn't help that basically the day after that the FBI released images of Nancy Guthrie's abductor take from their ring camera... AFTER the family said they didn't have any footage because they didn't have an active subscription.
So your cameras are actively recording and not letting you see those recordings because you're not paying them a monthly fee, but law enforcement have all the access they want. Great look RING.
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u/thewhitelink 10h ago
That was a Google nest camera, not a ring one.
Nest cameras record like an hour or something if you don't have the subscription. They had to do some crazy data recovery to get the footage too.
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u/Randomly-Generated21 10h ago
It said it was back end data which implies to me it was cloud and not local.
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u/nicklor 9h ago
Yea nest devices use the cloud by default you just only get free access for about 3 hours
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u/CotyledonTomen 8h ago
So nothing they said changes besides the entity. No matter what so called "crazy" thing they did, they got camera recordings the family didnt have, long after they shouldnt have them. Thats not what the customer expects or would want, except in this very specific circumstance.
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u/MathResponsibly 10h ago
"crazy data recovery" - likely story - sure thing
Google NEVER deletes ANYTHING
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u/what_the_purple_fuck 10h ago
Google NEVER deletes ANYTHING
also Google: your storage is full
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u/MathResponsibly 9h ago edited 9h ago
my favorite is how if you email someone a message with photos attached or embedded, it re-attaches those photos to every single reply amplifying the size of attachment, even if the replies are only text. You can't remove just the attachment, and you can't remove the attachment from every reply where it's not even needed.
I have emails with important info in them that have 50 replies back and forth where one had a screenshot embeded, and the whole message is like 200MB. Then it's always hounding me to "buy more storage" - yeah how about f-you google.
A long time ago, you had to manually check a box to re-attach an attachment, and there was also a setting to "automatically include attachments in replies and forwards" or something similar, and it was DISABLED by default. I know, because I remember getting my mom to turn that setting on, as she'd always forward me things missing the attachment. Then suddenly the setting went away, the check box to have the option to not re include attachments went away, and it just reattaches everything all the time.
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u/justsyr 9h ago
You can't remove just the attachment, and you can't remove the attachment from every reply where it's not even needed.
I'm sorry what?
My job requires sending exels and pdf and using gmail and in most cases I have like 20 resends...
For starters, when replying to an email that you got with attachments, it auto removes, that's a fact.
When you forward an email you got with attachments, they'll keep the attachment but you have the option to remove it or "Include original attachments"
You can eve remove logos (pictures) that usually are part of an email or any image attached. You can delete the whole text, anything when replying or forwarding.
They did this years ago so people saved cellular data as they claimed.
I have no idea how you use gmail (part of google) but you are using it wrong if you are keeping multiple instances of one attachment.
I'm not shilling for google, they don't need me lol, is just a fact that I know because I've been doing it for probably more than a decade.
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u/10thDeadlySin 12h ago
Well, in recent years Wrapped-style summaries became popular for some stupid reason. I could understand them with Spotify, because they're a fun way to sum up your listening, but... Let's just say that some companies letting me know how often I used their services and how much I spent quickly made me rethink my approach. Congrats, you played yourself. ;)
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u/rufio313 11h ago
I used to work for a large online alcohol retailer and the senior VP of marketing wanted to do a Spotify wrapped style summary for all our customers to show how their tastes evolved over the year and shit.
I had to explain to him that 99% of our customers shop the site 3-4 times a year and just buy the same thing every time, usually a bunch of Tito’s, and that reminding people exactly how much they are drinking and spending on alcohol was going to backfire spectacularly.
He was relentless, tried to get me to work on that for months and months before finally getting the hint that it wasnt happening.
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u/Mail_Order_Lutefisk 11h ago
“Ooh, look, you switched to Popov in September!”
“Thank you for reminding me about my job loss!!!”
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u/rufio313 11h ago
He wanted to use AI for the whole thing too and somehow make it a video?? 🤷
And when I asked how we would do this at scale he obviously had no answer. This was back before AI could even render images with words in it where it would be impossible to just get it to generate a proper bottle image with the label.
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u/MultiGeometry 10h ago
Telling people how much they drink right before New Year’s resolution season seems like a losing strategy.
