- This news article boils down to "a few people on reddit did something", which is interesting. But we know reddit and HN are definitely not mainstream.
Is this hurting Amazon? No, it is not. As long as they're honouring return requests freely, you know that the number of returns is within their accepted levels of distressed inventory. If it's getting into uncomfortable territory, they'll start rate limiting people by saying they're past the return window, or they should try again after a week.
If Amazon's return policy changes, that'll be much more interesting to see. But chances are, people forget about this in a month and their sales are unaffected. This may go the way of #deleteUber, #deleteFacebook and similar boycott campaigns - minor blips at best.
- While I agree that the return numbers are probably very low, you may be underestimating Reddit's impact in terms of product recommendation. I noticed that Reddit results are often pretty prominent on Google search when product reviews are searched for. Security camera market is pretty competitive and a single factor like this could easily sway people to choose alternatives.
- I'd agree on /r/FlockSurveillance/ specifically, but if Reddit itself does not qualify as "mainstream", then what does? Just FANG?
- Reddit is filled with very vocal terminally online people. Their views and actions are not representative of normal human beings.
- Try doing a search for something like "Average US online time". Those are normal people. Normal people are terminally online.
- > Reddit is filled with very vocal terminally online people.
Reddit went mainstream many years ago, hence the marketing dollars spent there on astroturfing, and brands acquiring pet moderators. The posters/commenters/readers follow power-laws like any online/offline community.
- Its top 100 or so subreddits are moderated by the same ~10 or so individuals who impose their ideological views on the subs and delete posts or ban anyone who dares challenge them.
A great example of how community moderation inevitably slides a platform to one side or the other of the political spectrum.
I honestly don't think mods on reddit should be allowed to moderate more than 1 or 2 of these top sub-reddits, this would at least force some semblance of diversity of thought on the platform.
- I think you’re dramatically overestimating how many sane adults would want to mod a top 100 Subreddit for free. It’s a job that generally only attracts the very dedicated, the very bored and/or those who’ve figured out how to monetize it.
- Reddit is at the core forum platform, therefore it's as misleading to attribute whatever is happening at any one [group of] subreddit to the whole of Reddit as it is misleading to do the same with closed Facebook groups.
Remember forums of old. Larger sites with daily visitors in the thousands already had nearly isolated topic silos within the forum. The effect is even stronger here.
- Facebook alone is far more mainstream than Reddit, I would say. Thousands of times more.
- We can just look at both's recent reports:
Reddit: 121 million "daily active unique users"
Source: https://investor.redditinc.com/news-events/news-releases/new...
Facebook: 3.58 billion "family daily active people"
Source: https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
---
I'd definitely consider both "mainstream".
(I know plenty non-tech and "normal" people who use reddit.)
- So like 30x the population (not thousands).
The thing about Reddit is it really amplifies voices. 10-100 people can be on the same subreddit and comment or post something, and it looks like “a lot” of people.
It’s also much easier to be a non-representative sample at 3% of the population than 50%. And, there’s a big sample bias for this sort of thing. I think someone is way more likely to post “I’m getting rid of X” versus “I don’t care and I’m keeping X”.
- For Facebook alone, it’s less than 30x. The “family” in “Family Daily Active People” is also referring to “Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and other services.”
- Maybe ten years ago, but that's a huge exaggeration today.
- It’s not. Just think of anyone 60 and over, or anyone not in the US.
- That would not be the order of magnitude proposed above.
- Roughly 6x the users and 7x the traffic. “Thousands” is a bit dramatic. Reddit is a massively popular site now, pretty sure it’s among the top 10 most visited in the world.
- at most most in the US
and also because many modern platforms are app focused and don't care about web traffic
and Reddit is a huge target for scrapping int the US so traffic numbers of recent few years have become a meaningless metric
Outside the US Reddit is often far less relevant then in the US, still somewhat relevant in many "western" countries but often far far less then in the US (like e.g. where I live no on "young" (<20) nor "old" (>50) people use it and the people which do use it are mostly from a _subset_ of often very US influenced tech/nerd/gamer cultures).
And if you go to countries where speaking English is far less the norm Reddits relevance drops sharply. The thing is, that is something like 50% of the word population... In India Reddit doesn't matter, nor does it in China, nor does it in many (but not all) of the highly populated areas "between" (south) China and India.
So why I don't know if "site [..] 10 most visited in the world" is technically true or false it is highly misleading even if true and seems to be bordering on US defaultism, through maybe more "the west" defaultism.
Now to be fair people forgetting like half of the word population in their arguments is pretty common, in not just the US, but also the EU.
It's a bit like with HN, it might feel representative for the IT industry world wide, but it is only representative for a certain FANG/US-startup/US-hacker culture influenced subset of it. Beyond this it has hardly any representation weather it's wrt. articles or people commenting. But "beyond this" is on a world wide scale a _very_ huge part of the industry.
- If Reddit is an ok representation of semi-techy/nerdy Americans it is probably(?) a good representation of Ring Doorbell customers, right?
- not sure,
from the not very representative context of people I know/where I live (not US):
Ring customers are often old overly worried people which "don't really care anymore" about ideal (often due to an over exposure to fear inducing propaganda, like the kind of stuff which first ties to make you think you live in far more danger then you do and then blames it on immigrants; And ring them comes in by being cheap, reliable and convenient and maybe the only AD reaching that demography. Worries about privacy are on the other hand shadowed by fear about people breaking in and beating them up.)
Other people needing cameras tend care more about privacy ideals and do more research. In turn they won't use ring.
And people not needing cameras most times also really don't want there to be cameras, especially not internet connected ones.
Through in general the relationship to surveillance is very different here compared to what it seems to be in the US.
- It's the demographics I mean, not the numbers.
- I don’t entirely disagree with that but with that kind of traffic/userbase clearly it’s far more mainstream than is being implied. Also, young people are definitely not getting on Facebook, which impacts how “mainstream” we can consider it. Reddit skews a fair bit younger than FB.
- > young people are definitely not getting on Facebook
but Reddit is mostly relevant "in the west" where most countries have an inverted age pyramid and most old people are not on Reddit, but on Facebook
and reddit relevance outside of the US is often far less then people think, to a point where many people not even know what it is. It doesn't has a network effect pulling in "friends and family".
and a lot of people "around 30" are still on Facebook due to network effect and active enough to count as active users (which doesn't mean much to be fair)
And in the US around ~18% of US users where in the age group 18-24 in 2025. Idk. how but somehow Facebook still manages to convince surprisingly many "just adults" to join it. And if they aren't on Facebook then they are on WhatsApp and maybe Instagram.
Now all of this doesn't really fully show how relevant reddit is because checking some minor memes once a week makes you show up as active user but also means it's pretty much irrelevant for you.
And if I look at people I interact with or where I can see a bit how they interact (i.e. _very highly biased by social environment_) then thinks look far worse for it. Reddit seems relevant in the US, mainly for people "around" 30. But outside of it, it seems to be more like a footnote. Used, but something most people would not care if it's randomly gone.
- I don’t know why you are commenting in two different places with roughly the same points but I’m just going to stick to this thread if that’s alright.
You are making some assumptions and guesses when all of these numbers are generally searchable - I don’t disagree with your point largely speaking, but the magnitude(s) is what seem off to me. Over 50% of Reddit traffic is international, about 75% of Facebook’s is. Yes clearly Reddit biases “the west” but a couple of y’all keep trying to paint these incredibly stark pictures.
Reddit and Facebook are both massive. They both have significant influence on culture and discourse worldwide. You’re also disputing Reddit’s traffic but again a search will confirm it is the 7th most visited site in the world. We can argue with the significance of that is given their demographic distribution, but then we would have to do the same thing to Facebook and I just don’t think that’s a particularly useful conversation without some concrete data at our fingertips. If you have some I am legitimately interested to see it.
Either way: Yes facebook is more international. Yes it is larger. But the gap isn’t 1000x. It’s not even 100x. They both have mainstream appeal, they both have shortcomings that keep them from being “truly” representative. It doesn’t help that Facebook hides their DAU’s among their other offerings to obscure the stall (perhaps it’s now even in decline) they have experienced. That’s not a good look I’ll say that much.
