Ring introducing new feature to allow police to live-stream access to cameras
84 comments
·July 19, 2025zug_zug
Barbing
Good bet.
What’s the Comcast story? (just did a quick search)
wslh
Also any update resets your selected options.
haunter
The feature exist and that guarantees the law enforcement will abuse this sooner or later. Opt-in doesn’t mean anything.
You have to be total naive if you still believe that this is a “safe” feature to enable.
xoa
Yes, this is my take as well, and I think it's the correct one from both a technical and legal POV. It's one thing for the government to try to compel an organization or person to create a feature they want from scratch. They have made noises in that direction in the past (like the FBI vs Apple trying to invoke the All Writs Act) but it's been on very shaky ground, on both 1st and 13th Amendment grounds as well as others. But the government can be a lot more aggressive and courts a lot more permissive when it comes to merely making use of functionality that already exists. Even putting aside all the massive numbers of perverse incentives, but the thing is of course those shouldn't be put aside, we've seen this movie before over and over and over again. Once a feature exists that can generate a lot of direct revenue for a company and the only thing that keeps them from turning the knob up is "we're totally not evil cross our hearts!". Like holy shit, in 2025 who really goes "oh well it's opt-in!"
I think this particular one is pretty important to know about because a lot of people deploy Ring stuff almost by default, and some HNers (including me as it happens) have some level of influence or even control over it. I always meant to put some effort into updating my self-hosted security system efforts but this is a major kick in the butt. Have to know this exists and be able to offer solid credible alternatives.
Edit: to add a direct pertinent example, WE LITERALLY JUST HAD 5 DAYS AGO ON HN A 500+ COMMENT HUGE THREAD ON "Oakland cops gave ICE license plate data; SFPD also illegally shared with feds" [0]. And there are people really claiming "nothing to see here, move along, local and feds would totally never conspire to abuse anything in violation of the law let alone not in violation of the law"!?
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fnordpiglet
I am less worried about local law enforcement. They will have little ability to strong arm Amazon and have oversight and regulation, as well as judicial review, even if it’s not always effective it’s always there.
DHS has become lawless, and they are eager to strong arm and over reach after having dismantled their own oversight and ignoring their own regulations. They are working hard to move fast and break the law faster than the law can keep up and the Supreme Court has made it very difficult to seek remedy. Because they are not doing criminal justice but instead civil administrative enforcement the web of oversight and review and stronger civil rights for criminal justice don’t apply. They have become the largest police force, militarized, and with enormous budget, latitude, and blank check support from the highest levels of political government.
They absolutely can strong arm Amazon into doing what they want, and absolutely will use Ring camera against their owners and neighbors.
In six months we created a secret police rivaling the KGB, gestapo, State Security Police, and SSD.
mikercampbell
We’re going to get a news article of aome cop is going to be scanning for his ex-girlfriend, I guarantee it
leptons
You have to be totally naive to buy a Ring camera in the first place. Of course it will be used in ways you can't control, it uploads everything to "the cloud".
smotched
That doesn't matter when all your neighbors have one, and the one in front of you has theirs pointed directly at your house.
mousethatroared
Obviously i don't have Ring.
But everyone else does, so what's the point? My privacy is always compromised because tech junkies (as opposed to techies) insist on indulging in stupid things like 21 and me, Gmail, or Ring and I get swept along with it.
thephyber
> 21 and me
The company sequences human DNA. The number in the name of the corp is the number of chromosomes in human DNA. I hope you and I both have more than 21 chromosomes…
jsrozner
It's time for regulation that no images of people may be retained for any commercial purpose without explicit permission of the person whose image is retained. Facial recognition performed on any person who has not granted explicit permission (or, in the case of government, against whom a search warrant has not been obtained) should be illegal. Nor shall any compressed version, broadly defined, of the data be retained (i.e., no training on any sort of facial or pose data without explicit permission of all whose images are used in training).
Penalties should be in the %s of revenue or company assets. Whistleblowers should receive large sums for identifying violations.
In a broader vein, it's time for regulation forbidding the retention or aggregation of any person's data for any commercial purpose other than the one most proximal to the actual transaction in which the person engaged, unless they explicitly opt in.
