Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock
468 comments
·October 17, 2025Aachen
These are mappable in OpenStreetMap with the tags surveillance:type=camera + camera:mount=doorbell
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/
nedrylandJP
And (several times previously on HN), Flock and other ALPR cameras are mappable too.
mikkupikku
Seems like a fairly impractical thing to map unless you're getting volunteers to walk up to and inspect people's front doors. I know there is an app for a sort of gamified version of this where people take tasks to verify street signs or even how many stories a building has, I used that app for a while, but doorbell mapping seems a lot leas casual.
Aachen
If I can see them, they can see me. No need to walk onto anyone's property, the whole point (for me at least) is to map things that surveil public spaces
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
wongarsu
Maybe less common in America, but in Europe it's not uncommon to have multiple people going around town delivering various things to your mailbox: a postman for letters, some poor student delivering grocery store brochures once a week, somebody delivering the local newspaper at the break of dawn, somebody else delivering the local church newspaper once a month, etc. And all of them are going door to door. If just one of them is an openstreetmap fan you quickly have all doorbell cameras in their delivery district mapped
spyder
You don't need to walk up: 1. You can do wardriving and identify them by MAC address. 2. You can use object recognition on google street view photos or your own photos while you're wardriving.
squigz
Wouldn't identifying them via MAC address be very inaccurate, as you can't pinpoint them to a specific house very easily?
Would cameras like these emit any sort of IR light or anything that might be detected from a distance?
Object recognition would depend on them being very obvious from the outside - which Rings do appear to be (I've never seen one in person) but I imagine there will be less-obvious options soon enough, if there isn't already.
westmeal
Walk up to door with stack of papers with a stock photo of a puppy on it that says lost puppy. Check if there's a camera. If the owner comes outside, ask them if they have seen this puppy.
QuantumNomad_
And then at door 125,000 you finally reach the home of the puppy that’s in the stock photo you printed. And they say “Why yes, we have seen this puppy. How did you know??”
array_key_first
And then remember you live in America and you get shot for walking on someone's property.
Joking, a little, but seriously: the culture in the US has rotted to such an insane degree. Not only are we not friends with our neighbors, I'm actually scared to talk to them!
nbngeorcjhe
apparently Ring LLC has their own OUI [0]. I wonder if you could wardrive around and identify cameras by their MAC address
wongarsu
That's fun. If you have an account you can use https://wigle.net/mapsearch to search for bluetooth devices with that prefix from other people's wardrives. There are definitely some results coming up. A wildcard search for bluetooth devices named "Ring %" also seems to work
egberts1
Yes
Arrowmaster
A lot of doorbell cameras use infrared for night vision and motion detection. You could probably just drive down a street at night with a camera tuned to show infrared and they would all be bright beacons.
buzer
In most of EU doorbell cameras that point to public places are not covered by GDPR's household exception so if you use them you would be classified as data controller which come with it's own set of duties, responsibilities & limits. Is that not the case in Netherlands?
nerdsniper
That doesn't seem to work for me. Can you correct my query/URL?
https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=surveillance%3Aty...
habi
The search directly on osm.org is optimzied for address things.
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.
nerdsniper
Fantastic! Thank you :)
However, even ALPR doesn't show any devices for me:
I'm glad citizens in the EU are more on top of this. I really wish we as USA citizens had access to the same database of GPS coordinates for each Blink, Ring, and Amazon Key device that police do. Does anyone know how/if something like that could be FOIA'd? This seems it would be particularly fruitful if FBI/DHS has a comprehensive dataset for the entire nation.
Though I do worry that they may not "have" the dataset, but rather just have "access" to it via a queryable Amazon/Palantir database/API.
JeremyHerrman
Unifi G4 Doorbell Pro [0] is a great self-hosted option. I've been very happy with mine over the last year, but I was already bought into the unifi ecosystem with a UDM Pro SE and U6 mesh APs.