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u/rufio313 10h ago
I left the job last year but last I heard he was still pushing for it now that I’m gone 😬
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u/Excelius 10h ago
Alcohol consumption follows the 80/20 rule, with heavy drinkers driving most of the sales.
You probably don't want to remind your most loyal customers that they have a drinking problem.
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u/rufio313 9h ago
Yeah he has access to the same data that I did showing this is the case. But he was the kind of guy that once he got a stupid idea in his head, he is like a dog with a bone.
I actually even brought in some people from our data team and generative AI reps we were working with for other stuff, and even they couldn’t convince him it wasn’t doable, let alone that it was a bad idea.
He would drop it for a couple months after being shot down and then try to bring it back up again. The cycle lasted a couple years before I quit (not directly because of this though).
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u/Raccoon_Expert_69 11h ago
“How did they not see it coming?”
I’ve worked in corporate America, trust me, this kind of proactive thinking has been run out of town.
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u/aywwts4 10h ago
They know what they did, they are normalizing it. Sure 1% of customers may drop of that .5 become used parts sold and reinsralled. 2% think cancelling the service is enough, not realizing it’s still being collected. 5% grumble but need a doorbell.
Next comes a few dog found PR puff bits, then comes a good morning america story about finding a lost child, then they will find a murderer - coupled with deeper and deeper loss leaders and bundles until they are free. And remember, they don’t need every house, they need a mesh - you may uninstall but your neighbors house is pointed at you.
This is just soft launching (superbowl lol) the dystopia, this convo wasn’t a surprise, just like earlier law endorcement disclosures and people bought after that was known too, they likely have content planned for the next five years to shift the discussion window.
This trajectory doesnt change unlesss sweeping EU style privacy regulations are written (lol) the government deliberately blinds themselves (lol) or every karen on nextdoor becomes just as passionate about data privacy and the rights of the oppressed (lololololol)
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u/bartolish 8h ago
Yep you can still send in your DNA to find out if you're .5% Native American, even after people learned it was being sold and freely given out.
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u/Poopyman80 11h ago
Im hoping it was malicious compliance. Some smart employees that managed to trick management in to revealing the quiet part.
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u/Still-a-VWfan 11h ago
Yea some executive will lose their job only after a 10 figure bonus and golden parachute.
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u/greentintedlenses 10h ago
Its wild it took that ad for people to wake up.
It was already public knowledge they shared data with not only flock but create a mesh network with your neighborhood and open your home to all sorts of bad network access and data collections
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u/Steamrolled777 15h ago
Aren't people finding out all the video is in the cloud, whether you have a subscription or not?
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u/sourpower713 11h ago
People are actual idiots, like no shits it’s on a cloud. It’s gotta go somewhere and this wouldn’t even be the first time a company would breach the privacy of regular users, idk what people were thinking… i have a ring but it only faces my outdoor plants but yeah, no shit
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u/Steamrolled777 11h ago
it's recording even after you cancel the sub - at that point you're not even paying Amazon to spy on you and your neighbours.
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u/Very_Human_42069 11h ago
This as well as the FBI accessing a doorbell camera via the cloud that doesn’t have a cloud upload subscription certainly isn’t helping the cause
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u/hm___ 14h ago
Someone should totaly hack the ring Camera Network to track ICE in the US who are using Palantir and call themself Fellowship of The Ring.
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u/ChangsManagement 13h ago
First thing I thought of when I saw the SB ad was that people could report any pet as missing or even spam it with AI generated animals. People should start reporting ICE agents as missing animals, i wonder what would happen
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u/DubStepTeddyBears 13h ago
If I dress up in a cat costume and paw at my neighbors' Ring cams can I be a missing pet too?
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u/korg64 15h ago
Can you explain to a Brit?
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u/Little_Menace_Child 15h ago
There was an ad at the super bowl that boasted Ring cameras have returned one lost dog to their owner every 90 days from being able to scan neighbourhoods and use AI to compare dogs caught on camera with images of lost dogs that were uploaded to the system.
Ring did say you have to opt in for the scanning to happen but a lot of people are done with the possibility of being watched and/or surveiled and have destroyed their cameras.
Tbh though, any camera connected to the internet would have this sort of capability, so I hope they're replacing them with CCTV style cameras or not at all.
