Cloud connected doorbells must die as well as dragnet surveillance.
That doesn’t sound like “we’re cancelling this because our customers let us know loud and clear that they were ethically against this”. If the only thing keeping them from doing this is time and money, what guarantee do we have that they won’t do it again if time and money allow?
Ring (owned by Amazon, who runs a private airgapped AWS region for the CIA onsite at Langley) also works with law enforcement agencies.
I'd disagree and restate that cloud services willing to make these kinds of deals must die, painfully, in a fire after being stung by a million killer bees, after receiving a million paper cuts and having lemon juice poured all over them.
It is possible for a company to charge a monthly fee to provide a service and only that service without attempting to leverage their users and their data for any other form of income. Companies used to do it all of the time. It just takes a C-suite/board/founder to have the moral fortitude to not sell out their users.
Cannot even imagine what is going on these days, inside & out.
Could a solution be forcing Amazon (and Google and Flock and...) to open their backend software either for self-hosting or for running on somebody else's "cloud"? So subscribing to such a device isn't that different from getting web hosting from Dreamhost or Hetzner?
Maybe there's a host or IP field in the settings that users can easily change?
If Apple ever releases an Apple Home app for Android, I'd transition my entire home over by the time of my next Google Home Premium subscription renewal.
Local ML/face recognition would be a bonus. Ability to sync to a private owned server owned by me would be a bonus.
I'm assuming there are projects out there that would enable this -- does anyone have recommendations?
This is very easy though, you just go to your iCloud account settings under the settings app and enable it. It should be on by default imo, but I understand the argument for why it isn't.
Either way, enabling it is not a barrier and ICE cannot be granted access once you do unless you yourself give them that access.
So, yeah. Look into frigate.
N.B. Flock isn't really targeting the consumer market.
https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/super-bowl-revealed-a...
They also can give the Feds access to your iCloud data through a NSL. Just like Prism.
I’d like to acknowledge the damage I carry as a human being as a result of the pressure to pretend that this is normal. Just because there doesn’t seem to be real alternatives in so many areas of this “free market” /s economy.
Just for context, could you provide some examples of such people?
This is why regulations are extremely important. There need to be a strong enough counterincentive or companies will eventually always follow the path of least resistance to growth. Ethics when present may create some form of friction along some specific paths, but it’s never enough for those to not become, eventually, that very path.
Following intense backlash to its partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that works with law enforcement agencies, Ring has announced it is canceling the integration.
In a statement published on Ring’s blog and provided to The Verge ahead of publication, the company said: “Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made the joint decision to cancel the integration and continue with our current partners … The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.”
The statement goes on to say that Ring’s mission to make neighborhoods safer “comes with significant responsibility — to our customers, to the communities we serve, and to the trust you place in our products and features.”
Trust is the big one there. Over the last few weeks, the company has faced significant public anger over its connection to Flock, with Ring users being encouraged to smash their cameras, and some announcing on social media that they are throwing away their Ring devices.
The Flock partnership was announced last October, but following recent unrest across the country related to ICE activities, public pressure against the Amazon-owned Ring’s involvement with the company started to mount.
Flock has reportedly allowed ICE and other federal agencies to access its network of surveillance cameras, and influencers across social media have been claiming that Ring is providing a direct link to ICE.
While that claim is not accurate, as the Flock integration has never gone live, Ring has a history of partnering with police, and the new partnership quickly came under intense criticism.
Adding fuel to the fire, this weekend Ring aired a Super Bowl ad for its new AI-powered Search Party feature. While the company says the feature is designed to find lost dogs and maintains it’s not capable of finding people, the ad raised fears that Ring cameras were being used for mass surveillance. The ad shows dozens of Ring cameras in a neighborhood scanning the streets.
On top of this, the company recently launched a new facial recognition feature, Familiar Faces. Combined with Search Party, the technological leap to using neighborhood cameras to search for people through a mass-surveillance network suddenly seems very small.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) – a longtime critic of Ring – sent an open letter this week calling on Amazon to cancel the company’s facial recognition feature.
Ring spokesperson Yassi Yarger said in an email that its products are purpose-driven tech, “not tools for mass surveillance.” She added that “Familiar Faces is an opt-in feature designed to give customers more control over the alerts they receive (e.g., ‘Mom at front door’ instead of ‘Someone at front door’) while keeping their data protected.”