- Don't know why you are being downvoted. Thousands of times more is clearly wrong. Facebook has billions of users. Reddit has way more than single digit millions of users.
- You've identified the problem. It's never "reddit", it's a specific subreddit. It really depends on the size of the subreddit. Smaller subreddits can easily get riled up, and also create a sealed echo chamber by banning people left and right. But I wouldn't worry about a sub unless it was really big.
For example: I'd say HBO should worry about what the game of thrones related subs are saying about their latest show (which is good, shoutout) but only as a vibe check. The normies will always outnumber the kind of people who go to a subreddit to discuss their favourite show. Normal people just watch and forget.
- My guess is that it is more: the people that are concerned are posting about it. And those that aren't, aren't.
So you are just seeing a biased subset of the (relatively) mainstream reddit.
- It might be that the demographics of Reddit skew toward low economic relevance but high unique views.
- Pretty much any time you see a headline like this, you should mentally add the word "Some" to the front of it.
- I’m not so sure. In terms of total revenue, yes probably insignificant. But in the world of subscriptions and a highly speculative market, I think declining subs can have an outsized impact on share prices.
- That was my immediate reaction as well. These things are never more than a storm in a teapot.
- It’s interesting how internet backlashes can be large enough to move the needle: ring breaking with flock is evidence of this.
Yet simultaneously the internet represents the opinions of a very small and vocal minority.
I’ve never seen an internet boycott have an impact.
- You have now. "Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash" is literally on the front of Hacker News.
- >It’s interesting how internet backlashes can be large enough to move the needle:
Brexit.
- Bud Light's stock performance last year would like to have a word with you.
- Could you analyse AB InBev's stock performance in that period? Because it doesn't look bad to me. [1] It looks like it was $65 before the boycott in April 2023, falling to $55 a couple of months later. But it was back up to $65 by the end of the year. It sits at $80 today.
If I hadn't told you the date of the boycott, would you have been able to spot it on this chart?
[1] - https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/bud?gaa_at=eafs&...
- On the contrary. It appears that Bud Light sales continued to fall.
https://sherwood.news/business/beer-bud-light-market-share-b...
Budweiser stock did recover, but they haven't (afaik) repeated the behavior that got them boycotted in the first place. It appears that this boycott achieved exactly what was sought.
I'd agree that this is a rare exception, and that boycotts are almost never successful. But this really is an example of that unicorn.
- Alcohol across all verticals is down. How can we attribute this fall to their issues specifically?
- ("repeated the behavior that got them boycotted in the first place" = sponsor an influencer who happens to be trans)
- What would it say?
- Funny how a single superbowl ad from Ring themselves was able to do in one weekend what a thousand and one anti Ring bloggers were unable to do for the past 10 years straight. This commercial and the response will probably be studied in marketing classes.
- That one image of all the camera's apparently remotely controlled to scan the entire neighbourhood is something it's difficult to unsee.
The implication is obvious, the feel is inhuman.
The power of a few seconds of video is why TikTok had to be brought under control ( and sadly not just because of worrying about what others might do, but to specifically censor and promote specific messages ).
The issue really isn't about whether your neighbourhood has camera's, the question is who is in control.
- >The power of a few seconds of video is why TikTok had to be brought under control
Didn't USA's current regime take over TikTok in order to use it for propaganda? Twitter-X was used so successfully that they're expanding their psyops.
- All done in plain sight - because the people doing it are the good guys right?
- You can trust billionaires, they always have your best interest in heart. After all, they're so wealthy they don't have to exploit you, unlike those grubby mom and pop operations that are desperate.
- > to use it for propaganda
AFIK no
But once you do take it over and have no morals, why not also use it for such?
- [flagged]
- "From the river to the sea" is a literal call for Israel to be ethnically cleansed. Both sides want to kill each other very badly, only one side has the capability at the moment.
- Maybe. Though you have missed out the second part - which doesn't talk about cleansing - it only talks about end of occupation.
Only one side is an illegally occupying power who took the land by force from the people who were peacefully living there.
And don't quote me events from ~2000 years ago.
If everyone held grudges that long the whole world would be at war.
The people in the West bank currently being driven from their homes - they aren't a threat to Israel - they are just farmers working their land. Trying to pick their olives.
It's a false equivalence to say there are two sides, on the one hand and the other.
- as interesting side note:
geographic "from <> to <>" slogans are very commonly used in such contexts. Basically you take a are geographically split into multiple regions, make a "from->to" slogan which treats this areas as one unit in between and imply through it that it should be all homogeneous (weather it's about country boraders or ethnicity)
---
Like e.g. the German national anthem is based on a song from 1841, i.e. it predates WW1,2 and in turn the current German border.
Due to this the first verse refers to boarder rivers which by now lie outside of Germany (and and has other issues related to sever misinterpretation of most of the verse).
This lead to it being abused by Nazis and later neo-nazis to mean Germany should go to war and size various border regions.
But Germany did need a national anthem and this song has a lot of important history meaning unrelated to WW2/Nazis. So west Germany decided to make it the anthem again, but only sing the 3rd verse for official occasions. Through due to continuous abuse of neo-nazies of the first verse this was changed with reunification and today only the 3rd verse is the official national anthem.
Anyway I got a bit off topic but "from <> to <> verses" crossing country boarders (or "ethnic" boarders if used in some "ethnic" context) are most times "pretend to be harmless" slogans of extremists, even if they have a history where they had other meaning (like with the first verse of the song the German national anthem is based on).
- Well we took it from a communist, anti-American regime executing their psyop and made it our own.
Either way just stop using it and nobody gets to psyop you. It’s very straightforward.
- I can't stop the influence of it on my life by not using it. Perhaps it's not as straightforward as it seems to you.
China didn't seem to be doing much with it, as far as the West goes. Not sure if they were using it against their citizens though? Much safer to have it Chinese controlled for me, it seems.
You suggesting that China was "anti American" sounds crazy to me. They were surely your biggest trading partner? Like, I hate all those guys so much that we're going to make everything they want at whatever price they want to pay ...? In the past it might have been possible to argue they were anti-American in their politics; like opposing democracy, or rounding up nationals, ... but USA does as badly (worse?) on those things.
What it looks like is China was 'winning' the trade balance and USA's billionaires decided to take a break from raping teenagers to throw all the citizens on the fire to try and leverage their position to bring in fascism as a means to enriching themselves even further. Go USA, eh.
- > I can't stop the influence of it on my life by not using it. Perhaps it's not as straightforward as it seems to you.
Yea but you can stop what would be 80+% of the influence on your life by not using it. It is very straightforward.
> China didn't seem to be doing much with it, as far as the West goes.
China (and other malicious actors) have demonstrably leveraged social media platforms to inflame tensions, create anti-American and anti-Western sentiment, and more. With platforms like TikTok they were able to more directly influence content, they understand the algorithm that is used, &c.
But let me put it to you from a different angle. If you don't think China was or could have been using TikTok to influence Americans and westerners in general, then I'd suggest the US had nothing to do with, oh, idk, the Arab Spring. :)
> Not sure if they were using it against their citizens though? Much safer to have it Chinese controlled for me, it seems.
Well they have other platforms for that, social credit score, TVs on every corner, &c. Much safer for me to have it American controlled so I don't have an authoritarian Chinese communist party trying to influence me or anyone around me, or further inflaming tensions for their own gain.
> You suggesting that China was "anti American" sounds crazy to me. They were surely your biggest trading partner? Like, I hate all those guys so much that we're going to make everything they want at whatever price they want to pay ...? In the past it might have been possible to argue they were anti-American in their politics;
Well it's not just Americans and Canadiens, it's the EU too. The strategy was to leverage incredibly cheap labor (slave labor in some cases) and loose environmental restrictions to start manufacturing cheap goods and then move up the value chain. Inherently there's nothing to wrong with the approach (minus the slave labor and all of that), but as China continued to do so they did so while also undercutting competitiveness from other countries and blocs. They artificially devalue their currency, they routinely broke WTO rules so much so that other countries said to hell with it. The EU for example has historically tariffed Chinese products. Why? Because if they don't then local industries in the EU with long summer vacations and all of these nice things would be out-competed and out of business.
