The Hidden Downsides of Doorbell Cameras

[Jonn]

The Hidden Downsides of Doorbell Cameras—and What to Do About Them​

With many neighborhoods dealing with an uptick in thefts from cars and homes, doorbell cameras can help police catch criminals in action. Sounds great, right? But there's a catch: Companies could share the data and footage gathered from your camera with law enforcement without your permission.


Take Amazon's Ring camera, for example. The company has partnered with more than 400 police forces in the United States and allowed them to access footage from users' Ring doorbells, which is stored in the company's cloud service—in some cases without users' full consent.


And unfortunately, Amazon is not the only manufacturer that allows police to gain access to user materials. According to Consumer Reports, doorbell camera companies like Google, D-Link, SimpliSafe and TP-Link all have policies for sharing camera and doorbell video footage with law enforcement without a warrant or user permission.
What to do: To ensure your data remains private, review the privacy policies and terms of service from your camera's manufacturer, keeping an eye out for clear policies on data sharing that ensure you have control over when and with whom your data is shared. Some cameras even offer features that allow you to limit or disable data sharing entirely.

MSN

 

[DeFunkCat]

I have a brand of camera and security system which is stand alone. It’s not connected to any security company. All info is on my own data storage. The other systems? Yeah they creep me out.

 

[Jonn]

I have the same.

 

[thejuice]

Creepy corpos being creepy

 

[Judge]

In general, I prefer to simply to avoid much of anything that is dependent on cloud-based data storage of their customers. Whether it is contractually their intellectual property or not.

Certainly most anyone with any concern of conducting nefarious pursuits on their own property likely are doing the same anyways. I know I would...lol.

 

[FilterFreq]

Depending on where someone stands on the issue, there's almost no way to get away from this kind of thing and the sooner we realize we can't escape the current paradigm, the better. Of course, there are some things I'd change about the world if I were in charge, but the fact of the matter is that there's literally no escape from whatever this is, and fooling ourselves isn't going to help push the needle forward.

For example, your neighbor has a cam pointed at your house.; checkmate. All of your devices are IOT; checkmate. You have a phone that's constantly listening to you and watching you anyway (even when you tell it not to); checkmate. Your security system goes to a box in your closet -- no offense, but that's utterly pointless at that point, because burglars can (and likely will, unless they're really dumb) just destroy the box.

As humans, I think we like to believe we have some control over the current state of the world, or we like to 'unsubscribe' from the current reality, but we're just sticking our heads in the sand* if we think that we have any control over it. While being passive and feeling defeated over the issue (or any issue) also doesn't make anything better, having meaningful conversations about how this type of thing has existed for way longer than we have collectively realized and how it's not going to change anytime soon might at least give us some peace of mind.

* = that also doesn't imply that we need to be addicted to the news or whatever most people do, but outright denying our current, collective reality is another topic all on its own

 

[Jonn]

no offense, but that's utterly pointless at that point, because burglars can just destroy the box.

I have considered putting a recording device hidden, say in the ceiling space.

 

[FilterFreq]

I have considered putting a recording device hidden, say in the ceiling space.

That's actually not a bad idea, even as a backup for someone who's comfortable using modern cameras. They tend to crap-out so frequently that you end up wishing you had a backup on hand

That's another interesting thing to mention -- a lot of these cheap IOT cameras feel so unreliable that it's almost a joke. When they work, they're good, but they always seem to mess up when you need them the most, like a server goes down or they just become randomly inaccessible in the middle of the night. Plus, they look like considerable garbage -- all of these are interesting to mention in this context and worth considering, IMO.

 

[Judge]

One thought I did have about this subject is just pondering the statistics of how many property owners *might* have had their video data used against them in a court of law.

Of course I'm assuming that any administrators in law enforcement and prosecutors would prefer and seek to keep such information far away from the public and media as is possible.

Just to get a feel on how incriminating such a thing might be. Hmmmm.

 

[Jumpinbare]

I have a brand of camera and security system which is stand alone. It’s not connected to any security company. All info is on my own data storage. The other systems? Yeah they creep me out.

What brand? I had thought they were all standalone.

 

[stevens]

I've been building cameras from Raspberry Pi single board computers. They run Linux and are Wall Street free. Those other internet camera "privacy policies," well I simply assume they either are full of lies, or that they can be changed on a moment's notice without my knowledge.

 

[Shevek]

Until all the rich people who the Police have to obey are on web-cam 24-7 so they can't do anything corrupt, I'll keep wondering if all the "Select Privacy" switches really mean "Watch This! - somebody will pay extra for it." Privacy should be inverse to wealth, but we only get the gossip, not the real dirt.