0: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cameras-doorbells/collec...
nerdsniper
Alternatively, the Reolink Doorbell cameras for anyone who doesn't want to be on the Unifi/Ubiquiti platform. Also I believe all these cameras provide a generic RTSP feed which can be consumed by any computer running Frigate[0], an open-source NVR/AI platform.
(Reolink, Unifi/Ubiquiti, and Frigate are all good solutions for anyone who is not interested in supporting the proliferation of a police-state)
jdyer9
If it matters to you, Reolink is a Chinese owned company. Not passing judgement one way or another, but if avoiding Unifi over the remote incident matters, I could see this factoring in as well.
WarOnPrivacy
> If it matters to you, Reolink is a Chinese owned company.
It does matter to me. Because I am an American, my greatest risks (actual and theoretical) are from American entities.
Conversely, China has little actual power to negatively impact my life. I am most comfortable (and arguably safer) with Chinese gear.
davkan
Separate vlans for iot devices with strict firewall rules is generally enough to mitigate the threat of most iot devices phoning home i think. We’re already in the territory of hobbyists who should be able to manage that with these suggestions like ubiquity and frigate.
zrail
I have a Unifi Protect system and am generally pretty happy with it. The biggest problem I have is similar in spirit to the Ring problem: remote access is required to get push alerts from the mobile app.
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.
vanc_cefepime
I have the same UI protect system w 7 cameras. After that incident, I made it local only. I like Unifi gear, but I became super paranoid after that incident.
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
_rs
I haven't seen any in depth performance comparisons, but I had also started to dig into this and I was leaning towards using Scrypted instead of the HomeBridge plugin. Just wanted to name-drop them for others also interested in all this
zrail
That's a really interesting setup, thanks for the links! I'm pretty deep into Home Assistant but that plugin looks amazing.
mway
Unfortunate that there's no stock except for the PoE variant.
I wonder if it's because the G6 is (afaict) launching in Q4? I guess we'll just have to hold tight for now.
IT4MD
I just installed mine (last weekend) and use a Unifi stack at home.
100% recommended alternative.
Jupe
So, rather than Big Brother being government-imposed monitoring paid for by all taxpayers, the concerned citizenry is flipping the bill for the devices, network connectivity and electricity. Fascinating.
charcircuit
Tax payers and citizenry are largely the same. It's not really flipping the bill.
null
downrightmike
always, flock just charges local governments and then charges the police too to get access. They get us coming and going, and yet most crimes and murders go unsolved still. If a cop can track his Ex through hundreds of cams, why aren't the solve rates better? (Its not about crime)
jamestimmins
By this point, we should assume that all companies with sensitive data that could theoretically help solve crime will be accessed by the government as a rule.
That's just being a realistic technology user in 2025.
dmix
The only real solution is strong privacy laws around gov usage and strong courts willing to enforce it. Expecting consumer choice or regulations to prevent that data from ever existing is mostly a fools errand IMO, there's just too much of it and it's everywhere.
deelowe
> The only real solution is strong privacy laws around gov usage and strong courts willing to enforce it.
I don't think this is a solution, personally.
encrypted_bird
Care to elaborate? You can't just say "I disagree" without explaining why you disagree.
anigbrowl
Based on what? There's no constitutional right to privacy, while courts have consistently expanded the scope of government powers and immunities and consistently hollowed out the Bill of Rights. It's gonna require a new legal paradigm.
WarOnPrivacy
> There's no constitutional right to privacy,
Being secure in my person, house, papers, and effects is my privacy in action.
bdangubic
any solution that has “law” in it is 100% not a solution
encrypted_bird
They did say "and strong courts willing to enforce it." What good is a law without enforcement, after all?
def5ranl
[dead]
agigao
This is why I never bought anything Amazon owned, other than Kindles; and I have dropped the latter, too.
I was always suspicious of Ring and never understood the people using it.
gilfoy
My entire neighborhood came with ring doorbells pre installed and eero routers.
I swapped out to the Logitech doorbell which I like better anyway
Aachen
Here in the Netherlands, the government gave them away for free
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
troyvit
So like it just came with the houses as they were built? If that's the case I wonder what kind of deal Ring make with the builders of new neighborhoods.
gilfoy
Yes, they were new build. They used it as part of the marketing too, calling them “smart homes”. There’s various other ring bits like motion detector and window/door sensors, alarm, etc. and some non-Amazon stuff like smart water meter, garage door opener.
