What drives me crazy is that even if you don't install them yourself, you can't opt out. I live in an apartment complex. I don't have a doorbell camera, but I have to go past at least 2 of them every time I leave my home. It feels like an enormous violation of my privacy, especially knowing that some companies participate in facial recognition and tracking and freely share that information with the government. I want to complain to management but I know I'll just be treated like the creepy neighborhood criminal.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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I had the creepiest conversation with a cop a few months ago.
My neighborhood is seemingly getting rougher by the day. I do have a video doorbell, but it’s not one of the major U.S. brands.
Anyway, it was trash day. Garbage had been collected. I had noticed several police cars around, but didn’t see any police. I went to collect my bins, and one of them popped out of nowhere to chat at me.
He was light on details, but needed to track the comings and goings of a parking lot across the street from my house. Didn’t need super clear images, just said he needed timestamps for a timeline. Said my camera angle was ‘perfect’.
And it is! I get so many alerts that I disabled it unless motion is detected within the area of my yard. (Which was not helpful to them.)
But he was explaining this to me, and said that he needed me to send them the video (before I told him that it was unlikely I had video, and then confirmed that I did not with him). A moment later, he did a quick scan of my various neighbors houses, and said (to himself) “Okay, that’s a Ring, that won’t be a problem.”
A problem?!? Just casually warrentlessly seizing footage from people’s homes is not a problem?
For those curious, the system I currently have is by Eufy and I cannot recommend the brand. Anker as a brand has been great (Eufy’s parent company), but I find the Eufy app to be riddled with spam, the offered features to be mediocre, and generally, customer service to be poor. They even had an amazon review removed once. (I called their app a piece of crap, and they hit it with a community standards warning to get it removed.)
I don’t have a doorbell camera, but I have to go past at least 2 of them every time I leave my home
A spray-paint can goes a long way. Just make sure to approach the damn camera from a blind angle.
The thing with a spray-paint can is, it takes you 2 seconds and a fraction of a penny to disable the camera, while it takes the man beaucoup bucks and a lot of time to fix it.
What a genius idea, just walk up to a fish eye lens security camera on someone's house, one that you know is recording, and do a bit of criminal damage.
I hate that I have to clarify that I'm not defending these companies that people brainlessly support in the name of convenience. I'm saying that unless your appearance is completely obfuscated, then spraypainting people's personal property is a dumb idea.
Use lasers. It's far more expensive to replace and entirely burnt out sensor than it is to clean off spraypaint. (For legal reasons this is a joke)
Cameras and DVRs should always be on an isolated network.
I have a doorbell camera with local storage. I specifically got one that doesn’t transmit my data to their servers.
Everything I do from now on will be self hosted. Fuck Big Brother.
Can you share the model? People were asking me about this recently and said that there are no good alternatives to ring. Thats obviously bs but i didnt wanna spend a bunch of time searching to prove em wrong.
I have a Eufy T8210 with a Home Base. The Home Base holds the hard drive. Eufy does have cloud storage now so I don’t know if they still sell this or not.
Some of their products also have an SD Card slot.
Ah damn so it requires an app. Sadge :(
I want one that has a "home base" like this that just works without my phone and serves a local webinterface that i can access from my computer/phone. That would allow you to VPN into you home network to access it remotely all without any cloud bullshit or reliance on a third party.
I went and searched for a bit and found this post https://www.thesmarthomehookup.com/local-control-video-doorbells-reolink-unifi-amcrest-hikvision-dahua
which lead me to reolink which lead me to this product https://reolink.com/product/reolink-video-doorbell-wifi/
They have a battery version as well, but that requires the "hub" for Homeassistant integration. This one just directly talks to homeassistant and the company even has a guide for it. The only issue is that for two way talking and the initial setup it once again requires their app (actually maybe not if you have the PoE version > reddit post). But after that everything else (motion/object detection, notifications and automation, remote access to video stream) works completely offline.
Ooh saved for if/when I live somewhere with outside facing doors
I have a security camera at my house. Not for security, but to watch the nature at the back from inside the house.
I specifically did NOT install a SD card in it nor an NVR, so if it's ever removed as evidence for any kind of reason, it will have no story to tell. And of course, it's on our LAN and firewalled off the internet.
I got mine for my dogs. I wanted to be able to check on them when they were outside while I was working.
It does not has unless it detects dogs or people on my yard. It had a feature to block out the street or my neighbors property, and I did that.
Today's world is so weird: online "services" are forced unto you even if you stop paying for them, and visiting kidnappers caught on camera look like ICE officers...
haha you can't use them, because you don't pay, but the government gets a free universal pass. Glorious. Just as the Founding Fathers would have intended.
Anyone who willingly installs these things is part of the problem.
haha you can’t use them, because you don’t pay, but the government gets a free universal pass.
Well, same for ICE: the fuzz is generally supposed to work for the good of the community, but ICE is working against it, yet you pay for it in your taxes.
The camera too works against you, but through Amazon, not directly.
Shit working against you is a theme these days...
The story generally sold is that the fuzz is supposed to work for the good of the community, but the fuzz has always been meant to legitimize the property of the ownership class with the state's monopoly on violence.
The house I rent has a ring camera. We have to pay $30/month for the "smart home fee" (non-optional) that includes the ring camera. I never activated it and assumed it was fully offline. This is good to know. I'll cover it with tape today.
Yeah, most of those cameras don't do the machine vision tasks on the device. They stream video to the server which processes it faster.
Do you have exceptions to this rule?
There are companies that advertise their products doing everything locally. Eufy for one. Although, be warned that anything that sends you a push notification must send SOMETHING to the cloud. People lost their minds a year or two ago when someone pointed out Eufy's push notifications send recognized faces to th cloud as part of their push notifications. Eufy did add a warning and the option to disable, or made it opt in I think.
Anyway, the point of all that is it's all a matter of degrees. Ring and Nest rely heavily on the cloud to process your video and do just about everything. But there are local solutions with varying degrees of local.
The best way to ensure privacy is by not buying spying equipment in the first place. Ring and Flock are two sides of the same coin, where Ring is driven by consumer choice, and Flock is just outright insidious. They both serve the same goal, and it isn't public safety.
Thanks for not burying the lede!
I'd read this elsewhere and totally spaced, now I have to change the hardware out.
Most obvious mass surveillance technology turns out to do mass surveillance.