This isn't really controversial or anything. It's pretty well known, and from an American standpoint the point of view with respect to China is rather bipartisan.
- Am I missing something? I thought it was not the ad itself, but rather the combination with the reporting on that Guthrie abduction, which claimed that although there was no subscription to the recording service, the video data was still recovered, i.e., recorded and sent to Google servers.
Regardless of how you see it, although the ad was a kind of manipulative reframing of surveillance infrastructure by using pets as means of psychological manipulation, the Super Bowl ad seems to have just been an unfortunate (or fortunately) timed ad that caused people to glimpse through the cracks in the control matrix being constructed around them.
I don’t think it will really make a difference though. It’s like wildebeest watching their compatriot snatched underwater by a crocodile, to only momentarily pause before venturing right into the same river.
- I think the Guthrie case had Nest cameras, thus the Google servers.
- Anecdotally, my physical therapist (far more connected to the cultural zeitgeist than I am) brought up the ad yesterday and talked about how creepy it was.
- The bigger issue is whether users feel they have clear, informed control over what's collected and who can access it
- That's a great analogy.
- The internet found out you can point a camera outside.
- Humans can adapt more quickly than wildebeest. Join advocacy groups for your own morale, continue to get better at communicating these dangers to the mainstream, be that person who offers alternatives to your non-technical circle.
Yeah, it’s a timing thing. Government surveillance with commercial partnerships is more aggressive now, and the stories are chipping away at our collective ignorance until something like this connects the dots for people. I’m off in my corner of culture and don’t watch social video so I didn’t appreciate the work that streamers/explainers have done to alert normal people to these problems. But those videos were more effective at getting Flock out of my city than any canvassing I did. It’s nice to see conspiracy brains turned to an actual cabal.
- This kind of story has been in the news cycle every few weeks for years. The ad is what's new.
- It is very simple, most regular people don't read random blogs, however they do watch Superbowl.
This is to be studied by geeks, how to approach non-technical audiences.
- Classic blind sighted tech view is that p50 people behave as p99 people.
- By buying a superbowl ad?
- By packing in a message that is understandble by non techies.
- Agree with GP, the message by techies wasn't opaque, the choice of message broker just had a different reach.
- It won't matter because they don't care. The masses don't concern themselves with theoretical threats even when they understand them on an intellectual level, they buy the emotional argument no matter how weak it is on technical merit.
To convince them otherwise, you need to offer a more compelling emotional argument, but politicians and lobbyist already tell them that they're going to get raped and killed in the street unless they support their agenda.
So what do you do? How do you come up with an emotional argument that's more compelling than that?
- What should we crowdfund for next year?
- Now you know why Superbowl ads cost millions and bloggers are just bloggers
- I think most people were unaware or only very vaguely aware that your Ring camera would do anything but show you who's at the door.
- sadly where I live (not the US) most people using ring are the kind of older people which through non stop propaganda about how "dangerous it is" don't have any mind left to consider iff maybe that camera is as dangerous just in a different way
now that also brings us to the good news, which is a lot of people really don't like any form of internet connected cameras and the culture related to surveillance to it is very different here.
- What did the ad say? I didn’t watch the Superbowl.
- There was an ad, how the Ring cameras can organize a "search party" for your "puppies", basically turning the whole neighborhood into a surveillance operation. Even though they wrapped the whole big brother feature into "sad little girl lost their cute puppy", it was too obvious.
Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OheUzrXsKrY
With that said, I'm not sure it will have any long term effect on them... sure some people return their stuff, make a post about it, but it's like (insert people with certain political affiliation) cancelling (insert big brand) by burning their stuff. It makes a splash in social, but I'm not sure it really significantly changes user behavior.
- Is this really political? While the right “Backs the Blue” (and ICE), they are just as concerned about the surveillance state as the left. Their threat model is just different as far as why. The right never trusted federal law enforcement.
- At least for conservatives who still value those principles when their party is in office, true. Sedona’s successful anti-Flock effort was led by Trump voters.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/flock-haters-cro...
- Well we saw the reaction from the NRA and the guns rights group when Trump said the guy in MN wouldn’t have been shot if he hadn’t been carrying a gun. That was a bridge too far for even them.
You let Trump announce that there has to be a national gun registry or mandated vaccines. You see he even stepped away from bragging about the vaccines only happened for Covid because of “Operation Warp Speed” under his administration. That should have been something that any politician would be proud of.
BTW, the only impressive thing that happened in his entire first administration is the speed at which the vaccines were developed and his not letting the economy collapse because of the stimulus and he can’t take credit for either because of his own base
- It was interesting to watch liberal progressives learn in real time that federal agents are allowed to just murder people. Right wing conspiracy theorists have known this since Ruby Ridge.
- Interesting that you'd attribute this to a left/right divide. There are varying levels of skepticism and trust of police/secret police on both sides. Probably the main difference is what those people think those agencies should and do accomplish.
- Really? “The left” has never trusted the police. I can tell you as a person who studied the civil rights movement, whose still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow South and who personal knew some of the secondary people who made the history books during that time (I am 51), “the left” or at least a large part of never trusted any law enforcement.
- From my perspective, the American progressive left is deeply distrustful of local / state police, but are more inclined to believe the feds good at least insofar as they enforce good progressive laws against backwards locals. The feds enforcing desegregation is perhaps the root origin of this sentiment. The conservative right on the other hand is very inclined to support local police, but have hated feds with notable intensity, probably sharing the same root but really intensified in the 90s.
- For context, I am from here and my parents grew up here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albany_Movement
So I had first and second level connections to people who were involved in the civil rights movement. My mom knew someone or knew who knew someone that could get me a call with almost anyone of influence in the Black community nationally. I went to school with a lot of their children - at least the 2nd or 3rd level connections.
The civil rights movement was very aware of things like this at the time
- And, you know, if it was actually mobilized to find lost puppies, I'd be all for that shit. But that's not what it's for. It's for helping cops find poor people, or ICE find Mexicans, or whatever bullshit is making the headlines in 4 weeks.
FWIW, I don't like being a tech downer/skeptic, but every fucking thing is like this now. Every social media is being turned into surveillance. Every cloud-based application, no matter how useful, is bending over so the state can shove it's hand up it's ass and turn it into yet another way for the Christofascists to shove their bullshit into my life. I'm fucking tired, y'all. I'm tired of finding something cool and interesting, and then needing to audit the entire backend to see if my friends and I are endangering ourselves by engaging with it. I'm tired of seeing something fucking useful, a goddamn video doorbell, and being like "oh that's pretty fucking nice!" and then having to box it up years on because the company that built it is going to turn my porch into a node in the nationwide Good Citizen network.
And it's asymmetric because they seemingly NEVER get tired. There's just a whole like 1/3 of the population out there that seemingly never even sleeps, they're just constantly trying to figure out how to make my life just slightly fucking worse, either for profit or to advance their weird evangelical agenda.
I'm so, so, profoundly sick of these freaks.
Edit: And please just SPARE ME the both sides horseshit. Yeah both sides have problems, but one side is fucking dragging us back to 16th century social politics, and THEY'RE the ones I'm sick more of.
- I know sometimes it can feel like you’re the only one concerned about your privacy but there are others who feel the same way.
- Re: your edit... Who are you responding to??
I don't see Ring as a politics problem, I see it as a policy problem. Just because something is legal in the federated, ad hoc instance doesn't mean it is advisable to systematize.
- > Re: your edit... Who are you responding to??
Preemptively, the exact sort of "BUT BIDEN BAD" horseshit occurring elsewhere in the thread. And again, yes, Biden bad. Biden is an inept old man who was far out of his depth, who failed, completely, to hold anyone accountable for the atrocity against the Republic that was January 6th. But again, he, and to be sure, the Democrats as a whole, failed that, and whilst that is true, the other side is currently ushering in the end of American global influence and they're going to make it so no American citizen will EVER be able to own ANYTHING EVER AGAIN. So I am simply not entertaining this "both sides" horseshit anymore.
