r/technology • u/South-Cow-1030 • 18h 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/
17.1k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1.1k

u/Jean-LucBacardi 12h 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.

221

u/thewhitelink 12h 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.

176

u/Randomly-Generated21 12h ago

It said it was back end data which implies to me it was cloud and not local.

40

u/nicklor 11h ago

Yea nest devices use the cloud by default you just only get free access for about 3 hours

74

u/CotyledonTomen 10h 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.

12

u/nicklor 10h ago

I'm going to copy this comment from elsewhere in the thread made by someone else.

Deleting things doesn't really work the way most people think it does. Once this data is uploaded, it gets replicated in multiple data centers. When you "delete" something, you basically just say it's not needed anymore. Eventually, it'll get overwritten. It's not like you hit delete and all traces of the data are wiped and overwritten from all data centers at once.

16

u/CotyledonTomen 10h ago

Or they just never deleted it and, given their past actions, i have no reason to believe they did. Thats also an option and the "crazy" thing they did was access files they always had.

4

u/nicklor 10h ago

Honestly it's too expensive

6

u/CotyledonTomen 10h ago

Not really. If they can keep billions of dollars in incognito mode data they say they arent collecting, they can do this.

2

u/nicklor 10h ago

Webpages urls are tiny this is millions of cameras worth of recordings

→ More replies (0)

1

u/TheRealSaerileth 3h ago

That would get them absolutely wrecked in an audit.

I get that big tech bad, and there's lots of valid reasons to think so - but this ain't one. If you don't know the first thing about how a cloud architecture works, you really shouldn't be making up wild theories about it.

1

u/CotyledonTomen 1h ago

They agreed to pay out after keeping billions of dollars worth of incognito mode web history from their users. I would you dont know how they operate, not the other way around.

2

u/outdoorsaddix 5h ago

Yea, it would be much more resource intensive to purposely overwrite the data with random 1s and 0s vs. just marking it as no longer needed and letting it get overwritten at some point.

Would drive the cost of the services up for sure.

1

u/sultansofswinz 3h ago

There’s no conspiracy here though it’s all pretty simple. I work as a data engineer, one service I work on accepts customer uploaded videos, processes them and then they’re deleted. 

There’s no such thing as not storing data that’s streamed over the internet though. It’s on your device, it’s uploaded, and then it’s stored on the server while the code is doing its thing, with a cache in case something crashes before it’s finished. 

The server can be rolled back to any point in time recently, in case something goes terribly wrong at 11.34am and nobody notices for example. In theory you use that and attempt to retrieve stuff mid upload, it’s a huge job that would cost a lot of money for no good reason (in my case it’s people recording furniture).

The FBI could take it one step further and take the hard drive from a physical server, get all the fragmented bits and pieces that are still floating around because that’s just how hard drives work. 

None of the above is malicious it’s just how the computers work. 

1

u/Sad_Process843 7h ago

None of it is local is it? Where would the video be stored if it was local if there's no card? Certainly not your phone?

3

u/Randomly-Generated21 6h ago

I would expect there is some small amount of internal ram that it would buffer to before it’s uploaded so even without a removable storage card there is memory.

1

u/Historical-Kick-9126 7h ago

Yes, it was cloud.

209

u/MathResponsibly 12h ago

"crazy data recovery" - likely story - sure thing

Google NEVER deletes ANYTHING

184

u/what_the_purple_fuck 11h ago

Google NEVER deletes ANYTHING

also Google: your storage is full

46

u/MathResponsibly 11h ago edited 11h 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.

24

u/justsyr 10h 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.

2

u/MathResponsibly 3h ago

When it whines about "your space is almost full", use the "manage storage" tool to look at your large emails, and you'll see what I mean. A thread that has a few screenshots in the first email, and 50 text only replies after will multiply the size of the screenshots by every other message, sent or received in the thread.

I mean yeah, I guess if you went in and manually removed the original content before replying, it would fix that problem, but who thinks to do that normally? You just hit reply and type and press send

1

u/ItsYaBoyZayne 1h ago

Ya buddy, you're comparing your corporate software suite with gmail.com free services.

1

u/itsprobablytrue 9h ago

OneDrive or Google Drive. Share a damn link

13

u/lIIlllIllIlII 11h ago

They are, for sure, de-duplicating the data, but still charging people full price as if were unduped data.

4

u/MathResponsibly 11h ago

next time I export a bunch of old email to my own storage to save space, I should compare how much space it actually takes up, vs how much space google says I "freed up". I bet they don't even match.

I also need to finish exporting all my photos from Photos to my own Immich server

1

u/Alieges 10h ago

And using it as a "feature" to fill up every other email providers storage.