What would the latter mean? Among other things, targeted ads and recommendation systems would become illegal. Cross-user aggregation (or e.g., a company engaging in any user-longitudinal data analytics) would be illegal. In SQL language, ideally the only time you could do any query with a user ID returning multiple rows for further use would be to serve data directly back to the user. In the long run, such queries should be impossible by requiring something like a) per-user encrypted storage, b) user owned data, c) non-correlatable per-user IDs across transactions.
It will never happen because -- as noted in the article -- many folks in SillyCon valley and government are technofascists, but it should, because our current situation violates all reasonable notions of privacy.
tantalor
> only time you could do any query with a user ID returning multiple rows for further use would be to serve data directly back to the user
What do you mean by that?
jsrozner
I'm saying we should not allow per-user analytics. Currently companies build a profile of each user and correlate that with all the other similar users. Then they target other users who are hypothesized to be similar.
I'm arguing that no per-user analytics should be able to be conducted. A store can track how many times product A is purchased, but not that product A and B were purchased by the same user. Using the latter info for anything other than providing a summary of what the user has purchased (to the user) should be illegal.
Yeah it would be complicated. But you could do it by creating a new obfuscated user ID for each transaction.
Or even better, by having each person store their own data and mandating that companies delete all records. The company can provide a signature on the transaction record (a receipt!) that the user keeps to prove the purchase if there's a conflict later on. But the company cannot keep a copy of any per-user info, the receipt, or the transaction info; nothing beyond the fact that product A was purchased on a certain date.
booleandilemma
[delayed]
fma
I was looking at security systems. It seems, Ring makes it very difficult to have any sort of offline operations. Recording onto SD card is limited or impossible. After seeing this, I realize this is likely by design. You have to be connected so that the surveillance state can get access at some point, somehow.
drannex
Fuck the police state, and all the technology companies and executives trying to cash in on fascism in the name of "security"
This will be abused by the government, by the police, and every othet nefarious organizations and individuals possible.
georgeburdell
I’d be interested to know if anyone has a moderate cost system that doesn’t force you to use a company’s cloud (and thus making them prone to abuse like this). I personally have a POE setup with some commercial grade cameras ($400 a pop), with attached NAS on a private network, and home-rolled a means to access the cameras remotely, but it’s not exactly economical or practical
jwrallie
Trying to find an affordable camera / baby monitor that was both secure and offline was a tough one for me, it seems every single consumer oriented camera has a remote access functionality (= a backdoor) nowadays, and the baby monitors that don’t use wifi are only secure through obscurity with some of them being as easy to hack as buying the same model.
I ended up with an Amcrest IP2M-841 and Tinycam on Android (as I understand using RTSP), and blocking internet access of the camera through the router. As I found out, just connecting it to the internet will automatically connect to servers for allowing “easy setup” of the remote access feature.
fma
I got me a hand me down...It was a Motorola and had no Internet access. All I had to do was replace the battery.
F7F7F7
I'm full Unifi. With all of Ubiquiti's faults considered. I still feel 10000000x better about it than Ring.
skirmish
Synology Surveilance Station [1], it supports 2 cameras per NAS for free, extra cameras $50 per device. I use an old 2 HDD NAS with 2 cameras for a few years already, it works perfectly well. (One Reolink camera, another Amcrest, both record video in h264).
BLKNSLVR
I use a local NVR containing a couple of hard drives totalling maybe 8TB of storage attached to same-branded cameras (ranging between $80 and $150 each) that I can access locally, and remotely via Wireguard.
I'd say it's economical in comparison to cloud options, but, yes, not all that practical to the less technical crowd.
I specifically block the camera and NVR local IP addresses from accessing the internet. I don't really want the possibility of an private company accessing live (or recorded) video of where I live.
Brand is Reolink. I've been slowly building up the system over five-ish years and have not yet found any reason to kick myself for choosing that brand. I also have some TP-Link Tapo cameras for more temporary things, like monitoring pets.
I've also setup Frigate as an alternative system, both for my own interest and as a way to aggregate different camera brands to a single interface. Frigate can be a bit complex.
userbinator
Best to keep Reolink stuff off the Internet anyway, and ideally in their own isolated VLAN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37586457
hypercube33
Is there anything that runs for a decent amount of time, wifi and essentially all-wireless? Blink somewhat works on its own local hub, but honestly its crap for detecting when things happen so I wont be upgrading from my used 2-pack + hub even though it does integrate well with HA.
