Data query around the Netherlands shows about a hundred are mapped so far as specifically doorbell cameras: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2dQw (the tag does not yet seem established in the USA). There are also many thousands of cameras mapped that are either not doorbell-mounted, or simply not tagged to such detail. This is a convenient map to see all of them: https://sunders.intri.cat/
It's more casual than surveying e.g. addresses that may be hard to see if the building is recessed, but you'd still want to capture it because someone will want to route there sooner or later. Not so for cameras that only capture own property
StreetComplete has a "things" overlay that makes it very quick to add these at the position of a front door
https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=surveillance%3Aty...
For a "complete" search in the OpenStreetMap-data I suggest [Overpass Turbo](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_turbo).
In this specific case I'd take a little detour over taginfo (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Taginfo), e.g. search for `surveillance` (https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=surveillance) there. A little bit of clicking (Type > Values > ALPR) leads to https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/surveillance%3Atype=A... If you click on 'Overpass turbo' on the top right, you get to a pre-filled search on Overpass turbo. Scroll the map to the region you want to search (start small), and click 'Run' on the top left.
Voila.
The area I was in was like the Korean DMZ with regard to flock cameras. I had one at the only entrance to my neighborhood. A trip to the grocery store would put me in their database 12 times at last count.
I still have to worry about the standardized fleet of cameras at Home Depot and a few other retailers, but it's not nearly as bad out here. Location is a big part of the dystopia. It is not evenly distributed. Fighting back at the municipal and HOA level can make a massive difference. Some areas seem hopeless though. You're better off finding something that already mostly works and trying hard to keep it that way.
The general fear level of the local population seems to be the biggest factor in all of this. I went from a place where people would do the quadruple check car lock routine when walking into the grocery store, to a place where many leave their unlocked vehicles idling in the parking lot. I don't even think about locking my doors at home now. It almost feels silly to do it around here. It's amazing the difference that ~65 miles can make.
It's not even that. The real shitholes full o' crime have scant cameras because you don't need them for "real" investigations of "real" crime. You only need a traffic cameras to establish what you need for a murder investigation or whatever, pair the images with cell time stamps and presto.
Cameras are for making it cheap to enforce the long tail of petty deviance that doesn't actually matter. Karen calls up bitching that some guy did something, normally that would be discarded because it's not worth it. But with a camera system they can query it and maybe fine the guy from their desks. They're not using the system to go after someone for stealing from parked cars except perhaps to walk back in time and add charges to someone they already got (same reason they ask for serial numbers of electronics and the like when doing theft investigations they won't follow up on).
0: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cameras-doorbells/collec...
(Reolink, Unifi/Ubiquiti, and Frigate are all good solutions for anyone who is not interested in supporting the proliferation of a police-state)
Unifi had an issue at the end of 2023 where users could access consoles they didn't own through remote access: https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/15/ubiquiti_camera_priva...
If I (or more specifically my spouse) could work the mobile app without SSO I'd be thoroughly satisfied. As it stands I have some regrets.
After some digging around, I found homebridge [0] (with the homebridge-unifi-protect plugin by hjdhjd [1]) which fixed that for me by tying the UI Protect system into Apple's HomeKit ecosystem (which also leverages the homekit secure video that keeps alerts/motion/snapshots on iCloud). Now all our devices are able to have it popup alerts for motions, packages, etc.
It's not perfect, but this way I'm able to get alerts without tying in to Unifi's SSO system. I also still like to open the UI Protect app when I'm not on the local network to sometimes archive videos, view cameras, mess with one of the new UI PTZ cameras, so I have backup access options, including Tailscale. Tailscale doesn't give me the alerts I want, but lets me access the app as if I were still at home. I also have it tied in with HomeAssistant and recently began playing around with go2rtc.
I'm a super-newb when it comes to all this but 2022 is when I began getting fed up with all these privacy nightmares and began to teach myself selfhosting, docker, etc so I can mitigate all this. Unfortunately, I'm the only one who knows how to tinker and keep all this updated. However, I do have documentation for my wife how to access everything and start fresh to make it easier on her by using UI's SSO way so it "just works" as they say in the Macintosh World, when I'm no longer around.
[0] https://homebridge.io/ [1] https://github.com/hjdhjd/homebridge-unifi-protect#readme
I wonder if it's because the G6 is (afaict) launching in Q4? I guess we'll just have to hold tight for now.
100% recommended alternative.
I was always suspicious of Ring and never understood the people using it.
I swapped out to the Logitech doorbell which I like better anyway
They're also illegal because you're not allowed to film public spaces without a good reason (it's up to the judge and case law to decide, e.g. if there has been arson in the area recently then it's reasonable to monitor your car that's parked at the kerb, for example). Nobody has yet gotten in trouble to my knowledge
Gotta love hypocrisy
I buy their mice. They've been good mice and I'm increasingly unhappy with Logitech.
