- These are mappable in OpenStreetMap with the tags surveillance:type=camera + camera:mount=doorbell
Data query around the Netherlands shows about a hundred are mapped so far as specifically doorbell cameras: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2dQw (the tag does not yet seem established in the USA). There are also many thousands of cameras mapped that are either not doorbell-mounted, or simply not tagged to such detail. This is a convenient map to see all of them: https://sunders.intri.cat/
- These cameras are a big part of why I recently moved. They're a canary for something deeper.
The area I was in was like the Korean DMZ with regard to flock cameras. I had one at the only entrance to my neighborhood. A trip to the grocery store would put me in their database 12 times at last count.
I still have to worry about the standardized fleet of cameras at Home Depot and a few other retailers, but it's not nearly as bad out here. Location is a big part of the dystopia. It is not evenly distributed. Fighting back at the municipal and HOA level can make a massive difference. Some areas seem hopeless though. You're better off finding something that already mostly works and trying hard to keep it that way.
The general fear level of the local population seems to be the biggest factor in all of this. I went from a place where people would do the quadruple check car lock routine when walking into the grocery store, to a place where many leave their unlocked vehicles idling in the parking lot. I don't even think about locking my doors at home now. It almost feels silly to do it around here. It's amazing the difference that ~65 miles can make.
by JeremyHerrman
4 subcomments
- Unifi G4 Doorbell Pro [0] is a great self-hosted option. I've been very happy with mine over the last year, but I was already bought into the unifi ecosystem with a UDM Pro SE and U6 mesh APs.
0: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cameras-doorbells/collec...
- So, rather than Big Brother being government-imposed monitoring paid for by all taxpayers, the concerned citizenry is flipping the bill for the devices, network connectivity and electricity. Fascinating.
- This is why I never bought anything Amazon owned, other than Kindles; and I have dropped the latter, too.
I was always suspicious of Ring and never understood the people using it.
- With the stroke of a key, 100 million customer-installed cameras become part of the surveillance state.
by bryancoxwell
7 subcomments
- Might be a good time to enable E2EE on your Ring cams if you haven’t already:
https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...
by jamestimmins
3 subcomments
- By this point, we should assume that all companies with sensitive data that could theoretically help solve crime will be accessed by the government as a rule.
That's just being a realistic technology user in 2025.
by PaulHoule
3 subcomments
- Flock is controversial in my area https://transparency.flocksafety.com/ithaca-city-ny-pd
- And this is why my setup will be using Reolink cameras integrated locally via HomeAssistant and Frigate. Detection runs locally on cameras and/or in Frigate, HA manages events and UI, and the only way to access any of it remotely is via VPN, no "cloud" anything.
If the authorities come knocking with a warrant, or frankly, even a nicely-worded sensible request, sure, have at it. But ain't nobody accessing the footage unnoticed and without my approval.
by browningstreet
2 subcomments
- I have a friend who's been extolling this open source alternative:
https://www.home-assistant.io/
by idiotsecant
0 subcomment
- Stop paying companies to put spyware in your house. Don't connect your smart TV to the network, don't buy cloud cameras, and above all don't run a phone with an OS that they phone company gives you.
by scottydelta
3 subcomments
- Flock is funded and supported by YC.
Not sure how YC sees this.
by nik282000
4 subcomments
- One of the many reasons to host your own stuff. It costs about 0.75CAD per day to run my server and PoE switch. For my 20 bucks a month I get cameras, a media server, password manager, push notifications, file sharing, and a dozen other services, all without handing my data over to business or governments.
Is it as secure as a cloud service? Depends on what you consider secure. I closely monitor access logs and use strong passwords, Amazon has billions to spend on encryption, apps, and datacenters but they also have thousands of employees that can access your data at any time for any reason.
I would love it if some commercial host-it-yourself product were released but that goes against the pay to play model that has been chosen for all modern tech.
- When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house, you realize that the recent demo of Anduril's helmet that gives an information display that the soldier/cop wearing it can use to "see who is in the house" or "see around corners" etc. is not sci-fi but instead, something they can do today.
by 1970-01-01
1 subcomments
- I'm willing to bet $$$ anyone will be able to call themselves a 'local security agency' before proper controls are implemented.
