It only uses around 20% CPU on a 6 core VM (running on a Ivy Bridge Xeon) with two cameras.
One of the big advantages is that I can pick and choose which camera I use, and then segment it off on it's own firewalled VLAN so it's only talking to my server applications. That lets me know that its not phoning home, and I can run PoE cameras that are immune to wifi jammers.
The idea that the surroundings of my house aren't being beamed straight into an Amazon datacenter somewhere is particularly satisfying.
I'm looking for outdoor + wireless, primarily for wildlife watching.
https://gist.github.com/neontuna/d1ba0c771aa89c42910f21c0aae...
I didn't like having to fire up some NVR software just to get the camera live stream, and you're locked into whatever options that software might have. With ffmpeg you can do some cool stuff with filters.
It has a very nice integration with homeassistant.
Is manufacturing using it for anything? More security applications?
Eufy Security started showing advertisements about their new products whenever I tap on a motion detected notification. They prioritize their ads over your own security which is ridiculous. Not just that, some of their clips stored in their cloud storage would never open despite the fact I used to pay them my membership fees every month. They were also caught storing passwords and other security credentials in plain text. Thanks to them, they were the primary motivation for me to move away from using those proprietary platforms and look for something self-hosted.
I got Frigate running on my old hardware with hardware acceleration enabled via RX 550 GPU and detection is always under one second. I wrote a small app that uses Frigate API to grab screenshots and send me notifications via Telegram and Pushover. It's been very self-sustainable for two years now. I only had to restart the service two times in all of this time. I am also using some tunneling from my VPS into the locally hosted Frigate running on my home server and it's just been flawless. Thanks to this amazing project.
They use the abbreviation NVR in the first sentence without saying what it means.
It means "networked video recorder".
Please don't do that. Not everyone who comes across your site is a member of your particular niche.
P.S.: I‘m also supporting them with a yearly? subsciption to train the „A.I.“ model against false positives I provide which increased the accuracy even more.
Why are people still installing security cameras that are monitored by them? They increase stress level and felt insecurity. They do not make you feel secure, say psychological studies. You probably think more about burglaries and dead spaces in your setup and actively monitor for these in your daily lives, where for 99.8 % of people this should be a non-topic.
If you want to install them for later police work, that still seems tedious and you might require off-site backup. In public places we often have CCTV of people, but unless you have number signs on vehicles, they seem to not help with conviction rates by much.
Frigate's better than anything else I tried, but not perfect. As mentioned in another thread, it has some issues with codecs from some cameras (playing clips from Amcrests is fine, Hikvisions not so much) and therefore you may need to transcode. Also it has no built in option for sending your recorded clips offsite; theoretically you could mirror its storage directory, but as far as I've found it's not organized in a way that you can separate just important events.
For basic needs go2rtc [0] or MediaMTX [1] can be enough. But once you need some form of intelligence on top AFAIK unfortunately there is no unixiy tool that can take a stream and easily define and apply a model on it. You will have to code something in python.
Running a mix of Ubiquti/TP-Link VIGI+TAPO/Reolink. I'm running everything in containers and everything works perfect!
I have a love/hate relation with Frigate, I use it since 2 years but since the business model of the developer is provide a "good model" using a custom one is not possible (at least not in a easy ways AFAIK).
I use my cameras to track a family member with a medical condition, this is why I do not feel confortable uploading those image to the "Frigate+" service to eventually get better training.
Unfortunately, the USB Accelerator is very hard to buy even at 3x retail.
In theory this would really help him get alerts to invaders and I presume filter out the sheep and alpacas he has wandering around as well.
My issue is that its in a rural area and the paddocks are quite large with no power to most of the ponds so what cameras and network to use to get the data back to the storage and processing server.
Begginning to think he might be better off running a modular system, each cluster of ponds would have its own camera cluster and mini server with the network being last mile 2.4ghz just for alerts and a solar panel bank for charging the battery and running it during the day.
What would I get away with here? N100 mini device? processing maybe 6 cameras?
[1] https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-cameras-nvrs/product...
At most, I would really only need a front door video camera that acts as a door bell. One of the things I miss most about my older apartment was the keyless entry and ability to virtually answer the door.
If you want to start just remember to avoid h.265 cameras so you don't need to transcode since few clients and browsers support it.