They had some kind of deal with Amazon surely because it came with some amount of time free.
WarOnPrivacy
> This is why I never bought anything Amazon owned
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.
IT4MD
Agreed. Ring has a proven track record of giving up whatever video law enforcement wants, regardless of your choice or privacy laws.
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.
array_key_first
Forget law enforcement, for years they allowed all their employees to access literally any camera whenever they want.
There were women being stalked by ring employees. It was that bad. Teslas had (has?) a similar problem.
browningstreet
I have a friend who's been extolling this open source alternative: https://www.home-assistant.io/
ssl-3
Home Assistant is very flexible. It's kind of like a common meeting ground where all the things come together in one spot, and they can thereafter be programmatically automated.
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?)
glitchcrab
Home assistant just connects to the devices; you still need the devices to make it useful.
xbar
With the stroke of a key, 100 million customer-installed cameras become part of the surveillance state.
AlexandrB
This was always the end game for Ring. I think people were saying this since before the Amazon acquisition. The acquisition itself always struck me as Amazon attempting to reduce "shrinkage" - brick and mortar stores have their "loss prevention" team and Amazon has Ring.
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.
grafmax
Unfortunately you can’t opt out. The surveillance network blankets virtually everyone - friends, family, all of society.
an0malous
This is also the end game for LLMs
bryancoxwell
Might be a good time to enable E2EE on your Ring cams if you haven’t already:
https://ring.com/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-end-to-e...
nerdponx
Consider not sending your doorbell footage to accompany that has no respect for user privacy, and is now actively partnering with a police surveillance company.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
> now actively partnering with a police surveillance company
You can make this point stronger: Amazon is a police surveillance company (with Ring), just not primarily.
cholantesh
Yeah there are plenty of self-hosted solutions that work just as well.
WarOnPrivacy
Blue Iris is a fairly amazing camera hosting solution. I am continually impressed with the quality of the code and feature set. (disclaimer: $80/yr but we actually pay a bit less).
nik282000
And it's cheap! If you want JUST cameras it's pennies a day, I'm running a 2010 gaming PC with a dozen services (which would cost >200 bucks from the usual suspects) and it's still only 20 bucks a month.
drdaeman
Is Ring camera encryption actually independently audited and known to be implemented correctly and provide all the desirable security properties?
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.
kotaKat
Bad news: Ring just enabled opt-in-by-default "search parties" for people to leverage your outdoor cameras to find their "lost animals".
captainkrtek
The feature in the app is also worded cleverly:
“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
lazystar
> What comes after lost pets? Very open ended
endangered animal conservation groups looking for rare birds
ceejayoz
“Do it for the lost puppies!” is darkly comedic as a way to ease people into the idea.
somehnguy
Thanks for the heads up, just went in and disabled it on my 2 cameras. Next step will be to throw these privacy invading pieces of junk in the trash. Just need to find a comparable product.
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.
absoflutely
Reolink has some good options in this area. Both wired and wireless security and doorbell cameras with microSD storage by default, but FTP and SFTP can also be used. I've been happy with my (wired) doorbell camera with just a microSD card.
treyd
I love how evil the concept of "opt-in-by-default" is. It's so rapey and sinister.
taneq
“Opt-in-by-default” is a lot of words to say “opt-out”.
rkomorn
I agree it's the same as "opt-out" but I like the phrase "opt-in by default" because it implies there's an affirmative "I want to participate in this" option somewhere, and that it is set to "yes" by default.
IMO it properly reflects that what looks like an active affirmative choice by the user is actually not.
jappgar
You opted-in by buying the product in the first place.
People are buying these things out of fear anyways. I thought they'd be happy big brother is watching.
IT4MD
However, it's a very abbreviated way of stating, "soon you will not even be given this choice, because we make entirely too much money selling your data/info and we kinda bribe law enforcement by granting them any and all video, with a simple request"
mihaaly
Oh, Jesus!!