- Look the outcomes from past history to understand how future will become.
Sadly it is only going to get much worse before it gets better.
by everdrive
6 subcomments
- George Orwell really never could have imagined that people would flock to purchase or otherwise use the methods of their own surveillance. (smart phones, social media, smart cameras, modern cars, etc) I think it paints government surveillance policies in something of a different light. There is definitely a constituency which believes that the evil central government is pushing for surveillance in a purely unilateral way.
I'm not really pro-government, but modern surveillance capitalism really pushes against this view. Put to their own devices, the public will generally (and apparently) flock towards mass surveillance all on their own, and I think one possible implication is that the government surveillance policies are more popular then some folks in HN circles would suspect.
- Slight tangent: on top of that, I just read an article yesterday (which of course I can't find again right now) about how false automatic alarms from such cameras will incur a fee from the owners when the Police comes to check it out. It was from somewhere in Texas.
- People need devices that will protect them from this mass surveillance. Plausible deniability needs to be restored.
Some sort of jamming tech or scrambling tech. There’s no reason to lock everyone into a surveillance state when we should be fighting it. Fighting through legislation isn’t tenable anymore.
- This is one of those stories that reads like a Black Mirror episode but is just... real life now. What’s especially concerning is the normalization of this kind of surveillance creep...
by sriram_malhar
1 subcomments
- Of course they are.
by maybezzzz76
0 subcomment
- Didn't someone a while ago make those QR codes which played with the facial recognition algorithms. I wonder where they are today... Sound like fashion could play a role here.
- I commented on a similar post earlier, but my entire neighborhood, hundreds of houses, came with them preinstalled. Can’t even leave my house without being surveilled.
Some people have the setting on where it starts announcing stuff any time it sees a person, which it does all the way to the sidewalk. So you go on a walk and get yelled at through a super shitty speaker several times.
And it’s about as dystopian as you can imagine with people posting recordings constantly on the neighborhood Facebook group and arguing.
I swapped to HomeKit secure video because of no additional subscription, included in the iCloud one I’m paying anyway. Allegedly end to end encrypted too.
- Having tried to do this already to no avail, does anyone know if as an owner of one of these Ring devices if it's possible to take it offline and handle everything locally?
I'm usually against these types of "smart" devices, but only bought it because my house got burgled as a student (whilst I was asleep!), so I got pretty shaken up and got the cheapest thing I could find. Currently, I do have it connected to a local HA instance, but I'm pretty sure that relies on Ring's online services to access it, unless I'm mistaken.
- I wonder how many existing Ring owners would have bought the camera had they known they would eventually give third parties access to the camera footage.
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614713
by add-sub-mul-div
1 subcomments
- Orwell didn't foresee that people would voluntarily pay for their own surveillance, out of fandom for a company that charges $15/month for "free" shipping. That they also actually do give away for free if you can wait a few extra days rather than treating every purchase as an impulse buy.
Reality has become more stupid than even visionaries could have predicted.
- Security cameras could already be hacked and have their feed altered by using Toka services. Toka was founded by Ehud Barak (also of Carbyne fame, with Epstein) and a16z:
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/06/a16z-backed-toka-wants-to-...
- However, AI-powered technology used by law enforcement has been proven to exacerbate racial biases.
This is a little misleading. Flock is primarily an ALPR that can identify make/model/color/identifying-feature of vehicles. It's not facial recognition. It doesn't itself have a racial component. The modal "proactive" Flock intervention (as opposed to investigative searches after crimes) is to flag a moving vehicle as stolen.
But in practice, the outcomes of deploying Flock are racialized, because the hot lists states keep of stolen vehicles aren't accurate enough for real-time enforcement, so recovered vehicles stay on the lists and false-positive. You're disproportionately likely to have a vehicle on a hot list if you live in a low-income neighborhood.
Even then: it's not clear how any of this is apposite to a Ring/Flock partnership. You can't use a Ring camera to do realtime ALPR flagging of cars. Presumably, this supports Flock's "single pane of glass" product; they just want police going to Flock for all their video needs. Police already canvass Ring and Nest cameras during investigations.
- They do have an end to end encryption option.