For on-camera AI, I'm aware of OpenMV https://openmv.io/ and their recently-kickstarted N6 & AE3 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openmv/openmv-n6-and-ae...
are you using with only one Coral USB dongle at the same time (plugged in the PN50 NUC) and get successful object or person identification with frigate? And why telegram? Is it connected to frigate only for notifications resulting from the identifications?
I ain't running it on a modern CPU though, so I'm happy with the Coral.
I appreciate the local storage option on this camera. It will also use the HomeBase series local storage devices if you want to do that. These are WiFi cameras so you need to install an app on your phone and then set them up on your network and then you will be able to see videos in near real-time. The delays that I see are about 5 seconds though I haven't measured.
The detection settings can be tailored from low to high. With mine in place I can regularly monitor insect activity for insects as small as 1 cm moving across the field of view if the sensitivity is set to middle setting. It will detect beetles, ants, grasshoppers, moths, butterflies, centipedes, spiders, etc. I have multiple videos of animals including deer, raccoon, opossum, fox, rabbit, rat, two species of mouse; also reptiles like lizards, and a snake; also birds including roadrunners, cardinals, wrens, chickadees, mockingbirds and others.
The night vision works well too. I don't mind being awakened at 2 am to watch a fox nosing around. I had seen the tracks several times over the years and my neighbor said that they saw it moving back and forth across his place but I had never seen it alive and moving until I got that camera. Pretty great.
That model camera may not work for his needs. It only has a 2X zoom. Eufy does have other solar models that use cellular network I think. I will likely upgrade to 4K models later with higher zoom and use one of their HomeBase storage devices since they can store up to 16TB if you provide the disk.
I haven't used their AI since it trains on local data on a HomeBase and I don't yet use a HomeBase. It does work though since one of my relatives has several different model Eufy cams and a HomeBase and they tagged photos to train for people and set up exclusion zones and it all works for them.
All in all I am glad I chose Eufy cams over standard game cameras. It ends up being less expensive and near zero hassle to use them.
For NVR I am using raspberry pi5 4gb model with a dedicated 2.5 inch hard drive that is only used for recording where micro SD card is used for everything else. All the pieces fit in a dedicated case:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007391354252.html?spm=a2...
I also plan to install Corall M.2 card within the unused M.2 SSD card slot.
Otherwise pretty happy.
(Edit: my ISP is blocking, this is not an issue with hacs...
I'm trying to integrate this, but the HACS integration does not seem to work with my HA because the get.hacs.xyz server is misconfigured.
wget -O - https://get.hacs.xyz | bash -
Connecting to get.hacs.xyz ([2606:4700:20::ac43:4465]:443)
28EBD0AA71710000:error:0A0000C6:SSL routines:tls_get_more_records:packet length too long:ssl/record/methods/tls_common.c:662:
28EBD0AA71710000:error:0A000139:SSL routines::record layer failure:ssl/record/.rec_layer_s3.c:687:
ssl_client: SSL_connect
wget: error getting response: Connection reset by peer)Like, I remember thinking the GNU guys were hippie crackpots. But it was like 15 years ago and I have forgot how to relate to that feeling... it is like realizing all my colleagues are not using adblockers and visit sites with ads. I just can't understand.
Most people would know the term from either being quoted or looking up CCTV solutions, all of which, unless they're fully "cloud-based", come with a component that is called the NVR. You wouldn't even consider this if you weren't aware of the concept. If NVR means nothing to you, Network Video Recorder doesn't mean anything to you either. This is meant to be a replacement for closed and inflexible hardware boxes that are sold together with security cameras, and the name of those boxes are "NVRs".
Easier than getting VLANs working across switches and APs
The little white one with "wings" seemed to work better than the really cheap circular base with circular camera ones
I did not know what "NVR" meant prior to reading the OP.
Been running about 2-3 years, was mostly fine before but now I get constant false positives from the children's garden toys, scooter left in the garden, pirate flag waving etc.
I don't submit false positives for privacy reasons but I'm looking at trainingy own model. I've got years worth of positives/negatives to train on.
1. It supports the developers(s) 2. The price can be directly attributed to cost for training 3. You can keep the models you trained during your subscription indefinately
That's pretty much the opposite to AgentDVR. I don't need hosted services for remote access or push notifications - I can do that myself. But if I want to abide the license terms, I need to purchase a monthly subscription for remote access over my own VPN.
They have a two-stage approach, first motion detection with - I think - OpenCV and then afterwards object detection of zones of interest with different object detection models, depending on your hardware.