Both sides DO have problems. One has distinctly WAY more fucking problems, and also, WAY more fucking power. If pointing out this obvious fucking reality makes me partisan, or biased, whatever. Partisan I am.
If I'm to be marched into a meat grinder I at least reserve the right to tell the people doing it to me they fucking suck.
- [dead]
- > Christofascists
It's not a partisan issue. From leftist utopias to god-fearing Texan ranch lands, the police are abusing power and harassing innocent people. Trying to bring religion and partisanship (in one word, even) doesn't help your message.
- > It's not a partisan issue.
I'm sorry I'm having a hard time remembering the role leftists are playing in the US right now what with the Executive, Congressional and Judicial branches all being stacked to the tits with Republicans, right up to the top with our dementia-addled conman of a president, sleepily signing into law the policies that will see us excised as the center of world economics.
- That's called selective memory and that's why partisanship is harmful. I'm not going to feed the "my guy good, your guy bad" fallacy.
- If you think the current president is dementia-addled compared to the last one, then that would be very surprising.
- He talks and acts like my mother who has dementia.
- They're both senile old farts 20+ years too old for the office. Trying to say one or the other was/is more far gone misses the point.
- are the christofascists in the room with us? you don't think marxists use this technology for nefarious means? chinese social credit must be a myth.
the both sides thing is right, you dont remember the lockdowns over a cold, mandated behavioral changes, and countries sending people to "isolation camps" and pressing digital id?
yeah tho its just the "christofascists" huh?
you people only care when illegal invaders get targeted. your outrage is performative.
- Lol are the Marxists mandating that teachers hang the Communist Manifesto on the walls of classrooms? Use your eyes, ears, and brain.
- "With only the computational power of a small dictator led nation state, we launch a new feature that's definitely, only for dogs."
- What happened?
- Thanks. This is actually kinda cute. After all the shit Amazon and the company did I am surprised this should be the thing that gets people worried
- If it wasn't for the ICE situation there probably wouldn't even be any backlash. It is getting people to finally open their eyes a little bit and see how this post patriot act world we've built for ourselves actually operates.
- The revolution will not be televised
But it's seeming like the trigger for it will be
- The add is super cute, except for 1 second https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OheUzrXsKrY&t=15s (probably from 14.5 to 15.5, the one home part is fine for me, but the neighborhood is scary). That second is out of an evil sci-fi film.
- It is too-obviously intentionally designed to be “kinda cute.” It is clear to anybody who watched it that the people making the ad knew they needed a sort of euphemistic (or whatever) way of pitching their surveillance system.
- Ring ran a Superbowl ad showing their cameras being used to find a lost dog. This made people realize they can be used to track people just as easily.
- [flagged]
- It is far, far, far, far more likely that this sort of mass surveillance capability will be used for bad purposes (even by law enforcement) than it will be used to find an escaped child murderer. (Hell, I am convinced that this sort of thing is already more frequently used for bad purposes than good.)
Also like, how many escaped child murderers are there per year in the US? Like... one? I don't think that's worth pervasive mass surveillance, though I would understand how a parent whose kid had been abducted might believe it would be.
- Don't worry we track only bad people and if we track someone this means they're bad.
- Good. But people should not have pointed cameras into public spaces and live streamed everything to the cloud to begin with. Walking past a house with a camera doorbell makes me really uncomfortable, like I'm being watched.
- I have a local one (reolink). Prompted by neighbors getting robbed unfortunately. Will this prevent crime? Maybe some but probably not all. But it would let me know if I have to file a stolen package claim or should wait on the package for a few more days. Plus it has been doubling as a trail camera for the local fauna I had no idea came by so frequently. It faces private property only as it is set up.
- Yep, I had this setup for years. PoE cameras, connected directly to a Reolink NVR, that I could access over my vpn and then later WireGuard connection back home. I very much enjoyed that setup and it helped me a number of times.
Not only did it give me peace of mind but two specific examples come to mind. One was when the garbage company’s truck picked up my trash can, and never put it back down (the whole thing fell into the back of the truck). I was able to get a replacement can for free, otherwise I wouldn’t have had any clue where it disappeared off to.
The second time was when my first Steam Deck was stolen in-transit. You could tell from the very hollow sound the box made when the delivery person threw the box onto the porch. It helped prove that it wasn’t stolen off my porch (side note, screw UPS, bunch of thieves, I also had another Steam Deck stolen from one of their drop boxes, last time I ever used one, by one of their employees. No recourse at all, I just had to eat the ~$700. Also, Valve, stop shipping the Steam deck in an incredibly obvious box).
- What do you use now?
- I’m in the process of moving to a new house where I’m going to go all-in on Ubiquiti equipment. I don’t have it set up yet (house is being built now) but I’ve started buying the equipment and I had Ethernet run to the places where I’ll put cameras.
Same concept though, local NVR, remote access via WireGuard.
- This is the setup I have, and it's been very good. I also live in a rural location, though- my cameras do not show anything that is not on my property, so I don't have the same concerns about randomly filming strangers just walking past.
- The local law enforcement will likely not have the time to chase individual small cases either...
- Careful what you wish for, local cops have already abused cameras and license plate readers to arrest people just for driving by the location and looking similar to doorbell video, over package theft...
- In Poland some moron in surveillance center visually profiled a random guy as one wanted person (by jacket color), then police took the guy to the police station and beat him to death.
- Wow. What an infuriating case, again and again. Only 2 years in prison for the perps because the court decided that "excited delirium" killed the guy and not being beaten and tased 4 times.
- And some of the protestors that protested this got 4+ years. Clearly police property has more rights than a human being.
- Even if they do, “crime scene” camera footage is less useful than the victims expect. Cameras discourage thieves of opportunity but not someone who has their mind set on taking your stuff. A simple cap or mask, some sunglasses, a few strips of reflective tape, a WiFi deauther, cheap and accessible stuff like this make the practical usefulness of most home camera systems limited at best to the owner understanding what and how it happened.
That’s why police looks to piece together from a larger surveillance network. Maybe you can’t see the face on the home camera but in another camera down the road, or a license plate on the getaway car down the street, or an accomplice without disguise. They want everyone to have cameras and then they can abuse the system.
Friends showed me high quality close up footage of someone stealing their bike. Absolutely useless, all you saw was an average guy that you wouldn’t recognize if you walked past on the street.
- You can always put the cameras inside the home and disable WAN access. Best of all worlds.
- If I were a robber knowing everyone has cameras, wouldn’t I just wear a mask?
- They do. Also many dont care as they will just be released. Criminals also know the cameras do not face up/down the road to capture license plates.
- Will this prevent crime? Maybe
No. Unless your camera is being held by a human being who can take action.
Cameras do not prevent crime. That's just marketing.
All they do is let people watch crimes after they've happened, and share the videos to spread fear to other people, which then sells more cameras.
If doorbell cameras prevented crime, the internet would be full of videos of people trying to steal packages, then changing their minds when they see the camera.
Instead, it's all just recordings of a crime that has already been committed.
- My garage was broken into twice within three years, cameras up two years ago, and nothing yet.
I may also have a nice rock for sale, we'll see how it goes.
- Yeah - I think it still a bit of a deterrent ... today, not everyone has a camera, and if I were a thief and one house had cameras while the place next door did not, guess which one I'm gonna rob?
But I wonder how much of that will wear off once everybody has one.
- if I were a thief and one house had cameras while the place next door did not, guess which one I'm gonna rob?
But we're talking about doorbell cameras here, not giant boxes in the sky with flashing strobe lights on them.
A thief doesn't know if there's a doorbell camera on a particular home until they're already on the porch and recorded.
- Not sure why you are downvoted. Reolinks work without internet and can stream locally using rtsp. I have a doorbell cam from them and it works fine. If you block it from the internet you only get video and basic doorbell functionality though, which is fine.
- You can also stream Reolink video to a Frigate box (free software) and access that from wherever.
No cloud involved if you run your own VPN.
Or even better, _just a little_ cloud involved if you expose through Cloudflare tunnel for just you and whoever else needs to access it.
- Given that cloudflare tunnels require ssl termination, this technically isnt much different to a cloud server that promises not to record. Of course, cloudflare are less likely to be inclined to analyse it
- The difference if you can film out on the street (random people walking by) or just your property (my own fault if I approach your door).