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!
jappgar
Shame on the idiots who place a webcam on their front doorstep too.
stogot
I have a Ring. I got the email notifying me and was about to go disable it, but it doesn’t share anything. It says it will notify you that your camera detected the dog and then YOU choose to share the video or not. So I left it enabled, as it becomes a later choice. Effectively I’m not opted into sharing was my take.
ta1243
The best time to not buy into all this non-free surveilence-as-a-service crap was a decade ago.
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.
andrepd
Is this seriously your conclusion? Might be a good time to get rid of the fucking spy camera owned by a multitrillion dollar corporation partnering with the state surveillance apparatus, is my opinion.
Have people never read/watched a sci-fi book/film before?
bryancoxwell
I think encouraging people to enable E2EE is more realistic than asking everyone to throw out the Ring cams they’ve potentially spent hundreds on, yeah.
danparsonson
But... what makes you think that Amazon et al can't MITM the connection?
andrepd
Why people would purchase a telescreen to place on their homes in the first place is also incomprehensible to me.
comboy
Just keep your cameras on separate vlan and access through eg. wireguard. Any company can have the best intentions but gov can just come to them, tell them to implement whatever is needed - even if that means lying to their users - and have access to everything. Probably even with plausible deniability for all parties involved, but not sure anyone even still cares about that.
VoodooJuJu
[dead]
PaulHoule
Flock is controversial in my area https://transparency.flocksafety.com/ithaca-city-ny-pd
macNchz
Not clear to me what the "External organizations with access" actually means or who decided which organizations to add to the list, but it's curious to me that the campus patrol for a college 250 miles away (SUNY Old Westbury) has access to camera data from Ithaca.
FireBeyond
(Ex Flock Employee) It's as simple as that agency saying "Hey, can we have access to your camera data?" and the originating agency saying "Sure".
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.
MereInterest
And actively ignoring state law in others, then violating cease-and-desist orders when told to remove the cameras.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45382434 (discussion from 2025-09-26)
Noaidi
Louis Rossmann has been going of a lot about Flock lately, and not only in Austin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQxQpzNSNZU&pp=0gcJCfwJAYcqI...
nik282000
One of the many reasons to host your own stuff. It costs about 0.75CAD per day to run my server and PoE switch. For my 20 bucks a month I get cameras, a media server, password manager, push notifications, file sharing, and a dozen other services, all without handing my data over to business or governments.
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.
rogerrogerr
I fear ISPs have made a commercial host-it-yourself product near impossible. Imagine selling a product, getting no ongoing revenue, and then being on the hook - forever - to support average people trying to connect to something inside their home network from their phone. Nightmare material.
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.
Liftyee
I think something like Tailscale's technology could resolve this and many other self hosting access cases. Already, I don't open any ports - just use Tailscale to connect to my PC at home. If this was integrated into the "camera app", it could be seamless - only authentication required. Since the traffic goes directly point to point, the cost of hosting this service isn't too large either.
nik282000
Tailscale solves the access/NAT issue and keeps your services off of your WAN, but it relies on a 3rd party to let you use your own equipment. I understand why it is useful and a necessary service but I'll never touch it.
nik282000
I understand why it's not feasible. I admin a server at home and one for a small business, and most people do not really understand "why doesn't it just work like a normal app." For the foreseeable future self hosting is an ideological choice rather than one of practicality :/
nerdsniper
Tailscale
charcircuit
>they also have thousands of employees that can access your data at any time for any reason.
They have 0 employees who can do that.
vkou
> One of the many reasons to host your own stuff.
This doesn't solve the primary problem of your neighbours turning your country into a surveillance state.
1970-01-01
I'm willing to bet $$$ anyone will be able to call themselves a 'local security agency' before proper controls are implemented.
nik282000
Likely a form followed by a "Do you promise you didn't lie" checkbox at the bottom is all that will separate a user from access.
These cameras are a big part of why I recently moved. They're a canary for something deeper.
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.