Occasionally I buy some cables. I think that's it.
If it was free, I could almost understand. Nothing is free, and if it cost the customer nothing, then the customer is the product. However, people paid for Ring gear and as a thanks have their privacy violated with no notice, no info and no choice.
There were women being stalked by ring employees. It was that bad. Teslas had (has?) a similar problem.
https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...
You can make this point stronger: Amazon is a police surveillance company (with Ring), just not primarily.
“Search party lets you use your outdoor Ring cameras to help neighbors in your area”
Note: doesn’t mention pets yet. Then:
“Starting with lost pets, Search party will…”
What comes after lost pets? Very open ended
This f shameless pretention of doing something noble - barely helpful above normal practices btw. - while manipulating clueless users into turning on mass-surveillance is revolting and disgusting. And ordinary employees figured this out, phrased, created content, implemmented, pubished, and are maintaining this dirty practice. Many times with (very misplaced) pride. Shame on all of them actively participating in this coward scheme!
Are there any wireless (running power to these locations is not an option) doorbell cams that record to local storage instead of the cloud? I refuse to pay a subscription for these things.
Ideally they would record to my server instead of onboard SD card so that the footage can't just walk away if someone grabs the camera.
The second best time is today.
Unfortunately the public love this stuff, and are quite happy to have CCTV pointing at your house. Privacy never existed 300 years ago, it doesn't today. Accept your feudal masters and make peace with it, because they won years ago.
Have people never read/watched a sci-fi book/film before?
Because when I reverse engineered my Tuya-based camera-equipped pet feeder, I've discovered that there was an encryption on the video stream, but they only encrypted I-frames and left P-frames unencrypted. Amazon is not Tuya, but IoT is IoT.
My point is, there are myriad of ways IoT vendor can boast "encryption" and "security" on the marketing materials, while the actual implementation could be flawed beyond redemption.
The bottom line with technology is that you either host and control it yourself or you're at the whims of the vendor's business strategy.
That's just being a realistic technology user in 2025.
I don't think this is a solution, personally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQxQpzNSNZU&pp=0gcJCfwJAYcqI...
Flock (deliberately, IMHO) has no verification on whether said agencies are allowed by law or regulation or whatever to have that access, it's just a free-for-all.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45382434 (discussion from 2025-09-26)
If the authorities come knocking with a warrant, or frankly, even a nicely-worded sensible request, sure, have at it. But ain't nobody accessing the footage unnoticed and without my approval.
Worst part was just running ethernet to the spots where the cameras needed to go (only crawlspace access) but nice not having to charge batteries and even nicer knowing i'm not sending video to netgear anymore.
If I had of had a webcam on my front door a few weeks ago I would have been able to identify the thieves that broke into my car and stole a bunch of stuff whilst I was asleep.
Since then I have "cammed" up, but I use my own hard wired network and connected to a Pi5 with a Hailo8 chip running frigate.
No third party apps, just the fun of more stuff on the network. I do run a Cloudflare tunnel on the PI so that I can connect to Frigate from anywhere when I get alerts.
But basically, it's me and only me accessing the content of those cameras. However I do plan to configure Frigate to upload the alerts and detections into S3 with a three month lifecycle.
I assume some of the concern around this is that folks don't want to live in a panopticon. If that's your objection, I can't really help with that. On the other hand, if your objection is that you don't want a backdoor built into your video doorbell (even one that you must opt into), I'm happy to report that there are good non-Ring options.
I switched to a Reolink video doorbell, and it has decent support for local-only operation. It has the ability to save footage to a local micro SD card, and if you're worried about someone stealing the entire doorbell and losing your footage, it also supports RTSP (a common IP camera protocol). You can even have it upload footage to a FTP server on a schedule. It also supports PoE if you're lucky enough to have ethernet at your doorbell, or don't mind doing the drop yourself.
Set up does require an app, but you don't need to use the app after that. Push notifs also require egress, but, iiuc, this is mostly because of how push notifications work. Push does NOT require a paid subscription.
I personally just use the app, but it's nice knowing that if Reolink tried to pull a fast one, I could just block egress on my VLAN and use it locally.
If you'd rather just go completely app-less, I imagine a dumb doorbell paired with an IP camera and a local ZoneMinder [1] install would provide most of the benefits of something like Ring. Of course, the tradeoff is you now have a second job being sys admin of your homelab. Pick your poison, I guess.
If someone is in my house tapped into the network, cameras are the least of my problems.
Cameras? NVRs? A sea of IoT light bulbs, switches, and sensors that all variously speak Zigbee or Matter or Thread or Wifi or Z-Wave or Bluetooth or some clown connection or whatever? Almost all of it works fine with HA. It's very flexible.