Some countries have laws for this, as in you can only point the camera so that you don't catch everyone. This can have downsides, e.g. if you have no (even short) front yard and your (organization's) door is directly on the curb - but I completely agree that this is just tough luck, the privacy of random people walking on public property past private property should not be filmed.
- > like I'm being watched.
Working as intended? It’s a wireless CCTV.
- Like they're being watched by every data broker customer on the planet, not their neighbor.
- Being recorded while on public property is not illegal in many jurisdictions, but it's certainly iffy and should not be normalized. Any cameras should be directed so that they're exclusively aimed at your own property.
- Counterpoint: everyone needs to own their own video streams
I hate it, but you are being recorded everywhere you go. Your plates and your face get scanned every single day, all day long. This is normalized. Privacy is dead.
You will never get access to any of that data when you need it. It is not there to help you. You need to keep your own evidence of the world around you; you never know when you will need it.
- I just assume that I’m on video, at any given time.
Not condoning it; just accepting reality.
> It is not there to help you
It’s like those “This call may be monitored for 'quality' purposes.” service calls.
You can bet, that if the recording helps the company, they’ll have it, but if it helps you, well, they didn’t record that call.
- The best part of those messages is that they give you tacit permission to record the call on your phone.
- They're used heavily for the companies to harass and dehumanize the workers, too.
"You didn't try hard enough to sell the customer something else when they called with a major problem."
"How dare you deviate from the script and talk to the caller."
"Why did this take ten minutes? Get those call times down."
- Gdpr helps with this. I've made a SAR in the past for a recording. It's up to them to decide if the penalty of me having it is worse than the risk of getting caught illegally deleting it after
- What happens to everyone when the plates and faces are recorded or scanned? Who is looking at those every day?
- Nobody looks at them. It’s 2026.
In the U.S., municipal vehicles have ALPR scanners on them. They go into a database
Cop cars will ping if a flagged plate is seen (even if the front and back plates don’t match) and the officer will pull you over. Literally happens every day.
- >Nobody looks at them.
Exactly my point but most of the comments here would have you believe you're going to be stupid up against a wall at any moment.
- I'm walking on the pavement. And yes, it is illegal to point cameras at public spaces in my country (Denmark), but the law is not really enforced.
- Denmark doesn't enforce laws?
https://news.com.au/world/europe/danish-teenager-likely-to-b...
- Seemed to mean that specific camera law, not the law as a whole.
- Whataboutism. Parent referred to that specific law for public filming not being enforced.
Also what would one case of a law being followed like in your shared article mean? Nothing. I thus assume you are acting in bad faith.
- Here in Norway, and I assume in much of Europe, it's actually illegal. But that hasn't stopped anyone. The (little) discussion there's been on the topic has mostly centered around car sentry cams, which is very similar in nature. Sadly, the only state authority that seems to care is so underfunded that they can barely cover a fraction of these cases. And there's (rightfully) very little appetite for them to go after pretty much everyone with a relatively new car.
My armchair take is that we need to start going after those who provide the systems. If a regular person buys a streaming doorbell or a car with a sentrycam, it should be up to whoever takes his money and handles those streams to ensure that they're not doing illegal surveillance of public spaces, IMHO.
- It's a mess in Europe. It's different everywhere.
In the Netherlands you can record, but only share it with the cops and otherwise you need some clear exception (e.g. dashcam images with minor accidents to your insurer). In all other cases you can either not store them, at least not publicly and all cloud falls under public, or have to inform everyone about their presence on the images, or blurr every identifiable mark (e.g. faces, number plates, names etc). Pretty sure all cloud door cams violate that. So the cops sometimes ask for people's doorcam images, and they are allowed to do that, but likely the people providing them will have recorded it illegally due to it being stored on some cloud account.
This question has already been answered by security footage videos and as long as they are overwritten withing a certain time, stored non publicly and only shared with allowed officials, it's ok.
There are exceptions, but very limited, like clear public good (e.g. whistleblowers).
- Once something illegal is culturally accepted it’s very difficult to remove, it requires a cultural shift.
It’s against the law to post cctv onto things like Facebook in the U.K. but people donor all the time. Early on the law could have banned cloud cameras but it’s too late now, far too many people like to answer front their phones. So glad I no ln get deliver pizzas.
- >>It’s against the law to post cctv onto things like Facebook in the U.K.
I live in the UK and first time I'm hearing about this - it's definitely illegal to record your neighbours or members of the public without permission, but AFAIK if you are recording videos of your own driveway you can post those anywhere you like since there is no privacy issue there.
Have you got any more info about this?
Edit: let me clarify - sure, there are _circumstances_ under which it's illegal to post a video on facebook, whether it's recorded with CCTV or your phone doesn't matter. But there is no blanket ban on posting CCTV footage anywhere, and your post makes it sound like it is.
- It's not illegal to record members of the public without permission in the UK. The test is mostly about whether someone has a reasonable expectation of privacy, but there are all sorts of other considerations:
https://sprintlaw.co.uk/articles/can-you-film-people-in-publ...
- I thought the law said it’s illegal to post footage of people without their consent if it’s publicly accessible. Which means videos of some random on your driveway or some random in a public place are treated the same, but this depends on where they’re posted. This doesn’t address the fact that this seems to be generally flouted!
Would love to hear more from a lawyer on this!
- you should make sure that the information recorded is used only for the purpose for which your system was installed (for example it will not be appropriate to share any recordings on social media sites)
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/domestic-cctv-usi...
Data protection laws are very rarely enforced though
- Just a quick reminder that in the UK these websites are purely informative in nature and are not actual legislation - they are meant to summarise to the public the nature of the laws but they are not laws themselves. Another good example is the .gov website that says ebikes can have a maximum power output of 250W, while in reality the legislation around ebikes(pedelecs) says the average output measured as described in the relevant industry measuring standard over a period of 30 minutes has to average out to 250W, maximum peak output is actually unlimited. It's an example of authors of the website trying to simplify it a little bit too much so the website isn't 20 pages long. I'm not saying this page you linked is wrong - just that everything you read on there has to be taken through the lens of "this isn't actual legislative text, it's a simplified summary".
>>(for example it will not be appropriate to share any recordings on social media sites)
Again, that's not what the legislation itself says and it's not so black and white. Posting a video from your own driveway of you parking your car would be perfectly legal even if taken from your own CCTV system. Posting a video of a postie that comes to your door every day for no reason other than to identify them would be not.
- > Once something illegal is culturally accepted it’s very difficult to remove, it requires a cultural shift.
I agree. And that's sensible. We don't want the law and culture to diverge too much. The former is meant to serve the latter.
But I do still think it would be possible to start going after the suppliers of the services.
- > The former is meant to serve the latter.
Bear in mind europe is known for millennia of pogroms and ethnic cleansing (like, I'm sure, many other parts of the world). Sometimes the culture must bend towards the needs of a stable culture.
- > Bear in mind europe is known for millennia of pogroms and ethnic cleansing (like, I'm sure, many other parts of the world). Sometimes the culture must bend towards the needs of a stable culture.
Of course. I'm absolutely not saying that culture shouldn't bend. I'm just saying the law must bend to follow culture to some degree.
And let's be clear: it wasn't a change of law that ended the millennia of pogroms and ethnic cleansing. It was culture that changed. Once culture was enough changed for enough people, the law followed and took care of the stragglers.
- Yes, it's the same in Denmark. And I unfortunately expect that the law will eventually be relaxed to allow it because it helps law enforcement. We have very little media coverage about the illegality of private people pointing cameras at public spaces, and the most frequent mentions of this is when the police use footage from such cameras to solve a crime. A couple of years ago there was a very high profile kidnapping of a young woman where the footage from a car sentry cam helped the police solve it. They eventually saved the woman and caught the guy who turned out to be a murderer and serial rapist.
Now the cat is out of the bag and it has become an untenable position to be against this type of surveillance. And don't get me wrong, I want rapists and murderers to be caught, but I am at the same time also worried about the effect that this will have down the line, in particular when live AI analysis of footage becomes cheap enough that it gets integrated into these cameras so the cameras can report (what they deem to be) suspicious activity automatically.