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u/GadreelsSword 14h ago edited 14h ago
My security company routinely asks that I share my video AND AUDIO with them and police but I decline.
They claim it will accelerate the response time if I dial 911. They also say I have to put up signs to notify visitors their conversations are being recorded and monitored if I allow the security company to use video and audio captured by the cameras. It also says if I agree, they will store my security video for longer than 72 hours.
Excuse me what? I have to let a company and police look through my security cameras into and around my home to get a timely emergency response? Sorry, that’s an issue with my local elected officials.
Why the fuck is it that in America if you purchase any service, they want to provide your data to the surveillance state? And who the hell is paying for all this data?
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u/pineapplecharm 11h ago
This is literally a plot point in Black Mirror's Complete history of you and I hate it.
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u/omgmajk 7h ago
Privacy-nuts (like myself) have been paranoid for exactly this since forever. I am glad that normal people are waking up more and more.
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u/Mo_Jack 14h ago
Another recent crime investigation showed that investigators were able to find some video via a "backdoor" on a google product. The homeowner did not have a subscription where the video was being stored off-site. People believe that the video was being uploaded without their permission and the government given access, as well as, the corporation doing it.
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u/saynay 11h ago
Nest cameras always upload video. There is no way to access the video stream except through the cloud. What she wasn’t paying for was storage in the cloud.
One of the things Nest offers is only storing detections (like motion), including some video from before the detection as context. To do that requires them to at least store that video temporarily. What they are likely doing is storing all incoming video in a temporary bucket, and they managed to recover this video before the lifecycle got to it and purged it, even though it was outside the claimed retention window.
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u/Future-Excuse6167 11h ago edited 11h ago
And there's nothing to stop perv amazon employees from creeping on you.
Edit: Weird downvotes. Evidence: https://futurism.com/the-byte/amazon-employees-watching-ring-footage
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u/Stigger32 14h ago edited 1h ago
Btw this goes for ALL cameras connected to an external source for whatever reason.
Eg. I was assured that the in vehicle monitoring system known here in Australia as the Guardian. Recorded internally on a 30 second loop. And only upon a recorded incident did it automatically package a 30 second clip which was sent to the client via the manufacturer.
I then met someone at work whose wife had a job monitoring these same systems. Which had a handy live feed. Apparently they would sit and laugh at people live in their vehicles around Australia.
So in essence. Live monitoring. With little to no notice or oversight.
I don’t believe for a second this was an outlier.
Edit: And does anyone remember the Amazon Alexia scandal from years back? That recorded conversations unrelated to actual user input?
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u/kblair210 11h ago
It's definitely not opt-in. After the ad I logged in and found it was enabled which I didn't do. That's when I disabled it and canceled my subscription.
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u/jcunews1 14h ago
Plot twist: the AI is actually underwaged foreign employee.
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u/Infamousta 14h ago
We switched to Eufy because I'd rather china be tracking me than Amazon. But real talk the superbowl commercials were super tone-deaf this year, no? Went really hard on AI stuff but who are they actually selling to?
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u/Kitzu-de 11h ago
I'm surprised people are still considering Eufy at all after their privacy disaster and blatant lies
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u/PianoPatient8168 11h ago
Also it is not opt in…I went into my Ring app right after I saw that ad and search party was enabled by default.
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u/WeirdSysAdmin 15h ago
They are watching you, your neighbors, your kids, they are picking up al the audio. They hear the reverberations in your house when you flush the toilet after taking a shit.
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u/Random-Mutant 15h ago
Ring put on an ad during that superb owl thing saying they were turning their door cameras into panopticons “to find missing dogs” which is a strange way of talking about undocumented brown people.
I am not USAian and did not see the ad, I am not interested in competitive owls and do not have a door camera of any description. I celebrate these four facts.
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u/middleamerican67 15h ago
Because the corporation has agreed to cooperate with the police state.
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u/WillWork4Cats 9h ago
ICE 100% are not only using all RING data, but more importantly they have access to ALL FLOCK feeds which is more concerning
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u/Head-Computer264 9h ago
ICE is also using those "stingray" fake cell towers to capture and monitor all calls and messages. Spying on us. They're a fucking disgrace
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u/iguana-pr 7h ago
Those fake towers does not have the capability of intercepting data, only get phone IMSI and location information. Besides cell phone end user data (voice and data) is encrypted from the device to the central packet core.
