I agree, but it’s not so evident or easy for the average person. Who wants to deal with managing storage? Cloud will typically win for the masses, who are typically not thinking about privacy and may not know the difference between a SSD and HDD

I've long wondered why something like a general computing device maintenance service hasn't become a thing. I guess cloud storage stepped in and removed the need.

When my AC unit broke I didn't need to know the finer decisions surrounding which unit to choose.

I have weekly visits from the pool guy for a pool and gardener for the landscaping. A yearly termite check and AC/furnace maintenance. And so on.

Your pool, landscaping, and traditional appliances are all fairly mature and stable in a way that lets local workers learn basic, repurposeable maintenance skills that last a long time and cover a large number of clients.

We won’t have that for home compute appliances until hardware/interface innovation slows down, and that’d actually been trending in the other direction for a while now. It will stabilize, even while innovation happens at other layers, but core stability plays a huge role in what you have in mind here.

Cloud stuff basically hid that that stuff on the other side of a pipe for a while, but has its own drawbacks and we’re likely seeing the start of a turn away from it.

Linux has been pretty stable for decades now. I’ve been using the same core configs and bulk data in my home compute environment basically since I started using Linux. Remote repos for any syncing needs, then just tar/rsync bulk archive data over. Store longer term or stale data on older decommissioned HDDs.

I’ve been running more or less the same services through hardware, hypervisor, and now kubernetes migrations and revisions. It seems to me doing things “the Linux way”, sticking to open source where possible, is resistant to the fast pace of the consumer innovation market. When anything new comes along, it’s usually relatively trivial to transfer over.

I know that this is a typical HN post, assuming everyone should become a Linux sysadmin. But related to the parent, and recent developments in Zero Trust Access products, I wonder if there is a pathway towards neighborhood-scale sysadmin services.

I mean, I essentially provide that to my small social community with a private media tenant.

With ZTA systems in place to accommodate remote access, maybe there is an appetite for neighbor-to-neighbor network sysadmin services? Hard to compete with the sleek silos of big box brands and their infinite marketing budget, plus 5 9s of service, though.

If only there were some sort of regional authority, a local group of people to whom we all gave money to, that could hire someone to administer such a system. This group could take on the responsibility of running, not just this neighborhood network system, but also, I dunno, the fire department and the police department and maybe also the schools?

I know it's an "out there" crazy silicon valley leftist idea but maybe something like that could work?

Okay no but for reals, the USPS could do that!

USPS might be mired in fed scale problems. Maybe a Library is more appropriate? At least, more directly accessible at the local level. I’m just not sure how exactly that would work, or operate thru existing library organization…

I think the incentive of a trade/artisan economy would make more sense, and justify individualized labor (house calls for NAS reconfiguration, for instance). Like a plumbing contractor vs inspector… I like the socialized idea, but I don’t see how the implementation would work under current social service labor system and organization…

The posted article is about the problem presented by police overreach into data that the average person has a mistaken expectation of privacy for. I may be misunderstanding what you're proposing, but it seems to me like having the same organization run things for both the neighborhood and police would actually facilitate police access to this kind of data moreso than provide any benefits in privacy.

Which is exactly why I proposed the USPS as a solution! They are an independent agency of the executive branch, and are the perfect fit for such a service.

Odd that you pick USPS of all possible examples: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/23/usps-covert...

It's not clear to me from that article, what the supposed crime the USPIS committed here. Maybe I'm butchering the reading, but it sounds like they looked for, and read public Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc posts by extremists, looking for threats made against the USPS; their buildings and their workers, the hard working mailmen and women who deliver the mail, and also the mail itself. which like, good? That's literally their job! I know ACAB and all but like, be real. If you're making a plan, in public, to commit violent crimes against mail carriers, then shouldn't the cops investigate? Instead of waiting for someone to shoot up a post office and then realizing they left a cry for help and warning signs after they've already committed their henious act?

Am I just totally misunderstanding the situation here?

....would you give your video footage to the neighbour?

....would you want to as sysadmin now manage them any time police comes and wants some footage ?

I think that can definitely work for stuff like internet access, but anything where "private files" and copyrighted content comes to play will be messy

> Linux has been pretty stable for decades now

Really? I installed Ubuntu after a 5 year holiday from it - Now you have some kind of Snaps, and flatpak. There is whatever is happening in wayland. To install handbrake, you need to install flatpack.

There used to be 4 different drivers for intel GPU, now there are 7, and I still can't get Quicksync to work in Handbrake. There seems to be some kind of plugin you can download from their website, but that doesn't install.

After tinkering, I realised that Quicksync works in ffmpeg and in Jellyfin, but not in Handbrake

Mind you, I have a home server that runs 20 docker contsiner for things like home assistant. I deploy applications to kubernetes in my say job.

But this shit is still frustrating

Who do I call to fix this for less than $500 an hour?

Just install Debian honestly.

Ubuntu is slowly turning into clown fiesta.

If you're looking to get away from the massive crowd and the effects of it (new devs aimlessly reinventing wheels) you have to move to something like BSD, and then learn to deal with not having the tools made by said new aimless devs.

I'm not sure that's necessarily true. For example when need maintenance on my heater, I have to call someone certified in support for my brand. Same with my washer, dishwasher, refrigerator, and stove.

If GE made a home security product for example, it would make sense for vendors to get certified on GE home security support. Even if the underlying tech changed a lot, if they had access to support docs and a support portal it could work.

That’s true and that’s probably what first entrants will do (are doing), but it takes a big capital expenditure and a lot of time to set up a program like that and recruit local shops to participate in, and your market opportunity is constrained by that growth.

It’s easier to certify techs at an existing HVAC repair on your specific heater than it is to convince somebody to set up shop just for your new and peculiar product. Maturity of industry matters.

I mean, there are companies doing that. Just not at the price homeowner will want.

Even then, there are contractors who will not work on systems installed by contractors not adhering to certain standards of workmanship.

Innovation doesn't seem that fast to me. I've been in tech since the mid-90's and all I see is iteration when it comes to storage technology.

What is faster and faster is anti-consumer activities and the general acceptance of it.

I think services like Geek Squad fill this need

I used to work for geek squad. They actually subcontract any work that can't specifically be done in store. I'd hardly call their service "general purpose computing maintenance" as it only extends to things they've done the install for and that's limited to items sold at the store. However they will provide maintenance, via those subcontractors, to items that fit that scope, such as replacing the bulbs for home theater projectors when they burn out.

It's not "general purpose computing" maintenance, but the service you're talking about does exist, though AFAIK mostly at the very high-end. It's typically for things like home theaters, whole-home audio systems, or smart-home type setups (predating and now merging with current consumer IoT/home automation platforms). Not sure how much that's "maintenance" in the typical sense so much as support for their custom install work, but I bet if you had a Sonos or Lutron system where your installer went out of business you'd be able to find a different guy to deal with it.

Fully managed security camera solution with LTE. They'll repair or service it if there's vandalism or any issues. https://www.flocksafety.com/

You can't offer a similar service at a substantially reduced priced by centralizing maintenance of your pool. Same for termites. Those have to happen on site.

For software, there are strong incentives on both sides of the transaction (buyer and seller) for a system to be remotely managed.

It's called the cloud. You're arguing against it.

I agree many are not willing, but I disagree that it is not "easy for the average person".

One can walk into a local supermarket on any planet(e.g., Walkmart, Sam's Club, Carrefour, Aldi, Tesco, Auchan) and likely be able to pick up a self-managed NVR with cameras.

If it was not relatively easy, I do not believe these companies would carry them.

You are right, many are not willing.

If you buy a Synology NAS there's really not much to manage. Other than inserting the drives and waiting for it to initialize, it's not considerably harder than setting up an account somewhere. It also has apps for security cameras.