- That is a really confusing law. how can you share the recording with the police if you're not permitted to store the recording in the first place
- Ordinarily the police investigating a major crime don't care whether you broke the law in small ways.
"Hmm, should we solve the murder, or, maybe get somebody fined $100 for having an unauthorised video" ?
- I got hit by an Uber once as a pedestrian, he drove away, I phoned the police and they spent the whole time trying to decide if I can cross the road there or not, decided that it was a legal technicality and let me off with a warning for jaywalking. So in summary:
> "Hmm, should we solve the murder, or, maybe get somebody fined $100 for having an unauthorised video" ?
Don't be surprised to find out the answer is both.
- Goods and products must adhere to regulations banning common wrongdoings. Safety standards, health standards, avoiding financial harm, but also privacy. With this I mean, you are absolutely right! Producers and/or sellers of products violating the standards of the society must be pursued! Common people have the convenience not knowing every and all big and small regulations setting the standards of the society when going into a shop buying gadgets or goods. Those active in a specific area must know the specifics of that area and adhere the rules. Should people be aware of radio emission standards when purchasing things working with electricity and validate themselves if the specific product will adere to those when used? Absolutely no! No chance of that. We, consumers, do not need to be aware and able to tell if some food from the grocery will harm people eating it but those should not be sold or produced in the first place. Same with other products in common - product related usual - situations, other rules, other aspects (here, privacy). Producers must know and avoid specific wrongdoings for the common use scenarios of that specific product.
- Thank you for making this connection! I think you're spot on.
- > and I assume in much of Europe
No. In Poland it's legal to record everything, only when you publish the recordings you need the recorded people to agree.
The core issue is that "nothing to hide nothing to fear" argument is correct as long as the government is trustworthy. Not only that, but mass-surveilance greatly improves life because it allows much better crowd management. Case in point - speed cameras. Would you support the removal of all speed cameras in Norway?
- > No. In Poland it's legal to record everything, only when you publish the recordings you need the recorded people to agree.
Interesting. Thanks for this perspective. But for the sake of this debate it's still more or less the same situation.
> The core issue is that "nothing to hide nothing to fear" argument is correct as long as the government is trustworthy.
The government and everyone else who might have access to the data.
> Not only that, but mass-surveilance greatly improves life because it allows much better crowd management.
Hard disagree.
> Case in point - speed cameras. Would you support the removal of all speed cameras in Norway?
No. Speed cameras are different. They do more or less not record people who are not reasonably suspected of committing the crime of speeding. They are more analogous to a doorbell camera (or car sentry system) that only actually starts storing/sharing/streaming data when very good evidence of a crime is in progress. I would, for example, be OK with a camera pointed at a public area if the operator of the camera can prove that the data is only stored whenever say the house's burglary alarm trips (this is equivalent to speed cameras when the induction loop in the ground says that a car passed faster than the speed limit). That minute of recording that may include innocent people in public areas is something I would consider to be in the public good. It's at least very different from a system that monitors continuously.
The fact that nothing is stored in normal circumstances of course needs to be backed up by very public audits. For example the operator would need to release source code and be liable to an enormous fine if state inspectors find that different code actually runs on the device. At least that seems like the ideal situation to me.
- > (this is equivalent to speed cameras when the induction loop in the ground says that a car passed faster than the speed limit)
This isn't how many speed cameras work in Europe. They work by having a speed camera at location Y on the highway that snaps a photo of your car/license plate read, and then another one 5km down the road that also snaps such a photo and plate read.
If you average more than the speed limit in that distance between photo timestamps, you get a ticket mailed to you.
Due to the way it works, it's taking a snapshot of every single vehicle that passes each camera. How long that data is stored/etc. I suppose is a matter of how much you trust the government.
This system is considered better most of the time since it allows for brief excursions of the limit for overtaking, and doesn't just set up a situation where everyone slows down for the one known speed camera point (or slam on the brakes when they notice a mobile speed camera van on the side of the road).
- The type you describe is unusual here in Norway. They exist, but they're even signed in a special way. I'd hazard a guess that they make up <5% of cameras. Most cameras here by far are induction loops that trigger photos. From memory, it seems to be the case in the rest of Scandinavia + Germany too. But I could be wrong.
Either way, the public auditing procedure I outline could apply to time-between-two-photos-cameras too.
- > Speed cameras are different.
So basically your entire argument revolves around the government pinky-promising that it won't use the data from speed cameras to track innocent citizens. Because when the network is dense enough, you can tell who went exactly when and where. This isn't any different from Amazon pinky-promising that it will only use data to improve customer experience.
The bigger point I'm making is that mass-surveilance technology does have benefits to the society, and any absolutist "but but but my privacy" who fails to acknowledge them is doomed to lose the debate.
- This. The survelliance state smiles when people find ok to film their neighbors for "safety" purposes.
- I'm interested in the laws around these cameras. Is it illegal to record eg parts of your neighbor's private property? Are you liable or is Amazon?
- Agreed, I know it’s juvenile but ever time that stupid chime plays I just want to throw up a finger.
- I do think clearer norms would help
- The world is going to be filled with millions of cameras using AI to analyze the video in real time.
- Doesn't have to be. Here in the Netherlands it's actually illegal to (permanently) film public space, and people can and will point that out to any offenders.
- Same in Germany. Putting something like a Ring camera up is a big no-no.
- That seems impossible to actually enforce.
- They are everywhere. Knowing the old “Germany is the land of privacy” I was shocked to walk about in many neighborhoods, from pretty run down to affluent, and see Ring, Nest, Arlo, all cloud connected cameras hanging over doors but turned more towards the public road in front of the house.
- How can that actually be enforced?
- With many exceptions of course.
- There's permanent cameras pointed at the street in the red light district in Amsterdam, along with warning signs saying that photographing the women in the windows is illegal.
- Unless the world becomes full of people that vandalize cameras on short notice, or countries that criminalize those cameras.
- I think it’s only fair the citizens are allowed to record if the government does it en mass
- And then what?
- It could reduce crime and also could be used by evil people to do evil things.
- Nobody's watching you. Nobody cares that you're walking by.
- I predict 100 returns in total and then everybody forgets about this in a week. I'm not cheering for this outcome but it's the sad reality.
- It's typically with this type of headline "X people are doing Y" means "at least 2 X people did Y".
- I really want to disagree with this, and have more faith in humanity, but I suspect you are more or less right. Even if it's 1,000 or even 10,000 or 100,000 cameras returned, it'll likely amount to a nothingburger for Amazon.
To make a real statement here, we'd probably need several million returns in the US alone. (A quick search suggests more than 20M installs in the US.)
- unfortunately having always-on cameras pointing around the house is kind of an arms race. if you don't, someone else will, and their word will be the one that gets taken seriously. so you better have one too!
its kind of like how in videos of altercations, the first thing all parties involved will do nowadays is grab their phones and start recording.
- America- land of those with strong moral convictions and high follow through :)
- In their defense, Redditors returning a throwaway piece of electronics then posting about it is probably the biggest sense of accomplishment they'll get all month.
It takes a special level of delusion to think you're pulling one over on the billion-dollar company who just paid millions to advertise this capability during the Super Bowl as if everyone didn't already know.
Hasn't Ring been sharing video with law enforcement for years? Ignoring that zomg ICE is the Reddit cause du jour (these people live for this), did they just now figure out how cloud-connected cameras work?
I fully expect these to all be replaced with generic cameras from Amazon full of security holes, that upload all video to CCP-controlled servers in China.
- That's one reason why being in a Reddit bubble is dangerous. Reddit always seems to be boycotting something (including Reddit itself), but those boycotts rarely led anywhere. Then news websites pick up on Reddit as a source of news and the rest is echo effect.
- Several years ago, there was the controversy about the guy who made Reddit Enhancement Suite getting his API access cut off. Everyone was on his side and I remember thinking "this guy could create his own reddit, he could literally steal all the users, similarly to how slashdot mass migration to reddit".