Wonder if that helps any.
https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...
by nbngeorcjhe
1 subcomments
- I _hate_ walking down the block and hearing their dumb "Hi! You are being recorded!" jingle. Ffs if you're going to record me at least do it quiely
- This combined with all the price increases makes me hate the fact I bought a ring doorbell.
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- Official post: https://blog.ring.com/about-ring/ring-expands-community-requ...
- All this hand-wringing about surveillance powers is not keeping up with how quickly our ability to surveil people is expanding. The fourth amendment seems kind of like a wet fart in a timeline where private companies can surveil the public and then simply choose to share their data with law enforcement.
I had to buy a surveillance camera recently, but I made sure mine doesn’t connect to the internet in any way.
by femiagbabiaka
7 subcomments
- This is the logical conclusion to the state of irrational fear that Americans perpetually live in, that causes them to feel they need 24/7 surveillance of their homes, no matter the consequences.
by BaudouinVH
1 subcomments
- My first thought : Orwell's 1984 Telescreen is happening.
- https://archive.is/7fMPK
by statuslover9000
0 subcomment
- Great job giving the government a live dossier of all the political volunteers canvassing out there. This makes me feel so much safer!
- I think Amazon hired the bizarro team to run Ring. Because they just keep giving reasons NOT to get a Ring device.
- To control the public, just play on the fear or safety part, and they will just follow mindlessly.
- Some serious boycotts need to be happening, and soon. I do not care if this was an R or a D administration, this has been out of control and just getting worse.
This is us against the oligarchs, not us against each other. And something makes me worried that there is an impending recession/depression and that these surveillance devices will be use to quell any dissent. (I say this because of the insane rise in the price of gold)
I, for one, am canceling my Amazon Prime account and avoiding amazon as much as I can in this dystopia where it is the only place you can buy many goods anymore.
- I’m surprised to not see more noise about Rings new “search party” features, for… Finding dogs?
- Zoneminder is a good alternative
- Doesn't matter, cops will raid a home on no more info than intuition.
- Keep voting for politicians that spend our money on weapons and violence, this is the stuff we'll keep getting. This applies to both major political parties in the US.
- how cheap is rolling your own with a little mini PC running an Ultralytics model?
by buellerbueller
0 subcomment
- It was only a matter of time.
by anigbrowl
2 subcomments
- It's not that long ago that people used to talk about East Germany as a dystopian hellhole of state surveillance, and yet the US is now far more surveilled than the DDR ever was. It's amazing to me how easily this country was propagandized and its inhabitants persuaded to establish an authoritarian state of their own.
- Wild how if a government does this directly most folks agree its dystopian and flip out, but let companies do it and, even if it ends up in the governments hands, people install it themselves...
- Get a Chinese knockoff that transmits everything to Chinese servers. Good luck to the US government getting your data out of there. :)
by forrestthewoods
0 subcomment
- Unpopular Opinion: good? I mean I like wish all the people who steal packages and break into cars in my neighborhood would get arrested.
- Big tech is nothing different from the German industrialists one hundred years ago
by jauntywundrkind
0 subcomment
- So so late. But just so vile, so reprehensible to see such a corrupt fallen disagreeable state of the world march over us.
I am stricken with fear over the control and manipulation by the Chinese state. A dominance over people without respect or regard, a self certainty and pomp that denies life & possibility.
But what the West is letting happen here, the limitless post-state open-for-anyone surveillance Flock & others are offering has seemingly even less bounds, less respect, less purpose, less direction. These people, this enterprise is clearly the worst possible thing we could do, the most awful accrual & misuse of the world against its people's. To spy on everyone & to without regard sell that days to everyone is a crime against all.
Flock is truly the #HostisHumaniGeneris. Woe & (all too expectable) disappointment to see Amazon giving up all their data to fascist pro ICE losers who, were we a descent society, we would run out of the world.
by flanked-evergl
3 subcomments
- Everybody is a libertarian when their political opposition has power.
by account_1234
0 subcomment
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by whatsupdog
2 subcomments
- [flagged]
- this article with 1 comment is top of the front page for me, how come?
- To all the people talking about government surveillance do you not realize the government already can track you by your cell phone?