Most security video recorders will just let you set automatic limits to the storage or age of recordings it's not that hard to just dedicate a small part of an attached or internal HDD to recordings and forget about it.

How much storage do you need?

Unless it's proof to the negative, which in most jurisdictions isn't something you'd ever need to prove, as the burden is on something occurring, after some amount of time most recordings are useless?

How much storage do you need? is a classic question as old as time.

the classic response is "how much you got?"

I store 48 hours worth unless I'm going to be gone for a long period of time, then I store everything for the duration that I'm gone.

My thinking is that if something happens that I need the footage for, I'll know that I need it within 48 hours.

A 32Gb flash card is able to store about a month's worth of video in my system.

Is there a home solution as easy as Nest or Ring and which offers the same feature set?

UniFi Protect[0] is a decent on-prem solution and has all the main features of Nest/Ring. Certainly expensive though, minimal system for a doorbell cam is $199 for the camera[1] + $199 for the smallest NVR[2].

[0]: https://ui.com/camera-security [1]: https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-protect-cameras/produ... [2]: https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-protect/products/unif...

I use UniFi devices throughout my home but the cameras (G3 specifically) are buggy and frequently disconnect, and don't auto reconnect. Basically useless.

Over the year end holidays I was traveling and set one up to monitor my front yard. There was actually an incident while I was gone and I remoted in to find the camera offline, totally missed it when it should have had perfect perspective. The police asked me for video and in this case I would have shared it, but alas could not. Sucks as I have the CloudKey box for video storage, but its very undependable in my experience.

This has not been my experience with mostly G4 pro hardwired PoE cameras. I have their G4 doorbell and did have similar problems until I upgraded its transformer and pointed an access point directly at it. Been smooth sailing ever since.

This has been my experience. In a year of use I've had 0 problems with PoE cameras and maybe 2-3 disconnects on the doorbell over wifi.

Appreciate the feedback, glad to hear that I am an anomaly. The camera is on WiFi and I have a mesh network with multiple UniFi APs. Both get good signal where the camera is located. Even in the same room as the AP my max uptime is about 1 day before it disconnects.

I ended up making a dedicated 2.4GHz-only SSID for my wifi cameras, which seems to have helped. I think forcing them to 2.4GHz, at least for my house RF situation, was the thing that helped the most.

Would you not recommend UniFi then? Will you be migrating to another system?

I have a smallish Protect system (UNVR, four G4 Pros, one doorbell, two G3 Instants).

The positives are that it pretty much just works. The mobile app is excellent, the web app on the UNVR is fine, and it has full spousal approval factor.

I have had very few issues with the system, primarily just the doorbell was unreliable until I upgraded the transformer and put an access point right next to it. I had an issue with the NVR right before it went out of warranty and I fixed it by replacing the internal USB drive with an SSD.

The negatives are that it's more costly than other options, Ubiquiti has had perennial stock problems over the last few years, and you're locked into their ecosystem. The NVR won't work with generic cameras and you can't run the software on your own hardware.

It's also possible that, if you have their remote access proxy set up (required for mobile app), you could be subject to the same warrant issues as with Ring.

The Access Points, PoE switch, and firewall work fine. My only dissatisfaction has been the G3 camera. As others have stated its a big investment so not moving off the ecosystem today. However when its time to upgrade everything I will certainly shop around.

That is not my experience with them at all. I have about 10 G3 cameras. They have never been any problem at all. Nothing.

My cloud key however, have killed a couple of drives over the years though.

What concerns me isn't so much that the camera was down but that you didn't know it was down. Does it not alert you of that?

No. At least not by default. I don't believe in pervasive surveillance however so I only really use it when away from home for extended periods.

Hmm, there's no good reason the system shouldn't alert you of that by default. It's like if my Heroku jobs crashed and nothing told me.

Aren't most of those PoE (the doorbell being the exception - appears powered by regular doorbell power supply)? So, you have to run cables to each camera. Not an easy undertaking for most.

> as easy

This is a very subjective area. As I noted you can get all kinds of NVRs with notification and cameras, others have mentioned Ubiquiti, Roku is also getting into the home automation field, and of course there are open source solutions like Home Assistant.

as easy as plug and play? not really. blueiris(windows) & securityspy(macOS) offer similar features, but it takes a bit of setup to add the cams via RTSP/ONVIF, configure storage and retention, configure monitoring schedules/alerts etc..

"Is there a home solution as easy as Nest or Ring and which offers the same feature set?"

I highly doubt it, for the fact that many of the features are incompatible with the goal of privacy and convenience.

There are plenty of on-site options that offer the bulk of the benefits, like self contained NVR systems. Once you want things like texts, web access, etc then it gets tricky. Those typically aren't offered in a secure and easy way.

Frigate takes 5 minutes to setup and try. There's really no excuse these days but these companies will keep walling-up their gardens.

I use frigate and like it. But it did take me a few hours to figure out all the right config file settings for my 3 cameras and then figure out how to configure storage settings and the like. And that's not counting the fact that I already have experience with docker and Linux systems and already had a running server with docker containers launched from a docker compose file. In other words, frigate is not for the 99%.

Apple HomeKit’s secure video is end to end encrypted and very easy to set up. You need compatible devices though.

The allure of convenience makes a lot of people blind to what's going on outside their small bubble of awareness. I see it a lot in the boomers around me.

That's hardly something boomers are more prone to than anybody else.

I disagree. How your life proceeds for the first 5-10 years of your life has a strong influence on your general outlook on life. Obviously it is not a 1:1 correlation, but it is by now a widely accepted trusim that children born into famine come out with much different perspectives on life than those born into surplus.

The strong economic growth during the postwar period created a culture with a truly utopian outlook on how technology is applied to improving lives. There was not the recognition there is today that it is possible (indeed, common) to consume resources at an unsustainable, destructive, rate, nor to comprehend the magnitudes and qualities of the effects that our consumption and pollution could have on the quality of life of future generations.

Peopple born in the last 40 years have weathered the effects of Reaganomics on the economies of the world. People born in the past 10-20 years have felt the ramifications of a massive recession during the early years of their lives. All the above-mentioned people are by now old enough to know who is to blame for those massive failures. This has apparently engendered a more cynical, or at least skeptical, perspective on how the future might proceed based on our current trajectory, compared to the more techno-utopian visions of the mainstream boomer mindset.

And yet, people younger than the boomer set trade convenience for privacy and such all the time. Just look at social media use alone.

From what I can see, all generations are equally likely to trade some amount of personal freedom for convenience. The exact things they're willing to trade may or may not be different, but the principle seems a constant.

No one here said younger generations are capable of similar. What is being said here is the over-arching early-life experience of those born in the Baby Boomer generation differs from that of later generations on the basis of economics and the resulting socioeconomic hopes and fears of the milieu, and that this difference colors the ways people of different generations interpret themselves and the systems they inhabit.

Citing exceptions has little to do with the conversation at hand, for the obvious reason that different people grow up in different socioeconomic situations even within the same generation. Nonetheless, a clear pattern emerges in attitudes towards this or that "personal freedom" on the basis of what a person can imagine can be done with those freedoms. These are obviously culturally-based attitudes, and obviously cultures differ between generations.

What about this are you finding so controversial?

I'm not necessarily finding what you're saying controversial on its face. I think my mistake is in trying to relate it to what I was saying in the first place. I think we're having two entirely different conversations here.

I agree, but still, I don't think it was appropriate for the judge to approve this warrant. Just because person X is suspected of a crime doesn't justify a search/seizure from person Y who just happens to be nearby at the time. Imagine a police officer legally searching your car just because the car next to you was suspected of a crime. It's just not reasonable. I hope the EFF or someone can help push back on this.