Maybe he realized it and wasn't interested, but man that would have been an epic move, by using their teen angst and have a hundred million active users overnight.
- > special level of delusion to think you're pulling one over on the billion-dollar company
Except that’s not the only reason to participate in such a boycott. Perhaps they simply do not want to participate in one voluntary node of participation in the surveillance capitalism network.
- Wyze has posted a parody response ad
- The parody is amazing! They were quick to respond and made a great ad at a time a lot of people are moving away from Ring.
- In related news, there's a recent scandal in Bulgaria that involves leaked footage from beauty salons and gynecological office appearing on porn sites.
What could go wrong by installing cheap cameras in such places?
https://www.euronews.com/2026/02/04/bulgaria-probes-secret-f...
https://www.ocnal.com/2026/02/bulgaria-launches-criminal-pro...
- Increasingly that's not only some accidents or data leaks. It's organized streaming with platforms and subscriptions.
- Wonder if this will still be the case now that it’s been announced they are suspending the partnership with Flock.
- <adjusting my tinfoil hat> wouldn’t it be easy to circumvent this? They can easily cooperate with some other chain of shady businesses that will cooperate with Flock or government surveillance.
- Ring still partners with Axon [1] as part of the Community Requests feature [2]. Since terminating the partnership with Flock is solely a PR play, the answer to your question will likely depend on if consumers en masse use this opportunity to educate themselves on the gravity of the “loss of control (of your data) in exchange for convenience” paradox of cloud services and advocate for additional changes to be made to the Ring platform, or if Amazon’s PR capability will find a way to improve consumer sentiment towards Ring products and services without addressing privacy and surveillance concerns.
[2]:https://ring.com/support/articles/uds27/Community-request
- Flock was not the problem. The acts of Ring was the problem (partnering with Flock and forcing opt-in, among many). People bought Ring, people return Ring.
- Stallman was right.
- Is, he’s still with us.
- Was, he said it a long time ago. He has said a lot of things that sounded kind of far-fetched and paranoid at the time, but which were later demonstrated to be true, so "Stallman was right" is reappraising the past statement.
- I understand what you mean, but he’s still saying it and he never stopped.
- Lots of people are saying some of those things now, but Stallman was saying them decades ago. It's not differentiating or meaningful to say "A is right" if B-E are saying the same thing at the same time.
- Let’s just say Stallman was and is still in the process of being right
- It's easy to be right when you live outside the boundaries of reality.
E.g. he won't (didn't?) own a mobile phone, but is okay with borrowing someone else's. He won't use Wi-Fi where he has to log in but would happily borrow someone else's.
It's not being right; it's shifting responsibility in exchange for his own personal convenience.
- It's called 'setting an example'.
One might disagree with value of the example being set, but I'm not sure I would characterize his choices as in any way convenient for him.
- It's not setting an example if you shift responsibility to someone else.
Setting an example would be just doing without the things he doesn't agree with. Need to make a call but only other people's cell phones are available? Well, you don't make the call. Need wifi but no open networks are available? Well, you don't get wifi. Is this even more inconvenient than the already-inconvenient use of other people's cell phones or wifi logins? Absolutely. But it's actually sticking to your principles.
- It's not the _cellphone_ that Stallman has an issue with lol
- They he should do without.
Live like the Amish in 2026 (though I assume they have phones now).
It's not setting an example. We have a word for it and it's called being a mooch.
The attitude is consistent with that famous video where RMS explains that he's "never installed GNU/Linux" because he could just ask someone else to do it for him, and suggest others should do the same.
For that matter, why own a car if we can borrow someone else's? Especially with license plate readers and traffic cameras everywhere, who wants to be tracked? Let your friend be tracked instead. That is the level of logic here.
- First people call him "outside the boundaries of reality" then demand he lives like Amish... Look who is removed from reality now. How would he even work for the FSF's goals, if he were to follow silly advice like that? Apparently, whatever he does, he can't do right by every naysayer's standards. What many people miss is, that even Stallman admits, that you don't have to go cold turkey free/libre only, but it is already a step in the right direction to do what you can, accepting an inconvenience in exchange. Many people will rather bury their head in the sand than to accept any inconvenience at all.
- But if everyone acted like Stallman then solutions that have gone away such as public payphones would come back due to their requirement.
He doesn't give a crap if a random phone record of his appears in a random haystack, and that's kind of the point isn't it? It's the aggregated, crawlable stores that are the threat
There may be other issues with Stallman, but that behavior doesn't strike me as particularly inconsistent
- > it's shifting responsibility in exchange for his own personal convenience.
And? That’s actually one of the strategies to counter any risk, if you can’t avoid it or mitigate it, you transfer it.
- For someone who claims to take a principled stance on these sorts of things, it feels very unprincipled to leverage the risk that others take in e.g. carrying a cell phone.
Consider that there are two components here: one is that Stallman is uncomfortable with the risk of carrying a tracking device (aka cell phone) around with him. The other is that he wants to make it known that people shouldn't carry cell phones because of that tracking; part of his platform is advocating for and against things like this.
If he was merely worried about the risk, and was just out to protect himself, then using someone else's cell phone (which would be at hand regardless of whether or not he used it) would be a perfectly reasonable, pragmatic thing to do. Transferring the risk, as you say.
But using someone else's cell phone is a violation of the principle. How can I take his advocacy seriously if he freely admits that we need cell phones out in the world, otherwise it's even too inconvenient for him to go about his business?
- He does leverage the risk that others take, but those others are also the people who collectively build society so as to require taking that risk. It's kind of tit-for-tat in a way.
>How can I take his advocacy seriously
You could just listen to what he has to say and consider whether or not it's true. His personal behaviour at the end of the day has little bearing on that. "He doesn't even do XYZ therefore I won't believe him" feels more like a rationalization one comes up with because one doesn't want to believe him in the first place.
- I am currently in talks with a neighbor about removing his Ring camera (which points towards my front door / travels)... or at least angling it differently.
- “You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.”
– George Orwell, 1984
- Ah, the time before infrared cameras... Makes one think that now we can have cameras that can see as well in what appears darkness for humans.
- to get some feeling of it one can watch footage from Ukraine where drones with IR hunt soldiers at night. At the beginning of war, when soldiers didn't yet started to take it into account, there would even be whole groups walking like they would be at night feeling invisible, and that would be the last seconds before the explosion lights up the screen.
These days there is more experience with it, and for example to get "invisible" in IR one of the tricks used by the stormtroopers there is to put on an IR-protective coverall (it works to some extent and for short time) and to walk over warm asphalt.
In general even without IR the regular camera sensors these days are very sensitive, and you can pull a pretty good image out from the darkness by shifting dynamic range well down.
- There's been some clips of Russian soldiers walking wearing either a space blanket or a sleepingbag to try and avoid IR. Unfortunately for them in those cases they were dealing with visual spectrum drones...
- You don't even need to get so "fancy" [0] as IR cameras. "Nightvision" by way of light amplification has been around for ages. [1] Even the cheap stuff I played with decades ago lit up the night like nobody's business if there was even the smallest amount of moonlight. The downside was that bright lights made the image useless, but if you're building a robot, or running the video feed back to an operator you'd simply have another non-nightvision camera.
[0] Is it fancy if IR camera tech has been around since like the 1980's or 1970's?
[1] Since WWII if Wikipedia is to be believed.
- Just an example of what a prosumer camera could do 12 years ago from a Sony A7s:
https://philipbloom.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/SONY...
This camera is capable of iso 409,600, 4 stops higher than this image. I mean this is turning night into day.
- We talk about video here with requirement to have as many FPS as possible, not static pics from camera with huge sensor and lenses, fixed on tripod like in your link. Try making a night video of the same scene with that same camera, it will be grainy useless crap that any newish cheap phone can triumph easily.
Actually most real cameras had/have subpar videos to normal phones. Small volumes so hard to develop good optimizations in small teams, sensors optimized to the max for still photos. That market is basically slowly dying (I stopped using my full frame too the day my S22 ultra phone came despite lower quality of photos, tried taking it on trips few times but it mostly stayed in the backpack).
Its better now regarding video quality, but if you say travel to exotic places, more than 95% of the folks have phone only. Even those with cameras rarely pull them out unless its proper photo safari.