If anything, it may be too flexible. It can be rough getting started with it.
(I use it in "Home Assistant OS" form in a VM on a light-weight x86 box that only cost me $50, wherein: Performance is quite lovely, and updates haven't hosed anything up [yet] that required me to go poking at it to keep it going. It's also right at home on bare-metal x86, or an ARM SBC like a Raspberry Pi, or in containers, or [...]. Did I mention that it's flexible?)
Not sure how YC sees this.
They're "investors, not bosses" - https://www.ycombinator.com/principles/
Being an investor is not an excuse. It makes you amoral, too.
"I didn't build the bomb, I just funded the company that built it."
In case you haven't noticed, the surveillance state is 100% YC adjacent.
WiFi routers can’t tell you where people are in the house. The routers don’t even know their own location within the house.
All of those papers you see on the topic have extensive additional information being put into their models. The routers don’t magically know the layout of your house.
At most, a WiFi device could infer movement in a house if the RSSI of devices is fluctuating where it is normally stable.
And if you don't have those, a lot of buildings have common patterns. Its very much in the realm of possibility to train a model using exterior and interior information so that you could have AI generate a floor plan using only exterior data.
Combine that with a small drone that could fly around a building and take different wifi signal readings to triangulate access point positions.
Once you have all that don't you have everything you need to detect movement in the building based on signal disruptions?
Yes, seems like a bit of work but it absolutely seems like the type of effort some governments would put effort into.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416761
Signal processing is probably a general problem. This month we had news about transcribing speech from sound waves jiggling a regular computer mouse.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/mouse_microphone_secu...
Cons: use your imagination.
Which is easier, Wifi 7 in all homes or gun restrictions ?
https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/167...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentation... https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/11/anduril-to-take-over-microso...
Sci-fi writers understood both what technology could create in the future (and what would be desirable), and also understood how people abuse power and the tools available to them to stay in power (or gain more).
In other words: they predicted the future, more than they inspired it. IMO, that also makes their writing that much more interesting.
And yet here we are complaining that our phones are over-listening to us and our cars no longer have knobs.
Now with the written word and how seemingly determinant people are in large numbers we are again super vulnerable.
Is it as secure as a cloud service? Depends on what you consider secure. I closely monitor access logs and use strong passwords, Amazon has billions to spend on encryption, apps, and datacenters but they also have thousands of employees that can access your data at any time for any reason.
I would love it if some commercial host-it-yourself product were released but that goes against the pay to play model that has been chosen for all modern tech.
They have 0 employees who can do that.
It’s right in the article
Ok, I’m stumped, what service is this?
If anyone is having trouble understanding the support load, start by traveling to your local assisted living home and explaining to everyone static vs. dynamic IP address assignment.
You can do it fairly easily by bouncing off a server you control... aaaand we're right back where we started.
This doesn't solve the primary problem of your neighbours turning your country into a surveillance state.
Sadly it is only going to get much worse before it gets better.
"History doesn't repeat itself but rhymes a lot" (or words to that effect). What is happening now in the US (and many other places) strongly echoes the events leading up to WW2.
Then is up for the citzens to let it happen or react.
I'm not really pro-government, but modern surveillance capitalism really pushes against this view. Put to their own devices, the public will generally (and apparently) flock towards mass surveillance all on their own, and I think one possible implication is that the government surveillance policies are more popular then some folks in HN circles would suspect.
OpenAI is receiving far more data with a far greater privacy impact than social networks. And all this is happening at a time when the US is transitioning from a somewhat functioning democracy to an autocratic and fascist system.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/chatgpt-pa...
"Ignorance is bliss"
2 things.
1. Few people understand most surveillance legislation, including journalists.
2. Most governments use thought terminating cliches involving child safety to force compliance on the middle set of people who dont like surveillance and understand a minimum amount of what the legislation does.
These points leave anti surveillance campaigners fighting an uphill battle. Most people, when they have these laws clearly articulated and arent in danger of being called a pedo for opposing them, oppose them.
Some sort of jamming tech or scrambling tech. There’s no reason to lock everyone into a surveillance state when we should be fighting it. Fighting through legislation isn’t tenable anymore.
If you have a system where, as I understand it, the main point is to check who is standing in front of your door, and that system now is one automatic update away from dipping into your bank account... How long until the police departments figure out that donations to a specific company could be very profitable?
Even public information clearly describes how it is the "CIAs" one trick pony, whether it's orchestrating a "color revolution" for "democracy", instigating conflicts and war to feign innocent self-defense, implementing social engineering and Constitutional subversion, or implementing mass surveillance specifically. It's the same wife-beater and child rapist type pattern of grooming abuse that then feigns innocence and deflects blame to anything and anyone else.