Are these examples even comparable? A camera can provide direct evidence.

I think they're comparable. Both are the police searching the private property of an innocent bystander.

Analogy - if it was 1950, a robber fled on foot through a residential neighborhood, and he no longer had the wad of stolen money when the police finally got grabbed him - would it be reasonable for the police to search in the shrubbery, groundhog holes, loose dirt, sandboxes, etc. of the private property in that residential neighborhood for the stolen money?

Does your answer change if, instead of stolen money, the police are looking for the robber's weapon, or the victim's empty wallet, or some other "we have good reason to suspect that he ditched it somewhere around here" evidence?

> would it be reasonable for the police to search

Yes. And my answer would not change for the other case. It's also reasonable for the property owner to demand that the police get a warrant first.

I'm not arguing about whether or not these powers are OK. I'm just arguing that, in my view, both of the situations the OP mentioned are equivalent in that they're both searches of private property.

Have any links related to what you’re using and what to recommend?

When I went through this vueville had enough info for me to build an intuition for what to look for on Amazon.

https://www.vueville.com/home-security/cctv/ip-cameras/ultim...

No actual links, but ReoLink PoE cameras, a miniPC, PoE switch, Zoneminder, 2TB SSD, external enclosure, and backup UPS.

A more contemporary alternative to ZoneMinder would be Shinobi: https://shinobi.video/

How have you found Shinobi versus Zoneminder? I've been using ZoneMinder for years. It's a bit clunky but once it's set up it works fairly well, but I'd be open to switching to something better.

Looking at their assorted instructions I see some pre-canned methods that assume a specific OS. I can't find detailed instructions for people that already have Node, FFmpeg and MariaDB installed. Is that on a forum?

Reolink cameras are pretty affordable, can be accessed with ONVIF, and you can just put them on a VLAN/Firewall that has no internet access if you're afraid that it's phoning home.

I have a Synology NAS and their free security camera software is pretty easy to set-up and use with ONVIF cameras.

POE cameras paired with either an NVR or custom server. I prefer wired cameras and local storage.

If you want a really simple, dumb, and cheap local storage camera check out Wyze. By "simple" I don't mean "hacker news simple" but actual "normal people simple". Just be sure to disable the cloud upload option after installing an SD card: https://www.wyze.com/products/wyze-cam

The cameras are nothing special, but great for the price point. They support locally writing all video or just motion to an installed SD card. By default they'll upload 10 seconds of motion to the cloud but you can disable that. Or to be really sure, after setting up the SD card you can deprive it of internet access (block it or remove the wifi SSID you used for setup), and then you can be very confident it's not uploading anything. With this approach you'll need to physically take out the SD card to access the video.

There's certainly better local storage options out there. But for a single camera it's a pretty dead simple local storage setup.

"you can deprive it of internet access".

Very good advice when it comes to Wyze products. Sadly they're just the tip of the security/privacy nightmare iceberg.

I am using Frigate. Simple, open source project. It streams the cameras and can do object and motion detection and only record for specific events (like motion). It allows me to set how long to keep the recordings. For any additional functionality, I have it integrated with my home assistant.

I host my own on-site and have had my security footage requested by police 4 different times. It's never a subpoena or demanding. Just some detectives will stop by and say they want to know which direction a vehicle went. They come inside, give me a USB stick and we copy it over.

I'm sure I could tell them to kick rocks, and they would have to write up a subpoena but there's no reason to do that.

>I'm sure I could tell them to kick rocks, and they would have to write up a subpoena but there's no reason to do that

Would they have the right to subpoena you though? Over mere suspicion that they think a vehicle at some point drove a certain direction?

Sure if it was a case involving me personally I'd probably be cooperative, but I don't fancy the idea of just letting LEOs just waltz into my property to "just to take a look"

Legally, I'm not sure. I could say they aren't working, or they're fake etc.

My neighbor has fake cameras and he gets asked too but they just leave it at that and never press it.

Yeah I have zero issue doing this, it costs me nothing, and if it helps keep others accountable for their actions even better.

I’m not saying don’t help the police but I think it’s worth acknowledging that point of view when applied en made is how we end up with policies attempting to back door encryption etc.

I think making sure some decision basis should be applied (there was a break in, commotion, and a car speed chase which ended here is much different to ‘we just wanna see if this car drove past’)

That I do have a problem with. I want police physically asking me for my digital media, and I will gladly oblige most of the time.

You plug unknown USBs into your devices on your network?

I use Blue Iris. Cheap and easy.

I use Unifi's security cameras at home, they store all data on your own disks on-site.

Owning footage is only half the story, privacy is also a big issue for me, I don't want images of my home being sent to corporations even if I own all rights to it.

The only downside I can think of is that a really advanced thief might know to pull the hard drives and walk with them, but I suspect most residential thieves aren't that smart or wouldn't know what disk to pull from my rack.

The other downside for less techy people is that without the cloud it's not that simple to view your home from a remote location. I just VPN into my home network and view it, but it took some effort to set that up, especially with dynamic DNS and all.

Have you tried TailScale for the remote access part?

> I do. DIY on-site only system.

Agreed, that's the only way to build a secure system. I have some outdoor cameras but they are on a physically separate network and can't talk to anything.

Also, they are on ethernet but because they also support wifi I physically cut the antenna connections because I'm not about to trust the manufacturer of the camera to not try to exfiltrate something.

But sadly this is, while not difficult, too much for the non-techie person to do. So people just buy Ring cameras with all the associated privacy problems.

The worst is that while my system is secure, many of the surrounding neighbors have ring cameras outside so I can't protect from those!

> physically cut the antenna connections because I'm not about to trust the manufacturer of the camera to not try to exfiltrate something

This is not normal - there is no other industry where the customer routinely expects to be defrauded, and everyone to get away with it.

I'm not sure if you're talking about the security products industry but I think of the "conncted" industry is this way. It makes me fairly uncomfortable knowing that every move I'm making, either online or offline, is being uploaded to some server. I stopped installing apps, I stopped signing up to things, I set up automations to turn wifi and bluetooth off as I leave the house.

Well, there's crypto.

Is a pyramid scheme really an industry though?

Did someome say Housing?

You can't live in a bitcoin. Unlike housing, or land, which clearly have some value, the inherent value of crypto is $0. All prices are purely speculative.

It's the new normal, it seems. Same thing holds with the software industry.

Uh - used cars?

>This is not normal - there is no other industry where the customer routinely expects to be defrauded, and everyone to get away with it.

Every try to buy event tickets?

Every industry where I'm given a device with potential network connectivity, I expect the manufacturer to use it for their own purposes.

You could use 50 ohm terminator if you don't want to permanently destroy it.

Kinda shame we don't have more cameras running OSS software

In this case even that might not have solved the issue because the cops got a warrant for EVERY camera on the person's account including those inside the house that couldn't reasonably show evidence of the thing they were investigating.

> EVERY camera on the person's account including those inside the house that couldn't reasonably show evidence of the thing they were investigating.

Armchairing it here - these broad warrants are probably carry over from the days where you'd issue a single warrant for "the tapes" since every camera in the system recorded onto a single shared medium.

Like GP, I have a personal offline system with remote backups that I control. The footage all goes onto a single shared HDD for all the cameras like the old "tape" days. A warrant would likely ask for that HDD - not the footage from a specific camera.

That doesn't really change that even though you're completely uninvolved in the investigation as a target suddenly you've got cops examining the recordings of the interior of your house. Exterior recordings are at least often of nominally publicly viewable areas barring things like fences. Either way though I'm not that inclined to give the cops a pass for being lazy about the warrant writing just because it's the old way, warrants should be minimally invasive, particularly so for people NOT INVOLVED in the crime under investigation.