- Not to forget WiFi positioning by fingerprinting your silhouette.
- [dead]
- Yeah, "ring owners are returning their cameras". A few of them. Not enough to make a significant difference.
- I had a few Ring doorbells from 2019-2024. I ditched them both because I saw the quality of the video degrade slowly over that time, probably in an effort to reduce cloud storage costs. The reliability of the motion detection also decreased over the same period.
The final straw was when somebody ripped one of the Ring Elite (wired) doorbells off the outside wall. (This was during a Teamsters labor action against Amazon, but I cannot prove any relationship.) There was never a motion alert, and no footage of the culprit was recorded. The final frame had something in it that may have been a person, but it was impossible to be sure.
Having one of my Rings stolen was actually a blessing. I had the police come and take a report, and submitted a claim to Ring. They sent a free replacement, which I promptly listed on eBay, along with the other used one.
So after paying $5/month times two doorbells for five years, I went looking for something better. I settled on Reolink. Everything about them is better. The video quality is far superior, the motion detection is outstanding (and very customizable). Also, the Reolink doorbells cost less than a third of what the Ring Elites cost.
They offer optional cloud storage for about the same price as Ring, but you can also opt for free local storage (using a microSD card in the doorbell). I've got both doorbells set up with 256GB microSD cards, and have them both streaming RTSP to my NAS/NVR, which is something the Ring will never be able to do.
Also, Reolink has made no announcements about partnering with law enforcement, or anyone else. I suppose they might grant access to their cloud, but I doubt they would directly access the microSD cards, and certainly would be unable to access my NVR. I prefer to have some control over my own data, and the Reolink doorbells give me that, while being better and cheaper at what they do.
The one feature the Rings had which was not easily replaceable was smart home integration with motion detection, but I was able to implement that using edgebridge, my NAS/NVR, and some webhooks. My workaround is actually superior to what Ring offered because it's all local, and will continue to function even during an Internet outage.
- Any good alternatives? Preferably one that stores images on a local docker instance running within my network.
- Oh yes - run Frigate on a mini PC or home server. It runs best in Docker. And it should work with any cameras that support RTSP and provide H.264 video.
I'm not affiliated btw, but I found the instructions really useful - they walk you through an install of Debian 13 (small version of the OS with minimal components), set up low maintenance options (auto updates etc.), install Docker & Frigate, and set up your cameras for best performance depending on your needs.
Keep everything local (if you want). I also integrate with HomeAssistant and expose that through a free CloudFlare Tunnel for access when away from home.
CloudFlare tunnels by the way - these are a great solution to accessing home-network resources without punching holes / port-forwarding etc. because all the access is outward from the home network, then an authentication layer added by CloudFlare.
- Reolink Doorbell PoE, deny it access to the cloud if you want from the router, works well over LAN and can periodically FTP recordings anywhere you want on your local network, plus it has some really nice HomeAssistant integrations (last movement, last animal, last person, last doorbell)
- Frigate is very good: https://frigate.video/
Personally, I use Zoneminder: https://zoneminder.com/ Zoneminder is very "janky" but predictable.
I set mine up about three years ago, and it's been nice and boring since: https://nbailey.ca/post/nvr
- Unifi makes a doorbell and consumer (and commerical) security cameras which run and store data on a local device, but still reachable online with their app connecting directly to your device. I used their dream machine pro with a big HDD, but they're released a few other devices in the last few years which might be cheaper and use SSDs. And I think you could run the stack in docker. But if you want to hack it yourself, there's probably easier projects. If you want to spend a bit more but have everything more or less just work with nice hardware and apps, Ubiquity's Unifi system is really great for home security. Not to mention the wifi and other networking solutions they have.
- Home security devices sit in an incredibly sensitive place. If users feel like the scope of data use is drifting beyond what they originally agreed to, that's a big deal
- Related:
Super Bowl Ad for Ring Cameras Touted AI Surveillance Network
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46950915
Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash
- I am just happy that the average person is now aware of the usual manipulation tactics, the ad was about “aww doggos!!” and yet no one bought it and back fired.
- This is the right thing to do. When you want security, you have to first decide what the threat is. It seems that consumers are discovering that Corporate Surveillance is a threat, and they are right.
- I think people should return these cameras, this is good, but, is this really a trend or is MSN just reporting on a reddit sub with a few thousand people? So interesting a company owned by Microsoft would want to publicize people unsatisfied with a competitor...
- American surveillance is one thing. All over Europe people install Chinese IP cameras mostly from paranoic and imaginary reasons. Camera literally facing neighbour's windows and doors and their neighbour's own camera. Nobody understands that it's economically impossible to sell IP camera with a mobile app and cloud storage of video for 150 EUR. Their business model is not simply selling cameras.
EDIT. I'm really confused how you concluded that this comment is anti European. Quit whatever drugs and social media if something like this is triggering your paranoia.
- Personally, I know nobody who has the need to install this type of crappy surveillance shit on their front door in Europe to start with.
You frame it like the only alternative to American surveillance cameras is Chinese surveillance cameras, but no cameras seems to be no option for you.
Who is the one with the paranoid, imaginary reasons?
Edit: Ah btw, here in germany we have of course cameras to see who is in front of the door, it is called Türsprechanlage. It does not record, it does sent to the cloud, it is not smart, and is developed and produced in Germany, for example by Siedle.
- I don't understand why all answers make all about Germany. I saw plenty of cheap Chinese IP cameras in Turkish, Arab, and Asian districts of German cities and in tourist hotspots of German cities. IP camera, doorbell camera, surveillance camera, call it however you want.
- All over Europe is generalisation. At least in France, Germany, Switzerland it is too much pain and paperwork to get any camera installed. If you are worried about chinese then seriously you cannot live.
- In theory, in practice you can get a random one bought from Temu, and unless some neighbour calls in the authorities, no one will know.
- You are technically correct but also very wrong. Yes, it is a lot of pain to get the paperwork done and you have a high chance of being rejected without a good reason. I know dozens of people who run cheap, chinese IP cams recording public spaces directly to dubious cloud services here in Switzerland. You just don't ask.
Work related: We sell solutions including CCTV and video-intercom and we have only recently started providing customers with stickers they can use to make those installations comply with regulations. Technically, it has been the responsibility of the customer installing the device, so us doing this is just nudging people towards compliance because nobody cares. I can guarantee you that there are tens of thousands of cameras here filming public ground and it is not prosecuted. In fact, someone at the office put one up a long time ago for a PTZ demo (not recording) that was not compliant and it took almost 10 years until we got ordered to take it down.
Most of these are not recording, only recording situationally or only locally. Still not legal technically. However, ever since cheap cloud-connected doorbells have become available, they have definitely been installed here. They do not comply with regulations whatsoever and next to nothing is done about it.
- The camera is absolutely doable for 150€. Just look what raspberry Pi costs. The cut all the corners, take ancient ddr2 memory, ancient processor, optimize every piece for manufacturing and it’s done. Of course, CE testing and regulatory nonsense is not included. But would you buy 150€ camera or the same camera with proper certification for 200€?
- Where is this comment coming from? Why Europe? Are those cameras not used in other places? Are they specifically made for Europe?
Are there sources?
Or is this just a fantasy story?
- The usual anti-Europe narrative that is starting to be so common over here.
- Weirdly yes. But why is formulated that you can tell it's an American writing text only an American could believe from the first words.
- In this case, an anti-Europe and anti-China combo.
- > Are there sources?
> Or is this just a fantasy story?
People buy them from Ali, Temu, Allegro, eMAG and install all over the place. Simply freaking take a walk and look around.
- > Nobody understands that it's economically impossible to sell IP camera with a mobile app and cloud storage of video for 150 EUR.
Then maybe those cunts can sell a camera without cloud storage for once? Or the one that connects to local hub, like Chinese cameras do?
- [citation needed]
- >>Ring camera owners online claim
People online claim all kinds of things.
>>This Reddit user is alleging
The story, in part, revolves around one post on Reddit. Isn't this a low effort article? Isn't this just a wild guess by the Redditor posted as fact?
