Who said anything about storing it on the Ring? It's connected to your WiFi, just store it on a NAS (even a Ring-branded one).

Can't they just take the NAS?

If the NAS is outside of your home, where do you put it? Only the 1% own multiple homes and asking your parents or friends to hold it would just be...weird and complicated.

And then you'd need to keep a separate NAS in your home, for the camera pointed at the NAS in your parent's house of course.

Suffice it to say, it kind of makes sense to let Ring store all of the video in one central location since they can just hire armed guards to keep it safe. If you yourself can afford armed guards, you're probably not in their target market.

You'd have to find it first. Burglars tend to want to be in and out quick, as opposed to combing the house for all electronic storage devices. OK, if you get burglarized by professional spies or secret police they'll probably find it, but I'd venture to say in that case you have bigger problems than an Amazon Ring is going to help you with.

Someone could have burned down your house. Data could have been corrupted for any unrelated reason. Any physical storage could be confiscated by law enforcement for any reason (maybe there is incriminating evidence against them).

There are LOTS of reasons why you'd want redundant off-site backup.

Those caveats are still enough for me to want on-premises storage for my cameras. Your examples honestly seem like unlikely edge cases compared to wholesale privacy intrusion by data center hacks or Ring just deciding to give your footage to police. It shouldn't even be possible for Ring to share images/videos from your camera if it were designed correctly.

> it kind of makes sense to let Ring store all of the video in one central location since they can just hire armed guards to keep it safe.

Ring can hire all of the armed guards in the world, and it won't protect your data from Ring.

Is there any reason, other than expense, the NAS couldn't be reasonably secured on site? Put it in a box made of quarter inch steel plate, then bolt that to the concrete foundation. If they bring a cutting torch or jackhammer they could take it... but they're not going to.

With the density of modern storage media, the secure box could be quite small, much smaller even than a typical residential safe. And it needn't necessarily be accessible like a typical safe. If you design it right, it needn't even have a door that could be pried open with sufficient leverage.

It could at the same time be disguised. It could be bolted to a concrete wall, covered with a fake electrical conduit box (which would help disguise the wires going into it), then completely covered over by drywall. To find it you'd need to gut the house, and in the unlikely event that the thief found it they'd still be left with a hard nut to crack.

> Is there any reason, other than expense, the NAS couldn't be reasonably secured on site?

It's not even expensive. I have a couple of NASes in my home, but it would take a pretty intensive search to find them -- certainly more than a thief has time for. (I don't hide them to keep them from thieves, I hide them to keep them out of sight and out of the way for aesthetic reasons.)

Living in rentals or apartment buildings would make it difficult to do that.

That's a lot of installation effort for a simple video door bell.

It doesn't have to be (and shouldn't be) stored on the device that's outside of your house.

It's an extra setup and device for a customer to manage and if they want to view the data on their other devices away from home (a large part of the marketing of Ring et al) you get into difficulties getting the data from the 'home NAS' solution, it's 10x easier to just have the devices stream to the cloud 24/7 and deal with accessing it from there.

While I think you're exaggerating the difficulty of doing this without involving an external service, I fully acknowledge that it's easier to have someone else take care of the whole thing.

But that convenience comes with a cost.

The most difficult part is making sure the connection to fetch recordings when requested by a person using the app is reliable. That needs the server or your phone to be able to contact the NAS on the other side of your ISP and your router. That's hard and a headache to trouble shoot compared to just having the camera stream to some central server.

A thief would surely just disconnect the modem if this were an issue. This can even be done before entering the house in most cases. Cutting power might be even easier. It’s truly fascinating imagining the crimes that ring could document.

They would be disappointed to find out that My LAN hardware was powered by an UPS. And that security camera footage is streamed off-premise by the backup satellite connection.

That aside, I am pretty sure that in ‘typical’ consumer deployments, cutting power and/or cable from a house will disable and debilitate most alarm and security systems.

In reality, most people don’t have goods that are easily liquidated to make the b&e worth it in the first place. Most houses are are not at risk from professional thieves. Most houses certainly wouldn’t stand up to sustained penetration if there was an established fencable commodity worth the risk. Cops are absolutely terrible at solving crimes even with video evidence. Ring is intended to be a soothing mechanism, not a tool with a well-defined utility value, and it has the side effect of creating citizens who are paranoid for no reason.

Why cut the cords when you can deauthenticate all of the wireless devices?