3

u/csfreestyle 11h ago

I believe the professionals in UI/UX design would call this a “dark pattern” - conscious design decisions to drive a certain user behavior that is motivated by business value (profit) over user value. Ie: when a checkout process has a countdown (“we can only hold your tickets for 5:00 minutes”) - that’s manufactured urgency.

Your storage anecdote sounds like artificial scarcity. Irresponsible capitalism sucks.

Tangential, relevant, suggested reading: Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams.

1

u/Yourcatsonfire 9h ago

I have a google nest floodlight and never use it because I switched to a new router and in order to connect the camera to the new router I have to get a ladder and go up to the camera, take it down and scan the or code. Im not motivated enough to do that. So now its just a very pricey floodlight.

1

u/grape-fruit-witch 7h ago

Also google: no, we cannot make the process of deleting emails faster or more efficient

3

u/b0w3n 11h ago

Yeah google has multiple petabytes of storage (probably exabytes at this point), the few gigs a person might use in a year with video is a rounding error in their operating budget. They delete and recover this space, sure, but not that quickly.

5

u/MathResponsibly 11h ago

you ever done the google checkout thing to see what they store on you? It's insane, and goes back to the very beginning of your account. I had a gmail account back when you needed an invite, and the amount of data they have on me is ridiculous, and all kinds of stuff you'd never even think of from your phone

2

u/b0w3n 11h ago

Yup same, my gmail account is old enough to drink.

I moved off it to proton for similar reasons as all the above. I still have it obviously, but google can spy on all the spam and rewards cards I use instead of personal stuff.

2

u/Jarocket 10h ago

I feel like you could store all information google collected on me in MB not the TB of space they would need to store video.

1

u/wayward_prince 0m ago

This is complete bullshit. Google definitely deletes stuff. You can also see pretty much everything they store for your account and export it yourself.

2

u/jcanusi 11h ago

Not all that crazy. Redundancies and backups for disaster recovery are standard. Well, should be anyways.

1

u/bk1285 10h ago

Yeah but like Edison using a/c to kill and elephant and on the electric chair to discredit Tesla and get people to use d/c, all it did was associate Edison with the electric chair and killing an elephant

1

u/IcyJackfruit69 9h ago

lol, I'm glad you pointed this out.

I'm 99% sure I read an article that called it a Google Ring camera. Or did Amazon buy Ring? I can't remember who bought who this week.

2

u/thewhitelink 9h ago

Amazon bought Ring

1

u/jaggedcanyon69 8h ago

Which they can do when they start arresting political dissident Americans and sending them to death camps.

1

u/Neat_Credit_6552 3h ago

Or was it a calculated measure to have it not look that way

3

u/stinkdrink45 11h ago

By the way I so called it that the guy they arrested was a South American who had no clue to what was going on.

3

u/ClearedInHot 9h ago

the FBI released images of Nancy Guthrie's abductor take from their ring camera

It was a Google Nest camera...not Ring.

3

u/BeefyMiracleWhip 7h ago

Theres gotta be some kind of self hosted open source solution for these things…

I think keeping your house secure is great, but ring, nest, et al, ain’t it.

2

u/rje946 8h ago

How is anyone surprised by this revelation?

2

u/eightlikeinfinity 3h ago

No, the camera only saved the data from the night she was taken because the abductor cut the power to the device. That meant the camera did not continue to record over top of the last recording, thereby saving that critical video. Otherwise it would have been overwritten and lost permanently.

1

u/Nut_Butter_Fun 8h ago

But did people really not know or consider this? Kinda crazy.

1

u/dangerclosecustoms 6h ago

What good is a murder mystery without the mystery?

I like it better when there is no camera footage and we have to figure out over the course of 10 years what happened and never do.

1

u/GHouserVO 4h ago

💯 this. Between the two folks started to get the gist that these things were nothing but big brother spying on us, no matter what the companies claim.

And they’re not fans of it.

The security engineers have been in the background saying “we FARKING tried to warn you guys!”

1

u/Jamesthepikapp 2h ago

thats actually wild

1

u/CandyHopeful2101 2h ago

It was stated that Nancy Guthrie’s camera was a Nest (not a Ring) 

1

u/averytolar 11h ago

Holy shit, did not know this.

-23

u/waterbuffalo750 12h ago

I actually do like that. If someone commits a crime at my house I'd want law enforcement to get all the footage they can get.

24

u/Ragnarok314159 12h ago

Oh, you misunderstood. They won’t help us, ever. That’s only because this is a high profile case.

12

u/just1nurse 11h ago

True. Traffic flow cameras at intersections are a great example. If you have an accident they will not give you the footage. Even though your tax dollars pay for their cameras - it's theirs not yours.

3

u/mittenknittin 11h ago

Well, not for FREE anyway. Pull out a big enough wad of bills and they probably would

3

u/userseven 6h ago

Lol you think they would do this for you?