The main advantage to having this data yourself rather than being held by a third party is that you have a chance to push back if you have it yourself.

If you get a subpoena that you believe is overly broad, you can take the matter before a judge and argue your case. As I understand it, this can be quite effective in narrowing the scope. It's not perfect, of course, but it's better than having no say whatsoever.

Subpoena you have time to fight but if they get a warrant you can only challenge it post execution. Would you only get subpoenas if you retained the data?

The differences between a subpoena and a warrant are interesting and has some nuance: https://legalbeagle.com/8676593-subpoena-vs-warrant.html

But, in general, if you're getting a subpoena it's because you are a bystander in an investigation, and if you're getting a warrant, it's because you are a target of an investigation. So a subpoena offers a bit more protection for you and is easier to push back against.

You can only fight a warrant after it's been executed (at least, mostly), but fighting it after the fact isn't nothing. If you win, the property seized must be returned, data collected must be deleted, and none of it can be used in court.

In theory you should be getting a subpoena for your local storage. Also I'm not sure just deleting the data is really a remedy here since a) there's a good chance people already viewed the recordings and that can't be simply undone so the privacy violation still exists and b) were there to be evidence of some other crime on your interior tapes we know police et al have ways like parallel construction to hide constitutionally questionable searches from making it to court.

A is really my core objection here, the privacy violation of gathering all the camera's data is essentially unresolvable, someone will have at least looked at the footage and at best determined the camera is an interior camera and stopped reviewing it. Personally all my cameras are outward facing (though one is a ptz that could look into the office) and I have only local storage of the video. My other option would be to make an automation that deafens and turns any PTZ camera to the wall unless my alarm system is set to away.

Yes, I understand and am very sympathetic to what you're saying here. There is a real privacy violation involved.

But I don't think it's a real moral conundrum. As I said elsewhere, I think that if we as a society want to have police that can effectively investigate crime, they also need to have some invasive powers. And I think we do want to have such police, because the alternative is much worse.

The reality is that there is no such thing as an absolute right in pretty much anything, because it's rather common that exercising one right can infringe on a different right. So it's all necessarily about balance and compromise.

It could solve it in the sense that you have much more power I denying access to the data while to fight to get the scope of the warrant reduced.

Do you have outdoor cameras? What did you do for weatherproofing?

> stop using third party vendors for data storage

No. I need a system that detects motion during scheduled times (ideally only humans) and buzzes my phone instantly, giving me a live view and saving a recording around that time. And most of all, it has to be reliable enough that I don't question whether it's working. Anyone who says this is easy is underestimating it.

Something on-prem could do all that, but nobody sells it, and most DIY systems don't have those features (does yours?). So here I am with the Ring.

Ubiquiti does that. I have motion detection alerts disabled but human motion detection enabled depending on the camera. You can also set regions in the view that it ignores for motion detection.

Tech-savvy people say great things about Ubiquiti wifi, but my experience was that it's way more annoying to deal with than the AirPorts I was replacing. So I have doubts about relying on their security solution to "just work," but I've yet to try it.

The real test is at my parents' house, where I don't live but I manage some of their stuff remotely / occasionally in person. I can't sit there and babysit whatever gets installed, nor do I want to do that in my own home. They don't understand computers but were fine managing the Ring once I set it up. Ubiquiti wifi there was a headache.

I did a basic UniFi setup at my house back in the fall and it’s been pretty simple and fully reliable. It’s pretty much the apple of home networking and security.

The Apple of home networking was Apple until they discontinued AirPort. It was much easier.

It's my understanding that now ubiquiti used to be a good company/solution, but they ruined that recently by introducing a lot of "phoning home"-like "features" for their routers. Given that the tech group is almost always more privacy/security oriented than typical, and that's Ubiquiti's target audience, it was a very poor choice on their part and probably removed a significant portion of their customers.

Perhaps the solution that the tech-oriented crowd will move to now is just making things from scratch, I haven't seen the clear consensus on it yet.

You can opt out of remote/Ubiquiti managed login. This is just FUD. Ubiquiti is still excellent.

But it's an aggressive default. Tbh I didn't even figure out how to opt out of it, I just grumbled and made the account. It's wifi for crying out loud, should be plug n play.

My parents replaced the Ubiqitis themselves with some no-name Amazon wifi APs when they started having issues I wasn't there to fix. MAC address manufacturer lookup just said "Shenzhen." Plug n play.

Unifi Protect can do that on-prem. Remote access is optional.

You can do all that locally with Frigate, FYI

Yeah, Frigate is pretty cool, but here are the moving parts: https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/hardware/ and https://docs.frigate.video/guides/ha_notifications/ . I don't trust that to all work without maintenance.

The wide range of issues I've had in the past with HA tells me it would be a pain in the ass to manage.

Right now I currently have 2 light switch that can no longer be controlled remotely after installing a minor update to HA and it looks like the only solution is to pull them from the wall and reflash them. Camera feed on my dashboard is also having a lot of problem since last year and I have to watch it from VLC if I want a smooth playback. Who knows what stupid problem I'll get next month.

I have several cameras hooked up to an NVR that has 2TB drives for constant recording (when space runs out older recordings are deleted. I usually have a few weeks available).

I then have frigate[1] set up on a small fitlet (with a usb CORAL TPU), which gives me excellent control over detection (Humans vs dogs vs cars vs ...). Frigate grabs the streams from my NVR over rstp.

This is then hooked up to my Home Assistant where I have various rules to send alerts to my mobile devices based upon object detected, location of camera, and time of day.

Everything is internal. I have an always on wireguard on my family's mobile devices allowing them to access the cameras and home assistant alerts from anywhere.

It works great, but I have refused to set this up for my extended family (even though they have the same NVR and _really_ want my system), just because there are a lot of moving pieces that need to be maintained (not to mention having a server + vpn)

[1] https://frigate.video/

Frigate looks pretty interesting. Do you have an estimation of how much CPU it's using for your cameras?

I have about a dozen 4k cameras I'd love to migrate to a much more capable NVR, but doing so with software typically means I go from a 30W NVR to maxing out a 8 core 200W Xeon even without object detection.

Would love to kill my Duaha NVR and toss this on the Proxmox cluster instead.

The Frigate website seems to heavily recommend a Coral card to offload the bulk of the processing from the CPU.

EDIT: looks like CPU still used for video decoding regardless of Coral being available: https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/hardware/#do-hwaccel-args...

I really dig this idea. I think you just gave me my next project.

Could you share which model cameras and NVR you're using? I've been wanting to put something together like this for a while, but all of the solutions I've seen require a Windows box (usually running Blue Iris) for the NVR which I want to avoid

Someone should sell a complete solution to make it easy for non-techies to use. Sell a small computer (perhaps a Raspberry Pi) with the right software installed, the Coral accelerator, and several cameras bundled in a package. Make it clear that this is just a sale of hardware, not cloud data storage. It should be as easy as buying a Ring or a Nest, otherwise it will forever just be tech people's toys.

This is what I was thinking. Is there maybe not a big enough market for non-techies who care about privacy?

It needs to be basically the same as a Ring with just one additional requirement, plugging another box into power and your network to act as the DVR/brains, with a QR code that you scan to link it. Sure that can have more customization options, but the default has to be zero config. Probably gonna need a cloud server for notifying and serving the mobile app without having keys to the video, which would cost money monthly.

There are hundreds of different NVR solutions out there. The consumer ones are... meh. But they mostly work.

The reality is that except for companies, almost no one REALLY cares about it. It's an expense they'd usually rather not have (like backups), so it always gets the short end of the stick.

I tried that product a couple of times on Google ads, and fewer people clicked on "buy now" than my sister's joke product of "lipstick for your pit bull."