It supports Coral TPU, Halio Accelerator and most GPUs. I think AMD is still the worst, since ROCm is not available on iGPUs.
Afterwards, they provide/support models like edgedet (Coral), YOLO-NAS, YOLO, D-Fine or RF-DETR.
They also offer paid access to a specially trained version of YOLO-NAS where you can also train your own images.
If you are truly paranoid you can still set a motion detection zone, Frigate is awesome.
"These are not the detections you are looking for."
Oh wow, I didn’t know I felt that way! I’m glad you were able to tell me what I feel.
You are making a lot of assumptions about why people have them.
The one pointed at the driveway sends an alert to my phone when someone visits. It's handy because I can't hear the house from my office so I often don't realize when we have guests over.
The one in my back yard is for security. I don't obsess over it, but if something went missing from my workshop I'd check the recordings. I'm not worried about traditional thieves, but I've got a couple unsavory family members.
The point of Frigate et. al. is to not have to do the monitoring. The false positives of small wildlife, known persons/vehicles, etc. do not consume attention, so you forget about it until something of actual interest happens.
I have set it to send me notification if any person is detected in my front yard, drive way or back yard after I have "armed" my alarm at night. I am thinking of also sounding am alarm on my home speakers.
Frigate, when configured properly, has a really low false positive rate. I have only seen 2-3 false positives in the past one year. And if rarely ever misses. So it's something you can rely on.
In my case, I received a ring doorbell as a gift. I ran it for several years and replaced it with Reolink on a vlan.
Your go2rtc url should look something like this and it will display that url in the camera configuration in the app itself.
rtsp://cameraname:password@<ip address>/live0
not waking you, but it is cool to have a collection of animal photos. Sort of amazing there's a hidden world.
In so many words if you expect to use the Coral boards you are stuck on EOL versions of Debian/Ubuntu - which have terribly old video drivers and missing kernel GPU support. There's a good chance your modern GPU - even well-supported Intel ones - won't work.
Imagine buying new hardware in 2025 whose software still required Windows 7.
Tensorflow for the object detection doesn't do any OCR thus written instructions dont work. However, according to the website the system has a limited list of objects it detects. So maybe disguising yourself as a walking tree might prevent detection.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scanner_Darkly [1] https://medium.com/data-science/avoiding-detection-with-adve...
Since I installed a visible security camera above my front door I never had couriers throwing packages, they very rarely not show up and claim "no one was home" and so on. Also I had a neighbour damage my fence every single time he was doing his farm work (plowing, harvesting). In addition he would use an unfenced portion of my property as a turning place leaving deep/huge tire marks and did other silly shit like that despite me asking him many times not to do it. Once I installed cameras it hasn't happened once.
Then there are other practical reasons, I can review the recordings to find out which way my cat went if he is gone for a long time, or I can check is he waiting in front of the door in the middle of the night without having to get out of bed. Also my cameras resolved a mystery how one of my cats got injured once (hint - deer really don't like cats).
Finally, let's say there is a huge storm forecast and I'm away. I can check remotely everything is fine.
Finally, cameras are very good for insurance purposes. At least in my country insurers are known to weasel they way out of paying very often. If you have an actual recording that is much more difficult for them to do.
The only issue I have with most reasonably priced Cctv cameras is that they go towards more megapixels when they should go towards more IR sensitivity. Almost every consumer grade camera can be defeated at night if a subject is moving quickly. The picture will be smeared. So for ID purposes I use lower resolution more "professional " cameras.
As for open source, I've been using ZoneMinder with local (and on camera) AI for ages.
When the doorbell rings I get a notification on my desktop and phone with a relevant image captured a few moments before the button was pressed.
Then I can determine if it's something I need to put my pants on for.
Mostly it's just fun and easy to add cameras around your house. Then you can do stuff like have the LLM count birds it sees or ask it "are the dogs in the back yard" etc.
Here are some ways I use security cameras:
Check if my colleagues are in the office or not (and if they are in the middle of a live recording). Check on my plants while I'm away. Check if there is a free parking space. Check if I left something at home or in the office.
I'm not really thinking about crime, even though they are called 'security cameras'.
[0] https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition/blob/master/exa...
[1] https://github.com/deveth0/python-opencv/tree/master/objectD...
The above should apply to any 'IoT' device.