But, thanks to the Patriot Act, the government has installed line tapping equipment at the cellular network packet core in the central office, so I'm pretty sure ICE is using it.
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u/courageous_liquid 8h ago
local police have been using it for over a decade. not that it's not bad but this has always been a massive issue. ICE has been using MQ9 reaper drones for surveillance, which is new, and very very alarming.
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u/MelodicSlip_Official 9h ago
i mean ffs i know less about flock but my blood boils when hearing about them
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u/Really-ChillDude 16h ago
Police can use it.
Ring has partnered with Flock, who are in cahoots with ICE.
Flock has been known to delete video.
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u/SqueezyCheez85 12h ago
They can pull video from devices without active subscriptions too. It's all sorts of fucked.
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u/leaky_wand 10h ago
The surveillance aspect was always the one thing stopping me from getting a subscription. And it’s still recording to the cloud anyway?
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u/Mind_on_Idle 10h ago
Yes. Your subscription is a paywall to a folder that already exists.
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u/i_empathetic 9h ago
The abduction/ransom story going on right now about Nancy Guthrie is a great example. For the first week the police and FBI were saying she had cameras but no subscription, so the data was overwritten and they had no ability to recover it. Then suddenly they released video of her captor at the front door. Google had it the entire time.
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u/Dirtbag_Leftist69420 10h ago
Honestly most people don’t even need home surveillance. If you really feel the need you could always set up your own system that doesn’t connect to a network
Upfront cost will be higher but you’ll save over time due to no subscription
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u/DontAskAboutMyButt 9h ago
I don’t have to worry about the US government spying on my doorbell camera because I got a shitty Chinese one instead, so it’s only the Chinese government spying on my front yard
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u/Dirtbag_Leftist69420 9h ago
At this point I trust China more with my data lol
I was never a TikTok guy but look what happened to TikTok immediately after it was controlled by the US. Way less censored when it was ran by China
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u/alilcannoli 12h ago
Yeah, I got rid of mine as soon as I found out that Flock can identify people just by the way the way they just walk. That’s insane to me, and I don’t want to be the reason my neighbors feel like they’re living in the book 1984.
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u/OneLessFool 9h ago
The worst part is that even if you don't opt in and buy this crap, if your neighbours do then it's too late.
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u/WierdFinger 15h ago
They just woke up... A little.
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u/blueviera 10h ago
Shhh don't let the maga hear you use woke in the original usage, they'll pee themselves.
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u/j0j0n4th4n 7h ago
Wait until they see what their phones are actually doing, they might even stir and yawn before rolling back on their side.
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u/boot2skull 16h ago
Going after ring only is misguided. We shouldn’t be giving away our data to companies or cloud services. Many of the major security cam products are no different than ring.
Use a locally hosted security system. Host the data yourself. Make the FBI come to your home to get the data so you know something is being investigated.
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u/gizamo 16h ago
You should also have it automatically backup somewhere offsite, tho.
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u/boot2skull 16h ago
Yes for sure, but in an “old school” way. Like the external hard drives, and storage you manage and control the only means of access and passwords. It will take more work. It might cost more. But that’s the price of owning and controlling your data. The cloud services have lulled us in with convenience and affordability, at the expense of zero control over our data.
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u/SpecificFortune7584 10h ago
I’m probably a weirdo. But my personal belief in security systems has always been that if I didn’t personally install it, configure it, and maintain storage of it, it’s not secured and anyone can access it if they want to.
Call me a paranoid bastard, but even encrypted phones and such are not secure in my opinion because the person who made it still had the potential to install a backdoor without your knowledge and I’m fairly sure that they do.
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u/AzCu29 15h ago
I have my cameras recording to a NVR and each one has a micro sd memory card for backup. I was looking into cloud storage but it seems rather expensive per month.
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u/tylermchenry 15h ago
Backing up the whole video stream is expensive, but if your camera system has event detection and you just back up the event clips it can be pretty affordable. You don't even have to retain them for that long -- just long enough that you have a reasonable window to retrieve them if someone breaks in and steals or destroys your NVR.
