> Also, based on the size of the videos that thing must make, I don't see any feasible way they could or would exfiltrate the video content you're shooting.

They don't need the whole clip. They can easily grab a single frame, encoded and compressed to minimize the filesize. The camera also has a wifi radio in it which does who knows what behind the scenes. Since the firmware is very much not open source, I have no way to tell what it's doing. It could be constantly trying to phone home over open wireless networks (or partner hotspots). Hell for all I know the thing could have a 3g radio in it, constantly talking to home.

> They don't need the whole clip. They can easily grab a single frame, encoded and compressed to minimize the filesize.

Yeah, that would be valid telemetry, though telemetry should be opt-out, it's fairly innocuous.

> It could be constantly trying to phone home over open wireless networks (or partner hotspots). Hell for all I know the thing could have a 3g radio in it, constantly talking to home.

It's pretty silly to imagine a product that is primarily used by hollywood studios doing this. I have interfaced directly with folks working on-set for major productions supporting the systems that actually capture and share the content for collaboration purposes.

Let me tell you, even for a company whose ENTIRE business is doing this, it's fucking HARD. It still involves producers taking bags of memory cards into their hotel room at the end of the day and uploading them on a laptop, in almost all cases.

The only connected set I'm aware of ever existing is Mindhunter[0], and it involved our engineers being on set and operating our entire cloud stack within roadie cases.

Simply put, the things that people are afraid RED would do are so complicated as to be nearly technically infeasible when major studios are willing to pay for them.

[0] https://thefincheranalyst.com/2019/07/10/pix-onset-makes-con...

Plus, RED's goal is to move product. Sell Cameras. Become the de Facto standard camera for aspiring, indie, and professional movie and TV studios around the world.

Stealing a single picture out of a 60fps camera for no particular purpose won't put money in their back pocket. Building a 3g modem into a camera and paying cellular data fees to occasionally snoop into their users' memory cards won't earn them a penny.

The only people whom I could understand being rightfully paranoid about this are either making embarrassing fetish pornography or videotaping illegal acts for money.

It's the user data selling I would be concerned about. They are obviously getting another revenue stream from people that can afford 30k cameras. Which is a godamn goldmine for data sets.

Maybe it's that this thread is about specialist hardware that the commenters are unusually naive about how companies can use telemetry? I've seen it repeatedly argued as with GP that stealing footage is impractical therefore the consumer has no valid concerns, here.

Why ruin a perfectly good argument in two paragraphs by poisoning the well in the third?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well

I agree. They are unlikely to be intentionally exfiltrating entire videos. However, should the software crash, it's reasonable to assume a crash dumb of some kind could be sent. The crash dumb could include portions of memory, which would naturally include data from in progress frames or raw sensor data.