Most people are really not all that different than any run of the mill battered wife (even if only in the making), psychologically. I get it a lot when I point out what a trap and an illegitimate, enemy entity that the EU is (not to pick on the EU, because it also applies to the US and many other places, but it's far more pronounced with the "EU-cultists")... You get the constant predictable defenses of the love-bombing "abusive boyfriend"/wife beater in the making responses. "you don't understand", "the EU really loves me", "you never want anything good for me", "he showers me with all kinds of benefits and slick marketing", "we are going to be happy forever".
It's sad, and as someone that has watched that cycle unfold even in my own family, it's really kind of demoralizing and somewhat depressing to know exactly where it's heading and being unable to counter the forces that have roots a long long time ago, forces of nature. So, the US and the EU will have to suffer that which is predictable and was preventable, no matter how much they wanted to see the world through rose colored glasses.
Maybe for humanity's sake, China can free the world of the scourge of this cycle and the psychopathic, narcissistic, maniacal group of people that causes it all... if they don't just kill all life on the planet because if they can't be in control then no one can be in control.
I'm usually against these types of "smart" devices, but only bought it because my house got burgled as a student (whilst I was asleep!), so I got pretty shaken up and got the cheapest thing I could find. Currently, I do have it connected to a local HA instance, but I'm pretty sure that relies on Ring's online services to access it, unless I'm mistaken.
Google for rtsp doorbell and you’ll find many discussion threads
Some people have the setting on where it starts announcing stuff any time it sees a person, which it does all the way to the sidewalk. So you go on a walk and get yelled at through a super shitty speaker several times.
And it’s about as dystopian as you can imagine with people posting recordings constantly on the neighborhood Facebook group and arguing.
I swapped to HomeKit secure video because of no additional subscription, included in the iCloud one I’m paying anyway. Allegedly end to end encrypted too.
That's concerning. Now we have to worry about spyware coming pre installed on houses. I wonder how much the developers got paid to install those?
The data shows people like video doorbell. If the developer has to install a dumb one, then they would benefit by installing video doorbells.
I would love to see legislation banning this kind of automated harassment.
Never done it, but on late night walks home I've imagined banging on the doors of the houses with these just to inform them I got the message.
What sort of stuff does it say?
Reality has become more stupid than even visionaries could have predicted.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/06/a16z-backed-toka-wants-to-...
This is a little misleading. Flock is primarily an ALPR that can identify make/model/color/identifying-feature of vehicles. It's not facial recognition. It doesn't itself have a racial component. The modal "proactive" Flock intervention (as opposed to investigative searches after crimes) is to flag a moving vehicle as stolen.
But in practice, the outcomes of deploying Flock are racialized, because the hot lists states keep of stolen vehicles aren't accurate enough for real-time enforcement, so recovered vehicles stay on the lists and false-positive. You're disproportionately likely to have a vehicle on a hot list if you live in a low-income neighborhood.
Even then: it's not clear how any of this is apposite to a Ring/Flock partnership. You can't use a Ring camera to do realtime ALPR flagging of cars. Presumably, this supports Flock's "single pane of glass" product; they just want police going to Flock for all their video needs. Police already canvass Ring and Nest cameras during investigations.
Wonder if that helps any.
https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...
KMS access is based on IAM policies.
If law enforcement wants access to your KMS keys, they'll compel IAM, not KMS, to give them access. If you ask KMS about it, they'll play dumb.
Edit: added country
I had to buy a surveillance camera recently, but I made sure mine doesn’t connect to the internet in any way.
This is us against the oligarchs, not us against each other. And something makes me worried that there is an impending recession/depression and that these surveillance devices will be use to quell any dissent. (I say this because of the insane rise in the price of gold)
I, for one, am canceling my Amazon Prime account and avoiding amazon as much as I can in this dystopia where it is the only place you can buy many goods anymore.
The whole flock thing is brilliant as the FBI is the sales force through their grant programs.
(Context, IBM helped the Nazis with recordkeeping.)
IBM did a ton of business with the Nazis.
It's the exact same problem HN has been talking about for years except now a group of wannabe commandos who stake out in the parking lots of Mexican restaurants now have a tool where they can just type in their stereotypes and have the AI find them.
It's just the brown people who are put in detention centers, isn't it?
I am stricken with fear over the control and manipulation by the Chinese state. A dominance over people without respect or regard, a self certainty and pomp that denies life & possibility.
But what the West is letting happen here, the limitless post-state open-for-anyone surveillance Flock & others are offering has seemingly even less bounds, less respect, less purpose, less direction. These people, this enterprise is clearly the worst possible thing we could do, the most awful accrual & misuse of the world against its people's. To spy on everyone & to without regard sell that days to everyone is a crime against all.
Flock is truly the #HostisHumaniGeneris. Woe & (all too expectable) disappointment to see Amazon giving up all their data to fascist pro ICE losers who, were we a descent society, we would run out of the world.
