[MarkusWandel]

I have my sketchy Chinacams on a "red LAN" that does not have internet access. It only goes to the second ethernet port on the device that does the capture/motion detect; it does not route to the internet or even do DNS resolution.

This was originally done to keep all that traffic off my main LAN, but it has a handy anti-cloud/anti-spyware firewall purpose too. My Chinacams come from an era, though, where all you had to do is uncheck "cloud" in the ridiculous ActiveX required GUI setup, and that was it for them trying to access the internet. Things may have changed; the last of these didn't even let me set a password to get into the GUI before activating through the cloud and that was a few years ago.

Spending extra to get a commercial grade camera is really not that bad if you plan to use the camera for a while.