I finally had to look it up on Wikipedia so I could understand what they were even referring to and "Network Video Recorder" was much clearer as to what the component was. Overall it creates barrier to entry where everyone operates on the assumption that you're only shopping because you're already a customer.
In addition, if something else like a 2nd tree moves, then it will get sent to the detector which will potentially label the other thing (my trees were causing false positives because it thought the stationary fence post was a human)
Not so sure about that, there's some cool stuff being done with adversarial models to force mis-detection of otherwise normal-looking images.
Mars MT1000LRF Thermal Riflescope:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/ThermalHunting/comments/1i8wlpp/tho...
Or if it's Jehovah's Witnesses, something you need to take your pants off for.
> Turn on face recognition & upload your first face via Face Library → Add Face.
> Train and improve accuracy: New detections appear in Face Library → Train with a confidence score-assign each to a new or existing person to refine future recognition.
As far as I know you can do object detection and tracking by gluing it with a yolo model using a few lines of python like this [0]. I saw a bunch of people doing this.
I really wish there was a more unixy tool available in package managers doing this.
- [0] https://github.com/xj25vm/MotionSpot/blob/main/motionspot.py
It is hard to turn down present with "it will spy on me" when ordinary people think a thermometer can't. But I am quite sure I would refuse to install a SaaS CCTV.
Even though it would suit me perfectly - simply by treating people like me, not knowing that acronym before, as somewhat "unworthy".
Cult.
I'm not sure why you're assuming most people ever requested a quote or looked up CCTV solutions. I sure haven't.
It is a rather annoying myopic perspective I most often run across in tech, where technical people for whatever reason are so fixated on their little corner that they are either unaware or simply indifferent to the fact that there are others in the world, and that if they want to spread their work and impact, they need to make things approachable and lower barriers to entry.
It Is why the rule of general language proficiency exists in English especially because of all the abbreviations, to facilitate information and knowledge sharing.
Let’s all improve by going through whatever our project is and make sure that at least in the context, abbreviations are easily understood by expanding them, e.g., your introduction/overview page and documentation should always expand most first instance abbreviations, including in separate, high level segments (e.g., if you have different first contact pages or objects) unless they are globally known to society.
It’s really not any different than any other “sales” tactic; you will not be successful selling something if you do not first describe what it does in a one-liner. Ask yourself, “who is the person I want/need to come to this thing and should I assume they would know what this all means?”
Disclaimer: I didn’t try it yet but the last rabbit hole regarding OpenVINO comparisons looked too good to be true and it seems Frigate supports it too. Win-win.
But for surveillence, it's usually the sensor/camera quality that is the most important. I've struggled hard to find an affordable IP camera that can actually handle both shutter speed + quality in order to for example read license plates.
Yes, only one Coral dongle and it's handles all cameras perfectly. With some masks I rarely get any false positives and it is like 99% correct hit-rate.
Telegram is just a way to get a fast glance of an detection, so it sends me an image with what type of detection it was and the frame it found it in with detection frame around the object. This is handled via Home Assistant and some automation I've written. The results comes via mqtt to hass.
Edit: I found a better place to make an screenshot https://imgur.com/a/5qpDWia There you can see the event marked as "Person"
I'm explicitly leaving out the Coral TPU, since it's been reported that the newer Intel CPUs (Core Ultra) seem to provide the same performance with it's iGPU.
Maybe you're suggesting that using two additional tools in combination with the free version of Frigate brings its quality up on par with that of an extra-trained Frigate+? If that's so it would be great if you could say that and elaborate how so / why, rather than just dropping in some new tool names and no explanation as to how/if they address GP's points. (Thanks in advance if you do come back and explain.)
Edit: I just looked into Doubletake + Compreface, seems they're both facial recognition tools, so using them wouldn't overcome the problem GP commenter reported that Frigate without Frigate+'s additional training doesn't do a good enough job of general object tagging for them?
All in, H.265 is unsuitable if you use a specific set of software/tools that is quite a common combination; Linux/Firefox/Android.
The original commenter is correct, if you're one of these people like myself, avoid H.265 like the plague until support is better and be sure to buy cameras that also support H.264.
Iam not sure but I think so
I didn't know what NVR meant either but it seems reasonable for Frigate to assume 90% of the people coming across their site would be given the context.
I would also argue that the expansion of "e.g." is not "absolutely obvious". I know what it means ("for example"), but I had to google it to know it's an abbreviation of "exempli gratia", and I don't speak Latin, so I don't even know exactly what that means without reading further.