Ring’s partnership with Flock was announced in October 2025 as part of Ring’s Community Requests program, which launched last September. It was designed to allow local law enforcement agencies that use Flock’s software to integrate directly with the program.
Community Requests launched after Ring ended its controversial Requests for Assistance (RFA) program, which consumer advocacy groups criticized for allowing video to be provided to police without a warrant, calling it a threat to civil liberties.
In its statement about the Flock cancellation, Ring maintains that Community Requests will continue, claiming it helped authorities locate a suspect during the recent Brown University shooting:
“When a shooting occurred near Brown University in December 2025, every second mattered. The Providence Police Department turned to their community for help, putting out a Community Request. Within hours, 7 neighbors responded, sharing 168 videos that captured critical moments from the incident. One video identified a new key witness, helping lead police to identify the suspect’s vehicle and solve the case. With a shooter at large, the community faced uncertainty about their safety. Neighbors who chose to share footage played a crucial role in neutralizing the threat and restoring safety to their community.”
As with RFA, Community Requests still allows public safety agencies to request video footage from users in a certain area during an active investigation, but it differs from the previous program because law enforcement agencies are required to partner with a third-party evidence management system – such as Flock – to use the service. Ring says this is to better maintain the chain of custody. The previous system allowed police to request footage directly from a user.
Flock was the second partner Ring announced for Community Requests, the first being Axon, a law enforcement technology company known for making Tasers. With the new service, only law enforcement agencies that use these companies’ software can submit requests. But the end result is the same: law enforcement gets video from users if they choose to share it.
Ring spokesperson Yassi Yarger says the Axon partnership is unaffected by the end of the Flock integration. Additionally, she says no other integrations are currently being explored.
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What a ridiculous way to try and be on a high horse.
Truly top-notch quality, full-featured, very low maintenance, easy to set up, cheap to operate. I'm glad so many people are using it now.
For video doorbell I just have a cam that can see the front door and I drew a box around the area I want notifications for. When a person enters the box, I get a notification and snapshot.
During Snowden revelations I'd already been apprenticing for years; nothing Edward documented surprised me. I'd literally walk around our 500,000sqft elevated floors knodding my head [none of this exists, officially].
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Nothing is as it seems.
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During DEF CON ~XX~ (approximately same timeframe as story above) it was publicly revealed that intelligence communities had redefined the word "intercept," to mean when a human operator catelogs a certain piece of data/traffic (i.e. not algorithms sorting). #1984 #newspeak #elevenyearsago
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I no longer carry a cell phone. Don't use email. PO Box in profile
[0] https://reolink.com/ca/product/reolink-video-doorbell-wifi/
The self-hosted and home-automation and home-assistant subreddits are _full_ of discussion threads on this. The good news is that you have a TON of options to pick from. The bad news is that they're all deficient in one way or another so you really do have to spend a bit of time to figure out who executes best on the things you care most about.
If you don't mind the lock-in, Unifi is nice. Reolink (and the other DaHua re-brands) usually leave a lot to be desired in terms of software / quality but they are cheap and they reliably spit out a regular video stream that can be used with just about any software. Just don't let them onto the WAN!
I dont understand why anyone chooses Ring when the costs of Unifi are so much better.
The ring app also sucks imo and all their hardware is quite slow.
All tech puts it's best foot forward, some of it's really nifty, but a camera on every street corner is always going to pose more risks than it's worth IMO...
It's work to go back to the old ways but I think this is one we step we should really all take.
Just because majority of people choose to be assholes does not mean everyone has to be. Be the change you wish to see in the world, or something
To be clear, I’m claiming you are one based on that question.
I'm not quite there yet, but after Netanyahu made that comment like "if you have a phone you're carrying a little piece of Israel with you" right after the pager attack stuff.. I keep the phone in the back of my backpack away from my meat bits.
I run grey man where I can. Stuff that's private stays private. Paper and physical security is still good.
Alternatives really need to be for the masses that have little Knowles in server hosting.
This is one reason I invest in Linux Smartphone company's that are work towards a clean solution for the masses. Daily drivers that are satisfactory for us build the stepping stones to walk to the alternative.
Hubitat is a different player in this space: https://hubitat.com/