People really don't understand this enough to even know that there's a problem. I have explained to a lot of people that "the cloud" just means renting someone else's computer, and they still don't get it.

Google Ads is too aggressive for this sort of product that requires knowledge of many things. The product is niche and would need a simple youtube video series to explain it, with a descriptive title and description text.

Ideally, in the video(s) you can talk about how the viewer can setup the solution themselves, breaking it down into components, why each is important and how it all works.

Also introduce how the viewer can buy the entire solution from you directly, where’ll they’ll get some custom support/troubleshooting or they may just hire you for consulting.

This will function as your funnel to let your target customers find your solution as they search for ways to problems they have self-identified.

If you’d like you can also do retargeting ads on the viewers of your video, as they’d be more likely to buy your solution vs the avg joe.

I'm more hopeful for humanity now that I know my testing methodology was bad. Thanks for the information!

For this kind of thing, you'd want to advertise it on e.g. Tindie - that's where the likely target audience would look for it, I think.

I just wish it hasn’t been almost impossible to get a coral you for the last few years

I was okay with Arlo for several years — primarily because it didn't have a subscription. With Arlo circling the drain now, I think a cloud-less DIY option is an excellent idea.

What NVR? I’m trying to put together my own system. Also, curious - all cameras POE or do you have some that are local wifi instead?

Unifi makes onprem NVR solutions for the home with everything you said. It’s all connected to their cloud for auth but you can turn it off if you want.

Frigate -> Home Assistant -> WhatApp Messages DIY, $2 per month + electric change. The $2 cover WhatsApp group messages - as it works for all phone in family with the app sleeping. Easy to share clips.

For example - who was the person who approache dthe door with an umbrella today.

Frigate makes sure its a person, Frigate makes sure it in the correct area of camera. Cheap rtsp camera, standalone wifi network. Frigate is the bridge to 'normal' lan.

Oh they definitely do sell it. And the more money you spend the crazier it gets (cross-camera facial recognition? you can go full blown surveillance on your neighborhood).

I bought a Synology NAS and I just added cameras on my home network in the web UI.

Does motion tracking, auto recording and the app rocks. It doesn’t ping me but I also haven’t looked for that feature.

What cameras did you end up using? I'm looking for good recommendations.

Amcrest is pretty good as long as you get an ONVIF-compatible model. Their PoE cameras are better than their Wi-Fi models, but I found that their indoor Wi-Fi models are not bad. I haven't had any luck with their outdoor Wi-Fi models though.

For Wi-Fi outdoor, I've been trying Reolink. I actually have had one die and another one keeps resetting so I'm not sold.

I've heard Hikvision is good but they're more expensive and I haven't tried them yet. I also think they really care whether you buy it from an authorized retailer.

> It doesn’t ping me

Well that's a crucial requirement. Should ping by default. Even if you can turn it on, I don't trust that they really put that feature first if it's buried in the settings.

It may not be buried. I might have just turned it off. I always turn it off right away.

I consider pinging a major cause of paranoia (see NextDoor), an invasion of my community’s privacy, and honestly I live in a safe area and insurance covers everything anyway.

Synology's Security Station will 100% notify you.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/surveillance/feature/mobile

Synology + a cheap RTSP camera and it has all the features OP requires.

"Something on-prem could do all that, but nobody sells it, and most DIY systems don't have those features"

I don't have it set up that way but thought about it. Zoneminder does motion detection and can be scheduled too. I'm not sure about the human recognition part, but I think I heard there's so sort of plugin out there for that, but I could be wrong. It will also send alerts and can be visible from the web if you have a static IP or a service that provides the same functionality (forget the name).

We used https://github.com/Motion-Project/motion for crude version of that in our office closet datacenter.

It just detected movement, sent an email with video file attached and a link to stream.

No face detect AI but this is ancient software, and minimum effort to set up

Wyze sells that. My camera stores local footage on an sd card. When motion activates it, Wyze sends me a push alert that something happens, I open the app and it requests directly from my camera. Video doesn’t stay on wyze’s server. If they’re served a warrant, they have no video.

>Sure, you would still be forced to comply with warrants/subpoenas if they think you have data, but that's basically unescapable.

Isn't there the standard work around that companies do of having scheduled deletion. As long as the deletion is scheduled and not in response to a legal request, what is gone is gone and not a crime. If you receive a warrant you might have to stop further deletion, but what they want is likely already gone.

I have a ring doorbell and I detest it. But my wife wants it.

Since you have your own system, would you be willing to share links to info on a "roll your own" system?

Not OP, but I _love_ talking about this stuff, so you're stuck with me. :D

I'm a big fan of this project:

https://frigate.video/

It's open source, and you can hook it up to a Coral (or some other things, I think) to get crazy-fast classifications. But CPU is fine for only a few cameras.

Once you get something like that setup, it's just a matter of finding cameras that support RTSP. You get them setup however you like (but preferably wired, with PoE), point Frigate at the RTSP stream, and that's it. Now you've got home security footage that never leaves your house. You can set up a VPN to watch the feeds from elsewhere. Frigate supports MQTT as well, so you can hook it into Home Assistant to get notifications, and even pipe person events into something like Double Take to get face detection:

https://github.com/jakowenko/double-take

EDIT: Oh, and the most important part is to have your security cameras on a totally separate network that doesn't have access to your internal network or the internet. The best cameras are from China, and you don't want to give them any opportunities.

One of my problems is finding reputable good quality cameras that are ideally dumb and just provide an RTSP stream. Of course, I'll throw them on their own VLAN and isolate them from the internet, but I want something with good image quality and ideally doesn't require an app or Windows to setup

Another issue is finding all of these projects and choosing the right ones that'll receive long term support and making sure the pipeline (Camera -> NVR -> Frigate -> ? -> Home Assistant?) doesn't break and stays up to date.

A lot of moving parts, and last time I looked it was hard to find a good NVR with Linux support that also has a decent web app (and even better if it has a native mobile app)

This is my favorite: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07S47VXGY

Ubiquiti's UniFi is an option (of many). They include doorbell cameras nowadays. There's also solutions from Logitech, Eve and others.

You can use Ubiquiti's surveillance software that's part of the UniFi console (that you can manage locally, with no cloud account), or other third party local-only monitoring software such as Synology Surveillance Station, BlueIris, and open source solutions such as iSpy, Frigate, ZoneMinder, and many others.

-- -----

Unrelated to cameras, I've preferred Eve for IoT devices simply because they adopted Thread and Matter very quickly. Nothing of them I have is IP addressable, nor can directly reach the internet. They have nice apps for phones and tablets, but I also use open source software to aggregate everything into my own dashboards (and automation) that I host and manage locally.

My system uses Cloudedge which lets you access the cameras from your phone/computer but instead of saving my data in the cloud I use micro-usb cards. Holds about 10 days of constant recording (128 gig). After that I wipe it and record over it.

I have a pretty decent outdoor camera system, because I actually wrote some ONVIF software, and got them for testing.

I will not use an external server. The cameras are in an internal DMZ, and no ports are open. I have a Synology server, recording the video.

But the convenience (and well-written apps) for Ring and Nest cameras is hard to argue with. People don't care about this kind of thing, if they can pull up video of their dog taking a dump in the living room, while they are sitting at a bar with you.

It's the convenience of a farm feeding trough versus having to search for food in the forest.

Stealing that!

> I do. DIY on-site only system

The police can still subpoena that footage and if they do, you can’t legally destroy it.

If you’ve got the money, you can fight the subpoena and you can be sure that they can’t bypass you and get the footage while your fighting it, but you better preserve it and don’t let it age out if your NVR in case you lose the fight.

This is how laws have worked for centuries at this point in the US. At least with this method you have the option of fighting it and the data isn't secretly used behind your back. Also you can force them to clearly define what data they need, like front porch, rather than as much as they can get.