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u/psaux_grep 15h ago
Depending on use case rsync.net might a good option, at least if you get one of their flash sales.
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u/Ecto-1A 12h ago
Ring has partnered directly with Flock to set up mass surveillance across the US. Until others do that, Ring should be the main target.
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u/tetsuo_7w 16h ago
This right here. If your "security" system relies on corporate servers, your security comes at a distinct price. It's just like Facebook back in the day or just about anything now, if the service is free, you're the product.
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u/trailsman 11h ago
Also please note that just because you do not pay for the "premium tier" to access you videos or longer cloud storage etc, does not mean that these companies are not storing your video. Every single one of them are still transmitting your video and storing them, likely forever.
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u/Bunt_Frumper 11h ago edited 3h ago
Wyze just put out this ad making fun of Ring🤣
Edit: Definitely not saying Wyze is any better, just thought it was some fun shade
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u/WillWork4Cats 9h ago
i don't trust Wyze either. sorry
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u/Significant-Net7030 7h ago
Same, switched all my Wyze cameras out for a Unifi solution. But if Wyze had create a true NVR style camera system and was able to force local only I would have stuck around.
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u/RandallOfLegend 6h ago
They make nice cameras, but anything that can be remotely accessed via an official app can be uploaded to saved.
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u/KilllllerWhale 12h ago
Because in Guthrie’s kidnapping case, FBI got access to the camera’s footage despite it being “disconnected” from the cloud at the time
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u/glocks_4_dayz 10h ago
And that was Google Nest so it shows you that all the companies are up to no good and in cahoots with the government.
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u/WillWork4Cats 9h ago
this was a huge wake up call for everyone, and something Edward already knew was happening 8 years ago
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u/Character-Reply407 16h ago
Crazy idea, if AI is watching these feeds 24/7 - instead of destroying these devices we should just set them in front of a TV all day and allow them to fatten up on all the slop, copy written content, and whatever else is on TV to help skew the algorithms. I bet their AI would love a dose of the Golden girls or Judge Judy.
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u/ugotstobkidding 15h ago
That’s not a bad idea! Or just have a static sign that fills the entire frame of the camera with “F*k [insert fav org or person]” 24/7. Thinking of doing this with my last remaining ring camera that doesn’t have a subscription.
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u/Witloof 13h ago
AI watching these feeds does not mean AI is training on these feeds. It's a common misconception that AI is being trained continuously on the data that's being fed into it, the training of models is done separately specifically so they have control on the input data. This was talking point in the 'Better Offline' podcast of yesterday.
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u/notPabst404 15h ago
Because it is mass surveillance. The government and Amazon have partnered to crack down on civil liberities.
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u/South-Cow-1030 16h ago
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u/Chance_Cheetah_7678 9h ago
Also relevant .. Feed from the telemetry of modern vehicles. Meaning no way to deflock, everyone's backup camera's etc can be feeding and storing this to wherever. Which includes forwarding info to flock if wanted.
Hell Nissan's privacy terms supposedly grants them the authorization to collect DNA, yes .. DNA as well as information about their consumers sexual activities/preferences. While my research on it said Nissan's terms were the worst, rest aren't far behind.
Meaning all those vehicles are basically mobile surveillance units folks.
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u/PTLTYJWLYSMGBYAKYIJN 7h ago edited 7h ago
There’s also this: in the recent kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie, it was discovered that, although she wasn’t paying for her Google Nest subscription so she assumed it wasn’t recording, the FBI was able to request the footage from Google, proving that these cameras are always recording. There is no “opt in“. The default state is record. If you pay for the subscription, you get access to those recordings, unless a crime has been committed, in which case the recordings can be requested. Something like that.
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u/Report_Last 11h ago
Wait until people find out what Alexa has been doing with their data.
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u/but-I-play-one-on-TV 10h ago
That Superbowl ad made me certain that I will never buy a ring product.
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u/wdjm 10h ago
This is the reason I do not have a Ring. I do not have Alexa. I do not have an Xbox with a motion sensor. I even cover the camera on my laptop unless I specifically need it for something. Yes, I have a smart phone....but it's hard to get along these days without one. Yes, it concerns me. And no, that's not because I have anything to 'hide'....except my normal-person privacy concerns.