I'd really like something that'd be apartment friendly so no drilling holes.
vrosas
I also recently installed a Reolink system. I have 6 cameras (4 PoE and 2 WiFi) inside and outside my house. It’s amazing. I just set up a raspberry pi to act as an FTP server to backup files to cloud storage.
ryandrake
I've got a bunch of POE Reolink cameras and their doorbell cam. LAN only, no centralized cloud server. So far happy with them.
ImaCake
+1 for Reolink. We have a reolink camera hooked into home assistant, the whole setup is local and reolink's API exposes every single feature in home assistant with no additional setup needed.
My house also came with an existing NVR camera network which I can view in home assistant over my router without it ever going to the cloud as well.
amelius
> LAN only, no centralized cloud server.
Until one day they auto-update ...
VTimofeenko
Cameras (like other iot devices) should be forbidden from going outside LAN.
halfcat
Can you use the app to talk to someone at the door if it’s LAN only?
Aachen
My grandparents solved that by putting their mobile phone number on their door. They're slow to come down and open the door so it makes sense for the post person or visitor to know they're on their way
Relatively low tech compared to somehow hooking up a camera livestream system to ring your phone via the internet in some way but it works
ryandrake
As far as I've tried, it's fully functional if you VPN into your LAN.
userbinator
There's lot's of generic NVRs and cameras for relatively cheap at the usual far-East retailers.
ActorNightly
>home-rolled a means to access the cameras remotely, but it’s not exactly economical or practical
Cloudfare tunnels are free. You just pay for your domain name. Ngrok is also an option.
If you want to be extra secure, you can do ssh port forwarding through the cloudfar
RunningDroid
Personally I'd look through the brands listed in the Home Assistant integrations, either Local Push or Local Polling :
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/?cat=camera&iot_c...
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/?cat=camera&iot_c...
The documentation for setting up the integrations should also indicate whether there's any cloud involved.
thephyber
As if privacy-minded users needed any more reason to avoid Ring…
ActorNightly
Key point is police can request, they can't just log in to your cloud and take footage
Then again, doesn't seem like the law matters anymore at least on a federal level.
josephcsible
This is way overblown, since it's strictly opt-in and always requires the owner's explicit consent. It would only be a privacy issue if either of those things weren't true.
vidarh
The owner isn't the only party whose privacy is being affected unless you believe these cameras will never capture anything other than the owners.
josephcsible
You could also invite a police officer over to your house to watch recordings from a completely offline air-gapped camera pointed at the street.
null
cma
There is a major qualitative difference if it becomes something like police AI systems analyzing it all continuously.
amelius
They could use dark patterns. E.g. make you click yes in an inattentive moment.
Or use a checkbox that mysteriously takes on the checked state while you are sure you didn't check it.
josephcsible
If they do those things, then it would indeed be a privacy issue, but right now they're not.
_DeadFred_
I mean people complained so Amazon stopped giving police access. Now as soon at Amazon thought they could get away with it, Amazon started giving access again. That's pretty shady behavior in my book.
IAmGraydon
You’re missing the point. The last report in 2021 stated that they sold 1.7 million units in that year alone. The effect is that nearly every square inch of any populated area now has a camera pointed at it that police can access. Please tell me how you opt out of that.
deadbabe
Is there some open source alternative to stuff like Ring?
matt3210
Opt in means nothing in the face of a legal subpoena
xoa
>Opt in means nothing in the face of a legal subpoena
Or scarier, a National Security Letter the government claims the company can't even talk about except maybe in secret court. Or perhaps scariest, a """"National Security Letter ;^)"""", ie, the company absolutely wants to gleefully cooperate with the government and give it whatever it wants for the right price, but also wants to maintain a veneer of "we totally care" and the government obligingly produces some demand and the company then goes "oh geez we totally place customers first and privacy is our highest priority ....but we had to because of terrorist pedo murder rioter jaywalkers, the government ORDERED us to not our fault nothing we could do!" while facilitating it without any challenge at all.
Let me guess "opt-in" means checked by default and hidden 12 menus deep.
Or worse-yet, opt-in means "Hey our rates are going up, but not if you agree to this" (something comcast did recently).
Or opt-in is stored in some database somewhere and might "accidentally be misread" due to a "bug".
If they want real-opt-in then it should be a SMS message at the time they want to know, and a phone-number you can reach out to for more information. This would give an audit trail at the very least.