Yes, as I said if you have the money (a big if and whether you win or lose, you can’t recover that money ) you can fight it, but can you really say you “own” your data if you can be forced to give it up?

Of course. Just like I own my car but if I violate certain laws it may be confiscated.

If "can't be forced to give it up by normal legal processes" is your standard for what it means to own something, there is very little in the world that you do actually own. So little, in fact that the concept doesn't mean much at all.

But you can have your video footage taken without you having violated any laws or even have any relation at all to the reason they want the footage, the cops can say "We think there's something we want to see on your camera feed, now give it to us", and as long as they have reasonable suspicion that there's footage related to an investigation, they'll get it.

If you're assuming the cops and the judges are so corrupt that the safeguard of the subpoena process is worthless, then you also have to think of everything you own being subject to seizure. Not just data.

I think you are talking past each other. If a crime (not committed by you) happens near your security camera, then your footage can be subpoenaed. This is not corruption or a violation of the subpoena safeguard process. I agree that it's a bit over-the-top to say "you don't own the footage." just because of this, but that appears to be the point that is being made.

Yes, I understand.

I think the issue, really, is a philosophical disagreement. I think that if the police are to be able to investigate crime, they need to have some invasive powers. But they also shouldn't be trusted to use them without controls. The subpoena (and warrant) process is the control we have in the US. I don't think the existence of this ability is, itself, a serious violation of rights.

Other people may legitimately disagree.

There is also a serious discussion that could be had about whether the controls are sufficient, but that's a procedural issue rather than a philosophical one.

> This is not corruption or a violation of the subpoena safeguard process

Not if it ends there and cops make the right decisions. However it's a legitimate concern that an overly broad police investigation, even after a real crime happens, might lead bad/lazy/dishonest cops to wrongfully acuse someone unrelated.

> But you can have your video footage taken without you having violated any laws

This is true of your car too, look up civil forfeiture in the US. The bar for seizing property is much lower than for criminal conviction.

A low bar doesn't mean "no bar" - they literally need zero reason to think you had and relation to a crime to take your video footage, but for civil forfeiture, they have to have suspicion that the property seized was related to wrongdoing.

Subpoenaing footage also has more than "no bar" as they still have to convince a judge to approve it

But my point is that you don't have to be under any suspicion yourself, if the police think your camera recorded something related to an investigation, they can take the footage.

If some person you dislike got robbed in front of your house, you could be compelled to help them by supplying your video footage even if you don't want to. If you really owned your camera footage, you could say "Naa, I don't wanna help that guy, I'm not going to let you have it".

And still that doesn’t mean we don’t own our data. We own it.

That’s why the police asked us for the data. Because we own it.

But they don't ask, they tell you that you have to hand it over. You can appeal to the courts (which is an expensive option), but the judge may say the same thing and you have no (practical) choice . That's why I say that you don't own it -- if you owned it and the police ask for it, you could say "no".

What then, do I ask, do you own? Because it sounds like your answer is “nothing”, which is not a useful definition of “own”.

Can you hand it over if you don’t own it?

You can own your car but if you get in debt they can come and take it too. That's what living in country with other people is.

“If some person you dislike got robbed in front of your house, you could be compelled to help them by supplying your video footage even if you don't want to.”

You say that like it’s a bad thing…

No, I'm saying that if I really owned the video, I could decide whether or not the police can use it. I'm not arguing whether or not the police should be able to have access to private video, but that you don't really own the video if you can't tell them "no" when they subpoena it.

Then you don’t actually own anything because I can think of a scenario where the government can take it.

including your freedom and your very life.

If the government does not have power to compel then property rights are moot anyway as the biggest warlord will just take your shit.

Seems a sophmoric definition of ‘own’.

Furthermore in this circumstance you aren’t even deprived of your video. They simply want a copy.

There is basically nothing physical in your life, excluding your body, that can't be subpoenaed.

This is not a reasonable definition of ownership.

> If some person you dislike got robbed in front of your house, you could be compelled to help them by supplying your video footage

Let me get this straight. You're so concerned about your property rights being absolutely privileged in such a way that when social institutions gathering evidence for the crime of robbery -- a crime where relevant law is meant to deter/address the violation of property rights -- come knocking at your door, you want to assume the privilege of telling them "nah, I don't like that guy, screw him and screw his property rights and nothing I own will be involved in the enforcement of laws regarding those property rights"?

I think what this highlights is that, even where rights are important, they are rarely unqualified privileges. In the reality of any sufficiently complex system, corner cases or even conflict between worthwhile values exist. A legal system that cannot obligate people to produce relevant evidence for a case will likely be without power to make judgments based on evidence or enforce its laws, including those meant to protect property rights, which are the reason you can be said to "own" things at all.

In order to have a functioning legal system, there needs to be power to compel people to do things. Not every arbitrary thing -- good legal systems have limits too -- but you'll never be able to have rule of law without some power to compel.

You could get the same effect by… not saving any recordings you know?

It’s essentially creating an attractive nuisance if you do and then want to refuse to hand them out.

You can be compelled to turn up in court and testify about a crime you saw, even if it was nothing to do with you. How's that different?

… I’m confused why this would be objectionable.

If you were the victim of a crime, and some useful evidence that could lead to the identification and punishment of the perpetrator existed on someone else’s camera system, wouldn’t you want the police to be able to get hold of it?

I'm not arguing for or against the police being able to subpoena video, I'm just questioning the real ownership value of storing the video on your own hardware vs cloud storage. It doesn't keep the police from subpoenaing and obtaining the video. It makes it a little easier to fight the subpoena since you can hold onto the video while it works its way through the courts, but that's an expensive process that I think few would undertake so it's more of a theoretical advantage rather than a practical one.

It doesn't keep the police from using it, it does keep some cloud company (and a possibly limitless network of 3rd parties, regardless of what is publicly known) from using it.

> I'm just questioning the real ownership value of storing the video on your own hardware vs cloud storage.

3rd party have no motivation to only give the say front porch camera video vs "here are all of their videos from every camera everywhere".

> that's an expensive process that I think few would undertake so it's more of a theoretical advantage rather than a practical one.

You don't actually need to hire a lawyer to fight a subpoena. It would be smart, but not necessary. And how expensive that fight is depends entirely on how far you want to take it.

If you're broke, you can still appear before the judge and argue your case. It only really gets expensive if the judge rules against you and you want to fight it in a higher court.

> if I violate certain laws

Trouble is that police, prosecutors, and even judges and juries can famously get that wrong. So I find this caveat not to be especially reassuring.

Welcome to society?

We can get the society we ask for, though. IMO this is one reason why we should favor policy that doesn't have overly aggressive law enforcement or prosecution.

In my experience, we don't get the society we ask for (though asking is the first step). We get the society we make happen, and that has pros and cons.

The current setup is this way because of a very complex set of intertwining factors which are shifting constantly. So 'shoulds' are plentiful and never ending.

'Is', however, is right in front of us.

"We" is an awful lot of us with many different opinions. I accept for instance that my views on criminal justice are not a majority in the United States, especially with the "tough on crime" bullshit from the last election cycle, which they are still pumping. So, I try to make awareness for what I consider to be the good parts of my views, and that's the best I can do. I also try my best to be respectful of those who don't share the views and aren't receptive to changing, even though I feel pretty strongly on this topic.

> can you really say you “own” your data if you can be forced to give it up?

You can be forced to give up anything you have. If that's the deciding factor for the question of ownership, then nobody owns anything. I don't think that's a useful definition, though.

> nobody owns anything

This is a pretty accurate statement.

If the footage is encrypted, are you legally required to unencrypt it for the police?

