[anarchodev]

The article asserts that if you upload video from Ring devices, it will be seen by amazon employees. This has been shown to be true. Amazon employees are almost all strangers to me. What's the issue with the statement?

"Do you want a few amazon employees being able to learn your routines by watching you leave and return to your house every day?" might be more technically expressive but no more accurate and certainly not any more reassuring or comfortable to me.

The part about cops and hackers are separate issues (and lead to more convincing arguments against cops and cloud services more generally) but this seems like an entirely fair assessment.

[darkerside]

Do you want strangers to learn all of your important personal information by reading the emails you send and receive?

If you don't trust anybody, the Internet sure is a scary place.

[allovernow]

>Do you want strangers to learn all of your important personal information by reading the emails you send and receive?

You mean to say this doesn't concern you? That enough PII is being archived in multiple places indefinitely and could be used to build a find grained profile on you?

Imagine how much you can infer just from location data. Sexual orientation. Political affiliation. Religious affiliation. Now imagine what happens when authoritarian regime gains control of such databases. The largest nation on Earth has such a system already - it isn't far fetched.

[darkerside]

It's just as problematic as the Ring doorbell, if not more so

[beatgammit]

Yes, that is problematic, which is why I use an encrypted email service that encrypts and decrypts on the client. The only people reading my emails should be the intended recipients.

Likewise for videos of and around my house. The only people capable of watching those feeds are me and those I explicitly choose to share it with. Ring should be E2E encrypted, with any video processing being done before upload or after download. Sharing with the police shouldn't be possible without the police coming to my home asking me for video of a given time period, preferably with a warrant.

I have no problem with storing encrypted video in the cloud, assuming that it's reasonably hard to decrypt and my keys aren't stored anywhere nearby (they should strictly be on the client, out of reach of the cloud service). If I want to send a video to someone, the service should download it, decrypt it locally, and then send it over my encrypted channel of choice.

I really don't understand why we put up with anything less. It's incredibly cheap to do get a chip these days that can do video processing on the client, so why is the cloud used for anything other than encrypted video storage and retrieval?

[remote_phone]

It WILL be seen, or it MAY be seen? A big difference. It’s impossible that every video is seen by an employee.

[JoBrad]

Unless you put a ring camera in your house, the video is of the street and your front porch. In my neighborhood, everyone has the doorbell and not much more.

[beatgammit]

Even that is a huge issue to me. If an attacker can compromise one camera system, they can track movement of anyone the camera can see, so they can figure out when people are likely to be away. If the service is unencrypted, this can be done by compromising the server or even a single WiFi hotspot, which makes this product a huge liability for everyone that the camera can see.

Why should we go through the risk? Just encrypting everything on the client makes the system way more robust, and features can be rolled out to a device that does local processing. I don't own any big home automation systems because I don't trust them, so as soon as a company builds something privacy centric, they will get my money.

[29083011397778]

> In my neighborhood, everyone has the doorbell and not much more.

Based on talking to your neighbours, or is this an assumption based on only being able to see the outside of your neighbours houses?

[JoBrad]

I’ve been in most of my neighbor’s houses, or talked to them about their systems. One of my neighbors has an additional camera, on the outside. Most people have a doorbell cam and some window/door sensors.