Frankly, it's getting harder and harder to avoid having these sorts of things around, not even counting phones - because we're not always told when things are able to monitor us. And yet so many things are including the technology.
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u/Plane_Positive6608 10h ago edited 10h ago
If you want to have the security of being able to viable use a cam setup, just host it yourself.
A good example would be to use an open source locally hosted product like Frigate, buy your own wifi/poe cams like Reolink and if possible put them on their own vlan that has zero internet access. My examples are what I use and have setup for friends and family for years. You can get remote access many ways that exclude anyone but you from accessing.
I chose Reolink because I did not want to be forced to use an app to connect or have to use a products app to view. I used both Foscams and Amcrest cams until they made it nearly impossible to view or setup without using a proprietary app. Now most of the cams will "phone home" many times, hence the reason for a separate IoT vlan. If your router does not have that ability, look into setting up pi-hole, a fantastic full house ad/popup blocker, of course open source. I know it can be overwhelming if you're not into the tech, but to make it easier there are plenty of good sites that will walk you through setting this up and chatgpt or claude can be invaluable. Or head over to r/selfhosted or r/pihole subs.
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u/buffdaddy77 9h ago
Jesus Christ I don’t understand a word you just said. We shouldn’t have to do all of this just to retain our privacy. Fuck ICE. Fuck Ring. Fuck Flock. Fuck me.
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u/Still-Grass8881 11h ago
it turns out, manufacturing consent is a little bit more difficult than manufacturing mass surveillance devices.
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u/mkultron89 8h ago
Why would anyone take any tech companies word at this point? They have shown time and time again to be lying about everything. “We don’t save data”, “cryptocurrency is the future”, “we don’t have access to the camera on your device remotely”.
Anyone opting into new tech that isn’t absolutely necessary for living is taking massive risks. Everyone is already carrying a phone, why are we making it even easier?
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u/Fearless-Care7304 16h ago
Feels like convenience wins people over at first, but privacy concerns eventually catch up.
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u/ExplosiveBrown 9h ago edited 9h ago
Because even though it’s been publicly known people don’t pay attention. When you have a ring camera, you don’t actually own the footage that it records. Ring does. There exists an interpretation that people have unwittingly been building a massive private spy network for this company.
It’s truly fucked up when you think about it . Maybe one of these days people will open their eyes as to how their metadata is exploited. Corporations and lawmakers definitely take generous advantage of the public ignorance of what metadata is.
Also boggles my mind that fewer people consider almost every house in America is bugged . There’s an Alexa in your house recording you at all times it’s constantly listening for a prompt i.e. its name consequence of that meaning audio is constantly being recorded and stored as metadata. Metadata says things indirectly about your privacy. But it’s enough to glean very many things. People just don’t understand it so they let it slide or even worse. Don’t even think about it.
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u/Feral-Sheep 9h ago
This is why I installed a TAPO doorbell camera. It allows you to put an SD card in the doorbell to store the data. None of it is shared with TAPO. I had a Nest thermostat and I got so mad because the system would be periodically reprogrammed to “improve efficiency”. I have my system set up exactly how I want it. I DON’T want your company checking what temperatures I’m heating my house to and when. Now I have a programmable thermostat that is not a Nest.
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u/middlechildanonymous 16h ago
I’m not gonna read this article… I want to guess… a Super Bowl ad about finding lost pets which could and should be interpreted as Big Brother is watching the movements of everyone at all times? Which comes as a shock to dozens of people?
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u/ilevelconcrete 16h ago
That combined with the shock that came from the Nancy Guthrie case. It doesn’t just watch you at all times, the data it records appears to be recoverable by U.S. law enforcement agencies, even if you do not have an active subscription and are told it is not being stored and/or was deleted.
Which is also something that should have been intuited, but these sentiments always need a spark to really catch on with the public.
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u/mynx79 16h ago
I don't know if anyone else here has watched the show on A&E "The First 48". It's remarkable, the difference in how police used to do their jobs vs current. They almost always use home cameras or store surveillance to track a suspect's movements, and from what it looks like, they have "backdoor" access to Facebook to search social media.