In the same way, you can also quickly understand from the page what an NVR is without knowing the exact expansion.
You can’t drop something like that without uploading it to YouTube right now.
What if you're away and the feed dies?
Why would anyone have any expectation of privacy at work other than in the toilet?
- [0] https://motion-project.github.io/motion_config.html#OptDetai...
Thanks for your insights
Like, could I avoid training or specifying much or becoming very knowledgeable in this domain, are we there yet?
Could I say "detect the frames of every car when it passes position X in the video, and then grab the frame when the same car passes position Y", and then I could calculate the frame difference to know the speeds. Or would I have to do loads of code and training still for something like this?
(I know I'm asking for much here, just curious what the SOTA is in this right now)
I believe it also has an advantage of being able to run bigger models like YOLO-NAS. Going off Frigate+ documentation: https://docs.frigate.video/plus/#supported-detector-types
I chose the inexpensive S220 cams because they fit my use case but I would expect that for your use case a different model would be needed. Here at my place I can use WiFi cams and do the nature monitoring with the only consideration or parameter that I have as a constraint being that the camera needs to be installed in a location that gets a minimum of 2 hours of sunlight daily on average.
When I first deployed one of my cams I had it in a non-optimum orientation, facing NNW instead of South so that the panel did not get direct sunlight at all. In that orientation working from a full charge on utility power pre-deployment I used the camera for two weeks before I redeployed it at the same location facing SSE. My initial plan was to position it using the Eufy mount installed on a post and the only post was N of the location I needed to monitor. After watching the battery charge cycle I determined that it would eventually discharge and require a utility top-off. I redeployed the camera on an old, cheap camera tripod a few feet from the initial location facing SSE so that the solar panel got adequate sunlight and in a matter of a few days it was topped off again.
I really like the solar powered cameras. They add flexibility to any deployment plan.
In frigate, add this to the top of your configuration file:
mqtt:
enabled: true
host: IP_ADDRESS_OF_YOUR_HOMEASSISTANT
port: 1883
topic_prefix: frigate
user: USERNAME_YOU_CREATED_FOR_MQTT
password: PASSOWRD_YOU_CREATED_FOR_MQTT
Observe the messages, pick the one which suits your needs.
Follow this for an example: https://chatgpt.com/share/6893fd1c-2940-800c-a358-a840029e6e...
You dont really need to add the HA automation via yaml, you can click it through manually.
The abbreviation of e.g. isn't a good example. It is hundreds of years old and taught in schools. It is essentially a feature of the language (or at least of writing the language) and can hardly be compared to the far more recent initialism NVR. It is ubiquitous and all native English speakers should know it and all non-native English speakers should learn it.
VCR is an example that is almost always referred to solely as its initialism. However, this became a completely ubiquitous term. Early advertisements didn't say "VCR", they said things like "video recorder"[0]. Once it was ubiquitous non-specialists knew what a VCR was even if they didn't understand the initialism and they were marketed just as "VCR". One could make the case that "VCR" stopped being a pure initialism and become more of a word. (VHS on the other hand... not expanded in that video.)
Is NVR ubiquitous enough? BestBuy sells them without expanding the initialism (in the examples I checked), so maybe. However, I bet if you sampled people, the majority wouldn't be able to tell you. And BestBuy selling them this way may have more to do with limited 'item title' space.
It might be the case that it is well-enough known among people who 'need to know' like security folks. I'd argue that's probably not meaningful if BestBuy is retailing them to the public.
Maybe a better example is something like an air-admittance valve (AAV). Most people have never heard of it, but all plumbers have heard of it. In context, anyone can probably figure out what it does. And yet Oatey "correctly" (according to style rules) identifies the name and puts the initialism in parentheses[1].
So on the one hand, it may be ubiquitous enough that it doesn't matter (and is becoming more of a word). On the other hand, there's evidence here that it does matter because it isn't ubiquitous enough for people to be comfortable not knowing what the acronym means.
What I can't see is the downside of writing "network video recorder (NVR)" on the first instance of is use at least on the landing page. Everyone has to learn what it means somewhere and it seems like a missed marketing opportunity for it to not be through your product's landing page. It may also reduce friction or aid in SEO. (YMMV, but I get quite different results searching for "network video recorder" and "NVR".)