Not a lawyer, but I read about cases where the judge put people in prison for contempt because they refused to disclose passwords for encrypted content. There was a guy that was in prison for more than 1 year in such a case.

To the extend that I've read, they can demand that they hand over data/documents that they know exist, regardless of whether they're encrypted. It's akin to being forced to open a safe if they have a search warrant for a specific document.

What they can't do is say "decrypt this blob and let us look around".

If they give you a valid subpoena, then yeah, you have to give them the video in a format they can use, you can't give them a bunch of encrypted video files and say "Good luck trying to watch it".

If you refuse to hand it over and they get a warrant and seize your NVR, then I'm not sure if they can compel you to decrypt it, but you may already be in jail for contempt and probably are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees at this point, so most people would cave long before this and just hand it over.

It depends. If it's against another party they can compel you to decrypt it. If it's against yourself they may respect a 5th amendment claim, or they might not.

That's fine. I don't mind complying with a warrant.

The likes of Ring (it might have actually been Ring if memory serves) were recently caught sending data to whomever asked nicely.

> you can be sure that they can’t bypass you and get the footage while your fighting it

They also wouldn't request data from cameras offsite. I mean, they could, but why would they (and would they even make the connection that these cameras are also owned by you?)

For the police to subpoena the footage they at least have to know you have cameras. They'll have much tougher time figuring out you have indoors cameras and requesting data from them.

With Ring it seems to be more like selecting a box on the map and click "request".

You're less likely to have them come to you for video if they're looking at a map of Ring users. Of course they will go to them first.

"I set autoremove to 7 days ago and I got your notice on 8th day, sorry".

"well, it does record only when it detect motion, and there isn't anything on that date, but here is the neighbour's cat video few minutes earlier"

Just need to shred the files instead of just removing them.

Then again if it is by police to you they need to say what they need and not just get everything automatically so IMO not really that problematic as the case where they can get inside house footage from 3rd party company coz they don't give a shit.

I think that's why encryption must play a role if this is a concern. Apparently passwords are "testimonial" level speech and cannot be compelled.

"Sorry, I deleted it the day before you issued the subpoena. No, I don't keep deletion logs."

It's my data on my drives. Are there legal retention requirements? Lying and saying "I already deleted it" seems like a pretty simple solution.

If they get a warrant like the story in this article you'll still have to hand it over.

The fact that it's not on a popular cloud camera provider may make it harder for them to discover what it is they need to request, but they can still do it and you could still be compelled to comply.

In that case I would kind of rather they go to a megacorp vs. me needing to get a lawyer and figure out how to respond.

But generally I agree that it's sketchy for a third party to hold the data.

You shouldn't really need a lawyer. The megacorp will just hand over all the data, in which case you could too to avoid the legal fees. The benefit is like you said, less likely they go to you since they don't know you have anything, vs them seeing a map of all the Ring users.

That's what I'm saying, if they want footage on my hard drive they need to approach me and i need a lawyer, if they go after Ring then I don't need to incur costs and life stress of dealing with that bullshit.

That's all assuming the cops understand I'm not involved or committing crimes. As indicated in your sibling comment, that may not be the case and having my own representation would be needed.

It's shitty situations all around frankly.

You don't need a lawyer. Just hand over the data they ask for, and they will be happy. You can get a lawyer if you want to fight it. If you're paranoid about police impersonators, you can ask your local strip mall lawyer if the document is legit before handing over the data, and it will cost you less than $100.

I think even getting as far as you've concluded may require a lawyer. I wouldn't follow legal advice on HN saying don't get a lawyer.

Wtf are you talking about? If you want to give them footage, go for it. It’s yours.

Deciding whether or not to comply and how would depend on knowing what it means and the likely consequences of several actions. It would also probably depend on the specifics.

Dude, it’s not complicated. If they have a warrant, they get what warrant says. How does Ring’s lawyer help you?

Glad your world is very simple.

Point about Ring's lawyers (which we've seemingly gotten away from this deep into the thread) is you do not pay for them. You don't get to be involved in strategy either, which may not be in your interests. Getting the best thing for your interests may require paying a lot for a lawyer and a lot of stress.

Ring doesn't craft minimally-responsive answers to subpoenas and warrants either. No big tech company does. That would take money (having a staff lawyer and some help to handle those is expensive), and they don't really care that much about your data.

When you own it, you can fight back to your heart's content.

And by the way, you do pay for Ring's lawyers if you use their product.

> they don't really care that much about your data.

The most important point

If you're storing the data on site then they turn up with a warrant and take the hardware.

A subpoena for Ring is an order to produce data. A warrant for Joe's CCTV at 223 Acacia Avenue is permission to take the data.

So you're saying that, in the event of owning your own data and being asked for it, you would get a lawyer because you acknowledge that there could be unforeseen conseqeuences and aspects of the request that you might not understand. But you would simultaneously prefer to let a megacorp own your data so you don't have to think about any of that?

So you're happy to give away your data, but also insistent that you should pay someone to review the request for your data. Apologies if I'm misunderstanding your comments (very possible), but I think I at least understand why some folks are confused.

I did say both of these things. Because there are upshots and downsides to each. Both are true.

You can't escape the shittiness of this problem by running your own server. It's a bad situation either way.

The root of the problem as i read it is overly zealous law enforcement and a judge that is not acting as a proper check on their power. It's a political problem. It can't be escaped with purely technical solutions like who stores the data.

Point taken, but I don't see enough of an upshot to giving away your data from the very start — retaining zero control so you don't have to deal with requests that may or may not ever happen.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lawyer would want to view all the footage themselves, before making any decision like that. Hopefully, you aren't keeping 6 months worth, because lawyers typically charge by the hour.

I think there may be a significant advantage to running your own server: you can controll how long you want to keep the data. For example, you can keep data from cameras recording the street/yard for longer and delete footage from inside the house daily (or choose to not even record when you are at home).

That's what I did, and I don't feel even a little nervous about it. I did it because it was obviously in my best interest to help them investigate a crime that I was the victim in, and because I am 100% confident that the footage is otherwise innocuous.

But it all depends on the circumstances. As you say, the whole point of ownership is that I get to make that sort of decision.

>Just hand over the data they ask for, and they will be happy. You can get a lawyer if you want to fight it.

Given it's common sense to never talk to the police without a lawyer, you would want a lawyer for this situation so you know you're not unintentionally fucking yourself over.

Obligatory IANAL.

> [...] Given it's common sense to never talk to the police without a lawyer [...]

Don't generalize and don't conclude from your point-of-view to the whole world. There are enough places where you can talk to the police without even thinking about a lawyer (and never ever even require one, even in such situations). Not everyone's country is the USA (I assume).

If my interaction with the police is anything more than inconsequential small talk, I'm getting a lawyer. I would apply this common sense even to Japanese police, among the most respected of police forces in the world.

Obligatory IANAL.

I think, having done this a few times, the line should be "minor traffic ticket," not "small talk." You can get out of a ticket (or get it downgraded to a warning) by being nice to the officer, and that is a much better outcome than you can get by attempting to bring in a lawyer or behave as though you are going to fight legally.

Many of these kinds of warrants are closer to the "minor traffic ticket" side than anything else. The trouble is that you may want a lawyer to tell you that.

Isn't the reason you might want a lawyer in this case that you might not have to turn over the footage, and doing so when you don't have to could be used against you?

So wouldn't the alternative where they get the footage from someone else be just as bad as you turning it over without checking, and therefore something you should prevent if consulting a lawyer first is to your advantage?

>Isn't the reason you might want a lawyer in this case that you might not have to turn over the footage, and doing so when you don't have to could be used against you?

That's one of many reasons.

You're still not getting yourself out of the thing where turning over the footage to the government could be bad for you, so having it happen unconditionally without your consent could be bad for you.

