They’re affordable and ubiquitous, but homeowners shouldn’t be able to act as vigilantes.
They don’t recommend them because of what the homeowners can do with them?
I’m much more worried about the fact that they’re a constant feed of activity accessible by anyone who can bypass or be let through Amazon’s access controls.
And here I am with my Eufy cameras…
In fairness is JUST bought the damned things right as all the drama was happening.
It allows local hosting; however, thumbnails are sent through an unprotected, cloud based server where they were also cached. It was easily hacked a while ago, when someone figured out the file names, and their patch was to make the file names more obscure so they cannot be guessed.
I bought them a couple of years before the hack, and shit hit the fan. All my cams are external, so the privacy aspect isn’t as high as those with them inside a child’s room or elsewhere inside.
Saying this as an ethnically Chinese person who is not being racist… I had a eufy robovac and when I discovered it was Chinese-owned and had a video camera installed on it… I immediately got rid of that thing. I don’t trust any technology company owned by China to be able to see into my home.
What’s the alternative? Some China based brand? I mean seriously they did not name ANY alternatives. I’m an American and would rather be spied on by the home team.
Edit: a user corrected me that there’s a link at the bottom for recommended devices. Thank you.
There is a link in the last paragraph to a whole article about which video doorbells they recommend if you want that.
Appreciate the response. Checking their privacy settings on the app, Ubiquity seems to be the most privacy conscious.
Ubiquity stuff is entirely on-premises, their (optional) cloud service is strictly for auth and remote access. Highly recommended, not just for the privacy conscious. Their ecosystem is also relatively affordable (compared to Aruba and Ruckus) and a joy to setup and maintain. No subscriptions or recurring fees.
Can you reliably make it work without buying their router though?
I’ve been looking at them for a while but I don’t want to be forced into their ecosystem.
I think this comment was supposed to be a reply to you. Just a heads up in case you haven’t seen it since they seem to have accidentally made a top level comment instead of a direct reply to yours. Whoops!
https://kbin.social/m/technology@beehaw.org/t/230158/-/comment/991728
I have a Reolink doorbell. PoE or wired power, SD card local storage, onvif and rtsp support. There’s a cloud (no subscription) but you can disable it if you want. I run it fully local with Home Assistant and Frigate NVR. Works like a charm.
Reading only the headline I assumed “not recommended because of the invasive Amazon tracking”, instead it was “because some owners become vigilantes”…
I am searching also for a camera but I’m not finding it, can someone help me?
What it must be:
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Not battery powered
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100% offline
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No cloud support at all
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No subscription
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To replace the door peephole
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Onvif support or similar so I can use a generic NVR in my own network for recording
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A screen on the inside of the door so I can see who’s outside (because now the door peephole is replaced by the camera)
Seems impossible to find
I just grabbef a generic IP camera, connected it over ethernet, and firewalled it so it could not make connections out to my home network or the internet. Turns out it just uses an mpeg stream for the video, so recording it is just a matter of running curl on a server. Any network camera that does not depend on a server should work fine for this type of stuff.
i’m also thinking to just take a cheap reolink and put over the door - but it would be cooler if there was a screen inside that turns on when someone is detected outside (even by an ultra cheap PIR sensor, don’t need sophisticated AI recognition stuff)
Could I do this with an RPi 4 B 4GB, I wonder? I’m just About to have mine arrive and I would love to have a couple CCTV cameras in my place.
As long as you are just doing capture and aren’t attempting to do anything where a re-encode of the video stream is needed then absolutely. You’ll need something other than a microSD card though to write the video too.
Yes, elit does take some messing around to get working though, so I wouldn’t recommend unless you want to spend a bit messing around with configuring a server. (Make sure to back up the pi’s SD card so if it fails you can easily replace it)
I’m looking at Ubiquiti’s UniFi doorbell. It’s not cheap, nor really intended for home installation (it’s more like office grade stuff), but I already use their networking kit and run their software.
Look up the brand Intelbras they have a few residential intercoms that might work for you, I don’t know where you are , but i know they exist the US and some parts of Europe and they might be cheaper there since they’re a brazillian company (they’re the best one we have I think?)
I have their regular câmeras and they fit all our criteria. Ours are online, buy ots by choice it’s not a system requirement. At least a few years back a few of those intercoms with screens were compatible with the nvrs i believe.
Why is Wired writing about wireless cameras? Stay in your area of expertise!
If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, a HomeKit camera would get you nearly all the way. Everything processed locally, no need to turn on iCloud if you don’t want. Your phone would be your peephole.