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ9nkyo01HQ [1] - https://www.oatey.com/products/air-admittance-valves-aav
Consumers are a wide range of people. 99 percent who have never heard
NVR is a niche term for a tiny number of people in a tiny industry.
Just stop. You're wrong, you're defending an indefensible point, and even if you "win," there's no upside for you.
Signed, someone else who's interested in this field and in Frigate in particular, and who had no idea what "NVR" stood for.
You can also transcode the video before feeding it to any outdated software and run it in a VM if you're paranoid.
Also, what kind of “security exploits” would an outdated Python result in if the Python interpreter itself isn’t serving a network port or accepting arbitrary user input in general?
I assume Frigate itself isn’t running the web app on the same Python version - it’s likely just the Coral SDK that requires an outdated Python version.
When there is collective photographing at school for children, we as parents must consent with a signature... which is a little bit annoying.
Having camera at home/yard is no issue.
And to be clear, when I say stalking, I mean it literally:
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ring-security-cameras-gave...
Just don’t come to work right? You can have all the privacy you want? Or don’t visit the business if you are the customer.
Please help me understand what the logic and justification is to regulate and control security camera use within private enterprises (with the obvious exception of toilets and changing rooms etc)?
Only if the camera is angled in such a way that it only sees your property. A door bell camera that can also see the public road in front your house for example is technically not allowed, even if most people ignore that rule.
I mean, are you flying home if a misdelivered dog gets struck by lightning on your lawn?
And how urgent is a blank feed? If not "drop everything" (even though it's probably nothing) then what's the point?
Can you recommend a quality online community that do the same thing that I could lurk in for while to soak up some knowledge??
Phew -- I am definitely not a "pretty girl".
Seriously, though, I'm glad that I ditched Ring and that it only pointed at my walkway.
Otherwise I'm puzzled by your claim of productivity. Especially since we are stalking about labour productivity.
Notice that the top tier of the list is populated by countries with strict privacy laws.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_...
> “There is a fundamental shift in how nations approach economic output. Strong social policies and strategic investment in worker well-being are creating more productive economies than traditional long-hour work cultures. The financial sector remains a key driver of high productivity, but it’s the emphasis on work-life balance that distinguishes the leading economies."
https://businessday.ng/news/article/top-10-most-productive-c...
We're past the industrial revolutionaire for while. A happy pig is a fat pig, one could say :-)
A broken camera gives you exactly the same information as a camera that doesn't exist: zero information. If this gives someone enough anxiety that they would need to drop everything, they probably need therapy.
Regardless, when I said "blank feed" I meant a scenareo where you're away and you don't know why the feed is blank. It's not the same as a non-existent camera: it's telling you there's a mysterious problem. Can you ignore the chance that it's an extremely urgent problem?
However while we are on the topic I don’t see why governments should impose any restrictions on businesses using monitoring systems on their WFH technology systems as long as it is disclosed to the employees they may be monitored.
When you are paid by an employer your job is to do exactly what they want and try to do it well. Your relationship is voluntary (at will) between both parties and if you don’t like it then don’t work for them.
The reason the can't use video footage is because your image is biometric data.
There are other ways of monitoring at the workplace without being so privacy invasive.
My team is set free. We don't have work hours. Technically we have to work 3 hours a day, between 10:00 and 12:00 and between 13:00 and 14:00. Without any monitoring they've reached their yearly target in may of this year.
So productivity is a falsehood. Nobody works harder when they're watched. People work hard when they are valued.
Fair performance reviews now and then do the job.
Then back on safety. I used to work in a bar years ago. It was in a busy part of the city and out of 30+ bars on the square I was the last to close. I had 3 cameras and they were installed for my safety. Imagery was erased every morning and only used when needed after a bar fight or theft. That's fair use.
Never use biometric data lightly.
On a sidenote. I just don't get why people want to live in a surveillance state so much. You can't build a society without trust.
I've had a couple failures over the past ~decade and it has never been "mysterious". If you don't panic and use context clues, there is always plenty of information. Pretty much any foreseeable urgent problem resulting in a failure would have produced some footage that indicates the issue. And non-urgent problems that result in failure are easy to detect. (e.g. if your UPS sends you an on-battery alert, and 5 minutes later your cameras fail, you just had a power outage)
The only time that cameras go black without warning and it is warranted to panic is when you're the comic relief character in a bad horror movie.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You refused to accept even the premise of any thing I've said. I believe I have matched your respect, but hopefully with more zing.