> mostly for marketing purposes, the fact that they can be abused by authorities for dragnet surveillance without (adequate) due process is just a "bonus".

It's not just a bonus, it's a selling point. Not for normal consumers, but for law enforcement, and Amazon would like to keep the police surveillance use case secret[1].

From The Secret Scripts Amazon Gives to Cops to Promote Ring Surveillance Cameras[2]:

> Documents obtained by Motherboard reveal that Ring provides 46 standardized comments that cops can post on social media, and several documents with scripted responses to possible questions from the public.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-ring-wants-police-to-keep-t...

[2] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjwea4/revealed-the-secre...

Amazon can protect you too. They don't care who they are protecting as long as they get paid, see:

https://nypost.com/2020/09/24/amazons-new-dashcam-gadget-all...

There is a big advantage of cloud based cameras and that is that the data is off premises and can't be just taken away on an SD card. Of course you could send video to your own server but that is beyond the capabilities of most users.

I use 'rclone' and 'motion' to push video and images to my google drive account. If I wanted to, I could easily encrypt it first. I think it's superior to most cloud video providers. I don't think most LE agencies would think to check something like Google Drive for active video feeds.

I also delete anything over 3 days(thanks rclone) and use a script which detects the presence of either my wife's or my phone on our LAN so the cameras auto-start when we're not home.

That's cool but accessible to about 0.1% of the population.

It’s not any harder than using an ftp account with curlftpfs as a Dropbox replacement!

So a standard HN solution then