And this. Which is EXACTLY what Ring figured out and so they took all those doorbell cameras, gave local law enforcement access, and now even on residential streets there are hundreds of cameras they have easy access too.

Ring is evil and all, but since we have a problem with them one of us genius hackers should make a product that has the functionality and critically the same UX but... doesn't use the 'cloud'.

The sharing with LEO will always then be optionally and at your option, which still provides a similar net security benefit.

Purely localized home storage and IOT stuff which offers similar features like remote access and whatnot, is clearly a really, really difficult problem to solve. Just like smartphone being essentially your entire one ISP coordinated popping from having your whole life in any security agencies hands.

Maybe we need an organization like OpenAI to solve this problem. Like OpenHome or something. A place we can centralize our developer resources to providing a solution to this obvious proto-police state that is being developed out of pure utility, aka usefulness.

Right now my friends moms washing machine and coffee maker are all wifi connected to be controlled and notified when done remotely from here phone. It's entering out lives fast and we need a solution and startups offering similarlly good products - or a private solution which can be sold to the manufacturers like Whirlpool.

A while ago I had this fantasy of a marketplace for video surveillance data where people could upload geotagged (+ time, etc) recordings and get a cut of the fee when someone pays to download it for insurance claims, etc. -- probably not any less evil but more egalitarian in any case

This reminds me of the Library of Congress in Snow Crash. Lots of speculative surveillance and hacked intelligence gets uploaded to The Library where it sits waiting for someone to search for it whereby the uploader earns commission.

Doesn't Ubiquity have this functionality? I think part of the problem though is setting up the servers, which can be a bit pricey. Not many people have NASs, despite them becoming much cheaper and easier to set up. It is hard to compete with the simplicity of cloud platforms. A full home operation still requires you to have the drives stored somewhere.

I think the better solution is that someone offers a relatively cheap service that has a cloud option that fully encrypts the data and uses e2ee for communication to the server. Though it is hard to prove that you don't own the keys (I mean how many still distrust Signal?).