Whether it's bad for you is irrelevant, if you're responding to a court order you absolutely want someone who has a thorough understanding of the law to guide you through it (unless you're thoroughly familiar yourself, but most people are not).

Even if we aren't talking about court orders, any interactions with the police beyond small talk should be guided by a lawyer for the same reason. Arrogance has no place when interacting with the law, the complexity of which is far beyond the understanding of common men.

You keep talking about the side of it where you have the opportunity to contest a court order.

The problem is the side of it where you abandon in advance your ability do to that by giving a third party custody of your data and then suffer whatever consequences a lawyer might have advised you to avoid when the third party hands your data over to the government.

I'm not sure how much clearer I can state this: You need a lawyer so you don't step on toes and fuck yourself over.

It doesn't matter if you're going to abide or contest court orders or whatever the hell else. I'm not talking about that.

You. Need. A. Lawyer.

Mere mortals cannot and will not understand the complexity and intricacy of law.

You. Need. A. Lawyer.

I think you might be missing the point of this comment: OP was saying that this is an additional expense involved in owning your own data. In reality, the people who would otherwise store your data aren't getting a lawyer for a warrant response, beyond validation that the warrant is legitimate. The "economy of scale" that 3rd party services have here is that they don't care if you go to prison.

Having a lawyer do the basics is really cheap. Having a lawyer fight the warrant or craft a minimally-revealing response is expensive. You don't have to break the bank if you end up getting served a warrant.

You ALWAYS need a lawyer, and don't hand over any recordings without a lawyer. Otherwise, you may be liable for crimes NOT covered by their initial request. Crimes you may not even think are crimes! Cops do this, to pressure more information out of you.

I still don't see why you think it's a negative to have your own data. If you think you need a lawyer for on-site data, they you should think you need one for off-site data as well. There's really no difference here. Where the data exists has no bearing on needing a lawyer. What the the data contains would be the primary driver of needing a lawyer, which applies equally regardless of it being on-site or off-site.

I strongly disagree. If they have to serve you a warrant for the data, you know they've requested it. This is rarely true if they can serve a warrant to a cloud provider for your data.

Since the likelihood is footage from your home is to investigate you or your family, knowledge of the data demand in itself is potentially invaluable, as you can begin forming a defense.

Also, not that anyone would do it, but 'oops, it caught on fire' is much more doable when it's all under your control and they don't even know what you have, rather than in some audited cloud providers backend.

Which has pros and cons.

You claim 24-hour deletion policy for liability reason.

Cannot chase what you don't have.

They can produce a warrant to turn over what is already there. They cant force one to continue proving that service. Thats a violation of the third amendment.

Of course there no case law on the third to determine if one has to continue to give quarter to surveillance equipment.

There's also the possibility that the same event that leaves me wanting the data leaves me without my on-prem recording, I would think.

It's pretty easy to stash the recording device somewhere that it would take an intentional and time-consuming search to find it. No common criminal will engage in that sort of search. If you need to be worried about uncommonly competent and driven intruders, then your security needs are such that any simple surveillance system won't do. You have special needs that require special solutions.

You could say the same about your valuables but it turns out most of us aren't that creative.

Recording devices can be very small. My valuables take up much more space, and are correspondingly harder to find a good spot for.

At least in that case I'm the one deciding how long to keep the data. They can't get a warrant for data I don't have. I frankly don't understand why anyone would keep weeks of security camera footage around.

Maybe you realize something is missing 6 months later? Or you notice some damage on your property and want to see how it happened? That being said, it would be really hard to go through the footage and find what you are looking for.

Not really hard, if the damage is visible on the camera.

You go back a year and look. Damage there? If no then go back 6 months. If the damage is there then you know it's between 6 months and a year back. Rinse and repeat, binary search.

Having said that, I wouldn't store that much. A week would be all I'd want.

You are right, as soon as I posted the comment I thought of binary search. Funny how people frequenting HN think alike, maybe we have to get out more often out of our bubble.

The concern is less that the cops show up to your cloud provider with a signed warrant, but more so that they just hand it over when asked. There's also concerns about jurisdiction.

What if the video is encrypted such that it can only be watched by certain faces?

The risk is that some judge doesn't appreciate your ironclad solution and so orders you to watch all the footage so they can record it over your shoulder.

If it helps you, it exists, if not, it never existed in the first place. - "oh those, they aren't hooked up to anything after I bought the house, the previous owner took the computer."

It is not feasible in reality that requests to decrypt your personal data stored on-site through warrants. If my server is powered off, everything sits in several encrypted ZFS datasets. No one can prove that I am recording stuff at all. The camera could be there for deterrence only.

That's not how the legal system works. The other party would claim that you are, the courts would believe them, and it'd be on you to deal with it. "It's not feasible" won't wash - especially if you don't spend tens of thousands on your defense.

Well, of course it depends which legal system we are speaking, but where I live (Germany), there is a presumption of innocence until proof beyond a reasonable doubt establishes.

We theoretically have that in the United States, but occasionally the spirit or letter of that is not respected by authorities and juries.

This.

I don't believe in cloud servers for home automation or home security stuff, I also think encryption and local storage is great, but all these techno-nerds are under delusions that enough geeking out on technical solutions will somehow change how law enforcement or the courts treat them. If they want to pursue you for something, it won't deter them.

> In that case I would kind of rather they go to a megacorp vs. me needing to get a lawyer and figure out how to respond.

If a crime occurred outside your home, but your home security cameras caught it, the police will discover this when they talk to you about the incident to collect witness statements, if you choose to share it.

If a crime occurred inside your home, and your home security cameras caught it, the police will discover this when you report the crime and you offer to share the evidence that may help you receive a cure.

There is absolutely nothing that a megacorp helps with here.

All things being equal, you're right. I'd want to avoid the issue of wanting a lawyer and prefer the resources of a larger corporation making those decisions

But they're not equal.

The police can acquire a warrant and serve it to a select few megacorps for ALL of the footage at a specific location for a specific time range. That's setting aside some policies where there's active cooperation between the megacorp and the police. By hosting it myself, I avoid this sort of blanket privacy violation.

In my particular situation, I'd guesss it would entirely eliminate police acquiring a warrant for my footage unless I'm a criminal suspect or there was a crime committed in my front yard. Maybe I'd be a bit more forthcoming anyway if a crime happened on my property :P

Maybe your situation is different?

I kind of read this article as the cops being lazy and requesting literal everything, not because they'll use it but because it's easier than understanding the job they actually need to do.

In that case it'd probably be OK to hand over footage.

But the more sinister and intentional motive among law enforcement also exists. The whole thing is a crapshoot and every case is probably different. If you're lucky, a responsible cop is involved. If you're not, it can be really bad times.

> In that case I would kind of rather they go to a megacorp vs. me needing to get a lawyer and figure out how to respond.

In my view, there is no effective difference between having a commercial entity holding your data and having the police hold it.

Thats why your file system is encrypted with an HSM USB key.

> but that's basically unescapable.

or you destroy the evidence.. sure, the regime may come after you, but they cant get what they want

> Sure, you would still be forced to comply with warrants/subpoenas if they think you have data, but that's basically unescapable.

Can you claim protection against self-incrimination?

Much easier for the party seeking footage to subpoena a large, third party repository than to subpoena individual citizens. The mere existence of large repositories of recorded footage invites parties to subpoena them. No need to locate individuals with useful footage and subpoena each separately. Just go to Ring. This is the same with third party email providers. They make warrants and subpoenas much more convenient. Just go to Google. These are one stop shops for getting peoples' data. Why store private data on removable media disconnected from the internet. Put it in the cloud so it's easier for law enforcement to get a copy. They can subpoena the cloud provider. It's better if people do not know when the third party is giving their data to law enforcement.