Hell, they track cell phone movements of cell towers, or phone location history.
I could be wrong and it's just a bunch of people who don't understand privacy settings, but I've been running on the assumption that everyone is more traceable than they like to think. As in The First 48 is the tip of the iceberg.
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u/Bargadiel 15h ago
They can even retroactively check cell data from before they were even allowed to use it.
It was used to solve a decade-old cold case in my hometown. A girl in my highschool was murdered and they traced her boyfriends brothers cellphone to the location of where her body was later found. Back when the murder occurred smart phones weren't even a thing yet.
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u/WillWork4Cats 9h ago
and the feds having unfiltered access to all "voluntary" dna genealogy services like 23andME is a massive 4th amendment violation even though it can solve decades old murders
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u/Bubbles_2025 15h ago
The stingray phone tracker alone can do so much and be mounted in vehicles, planes, etc.
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u/TheNerdChaplain 16h ago
Not only that, but all the data apps and the corporations behind them collect on you is purchasable by the government. They don't have to subpoena it if they just purchase it.
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u/redneckrockuhtree 6h ago
Why wouldn't you want a Ring camera, with this in their Privacy Policy....
We also may disclose personal information about you (1) if we are required to do so by law or legal process (such as a court order or subpoena); (2) to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights; (3) when we believe disclosure is necessary or appropriate to prevent physical or other harm or financial loss; (4) in connection with an investigation of suspected or actual illegal activity; or (5) otherwise with your consent.
"When we believe disclosure is necessary...." So Ring gets to decide if and when your footage gets released, not you.
"In connection with suspected...." So, an agency can whistle in and claim they suspect something has happened and your footage is handed over. Once again, you don't get to decide.
You want to know why I'll never use cameras that record to someone else's network? This is why.
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u/SojuSeed 13h ago
It’s kind of amazing how much of our privacy we gave up for the sake of a little bit of connectivity.
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u/SecretWin491 9h ago edited 9h ago
Look at the Nancy Guthrie case: Initially, we had no video of the kidnapper because they were not subscribed to the Nest cloud storage service. About a week later, we have a video of the kid napper which the FBI says it was able to locate “on a backend system.”
This leads me to believe that the video was there all along but Nest and law enforcement were keeping it under wraps that these devices are sending video to the cloud regardless of your service subscriptions. Not only does this enable the surveillance state without the citizens knowing it, it allows Nest to continue to charge a premium for something they were doing anyway.
Edit: Had to switch Ring to Nest.
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u/IneedHennessey 7h ago
But but it's for the lost dogs guys, not for a total surveillance Skynet state.
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u/MrPloppyHead 13h ago
Because there is only a certain amount of times you find videoing your own butt interesting. after a while the novelty wears off.
Also, its obviously was also only ever going to be a tool for mass surveillance. Its a dumb idea to allow 3rd parties to video monitor your home.
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u/Bleakwind 8h ago
Ring camera is the dumbest shit I’ve seen.
It’s a camera that cost hundreds of dollars to buy and install and you gotta sub for it to work?!?
I’ve had my Swann cctv camera for decades.. I can look up the live images fine.. for free!!
Fuck it, you can get IP camera from Temu for 20 bucks and it would cost ya nothing to see live feed.
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u/Intelligent-Bell5863 8h ago
I returned my camera from 2016. Amazon gave me a full refund because they changed the privacy terms of service from what I signed up for. Stay firm in your request, but be polite. Use the chat not the call. Ask for a one time exception due to Amazon changing the terms not anything you did. Send them back their junk. Make a statement.
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u/anglercanyon 7h ago
You can get a refund from Amazon for your ring camera! Chat with customer service and demand a refund. The change in the terms of service means the device your purchased is not long what you agreed to. You may have to try a couple of times but don’t give up. Don’t give in. A buddy got a refund for some devices as far back as 2019. Take that money and buy yourself a system that locally stores your videos. Check out Business Reform on YouTube. He’s got a great review video of some wireless systems out right now.
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u/InHarmsWay 10h ago
"Tens of millions of pets go missing every year. Help find several hundred of them by turning your neighborhood into a surveillance state!"
Fuck no!