Ring camera is getting more and more annoying
I've had a ring camera for several years. Historically I've been mostly satisfied with it, but lately they are adding some features that are pretty annoying.
The worst is that they've been adding neighborhood alerts and other proximity alerts, with categories for traffic and weather and lost pets and things like that. Today I got a "community alert" which was actually an advertisement for a local animal shelter. I don't have anything against animal shelters, but my motion detector camera alter is not the correct venue for this message. It's clear that amazon is trying to muscle in on Nextdoor. I don't use Nextdoor. I find it to be like facebook, full of cranks and advertisements and nosey annoying people.
So now I had to wade through a few pages of menus to find where to turn of this new annoyance. Obviously, if I could I would opt out of all new features.
The other annoying thing is that they turned on some AI evaluation of what the camera sees. So I was getting messages like "there's someone with a garden hose on your lawn" or "a person is carrying a cardboard box". There were a few things wrong with this
- I didn't sign up to have this and it slows down the alerts so they are up to 30 seconds after the motion is detected
- The AI sometimes made errors, especially at certain times of day where it misidentified different things in the yard (for example, some place marked by shadow was interpreted as a sidewalk when there isn't a sidewalk there). This happens of course because the AI doesn't know anything about my property, it evaluates everything from scratch each time it looks at an image.
- The ring app started bugging me with upselling messages to pay extra for the AI messages
So yeah. I just wanted to vent about the enshittification of this thing. I'm also aware of the privacy issues of ring cameras and how they're going to use the "pet finder" functionality to keep track of everyone. But this rant isn't really about that more important stuff, just the frustration of how these tech companies won't just leave anything alone because they have different goals than us.
Ring was always evil. They have just progressed to a level of evil you no longer find acceptable.
Fun fact: ring cameras are part of a handful of other Amazon accessories that are part of Sidewalk, a secret private ad-hoc wireless network that Amazon controls! And yes, it’s enabled by default weather or not you know what it is, and yes, it is tunneling information from external devices through your internet connection!
Amazon is the devil, folks. Drive them away from your homes.
Oh and don't forget that it enables things like TVs reporting your viewing habits even if you never connect them to the internet.
Has this ever been confirmed in the wild or is it simply possible? Especially since all Smart TVs can reasonably rely on an internet connection these days, it doesn't seem worth it to add extra hardware and extra cost just to also scoop up a vanishing minority that won't connect the internet device to the internet.
~Nobody knows! It's all encrypted and nobody's broken it yet to my knowledge. We're not good enough to know what's going on in Amazon's secret internet, you see.~
Edit: I wanted a better answer so I asked Claude. Apparently their TVs and Fire TV sticks do not have Sidewalk functionality.
I still maintain that what Amazon is doing is pretty damn evil, though.
*yet.
And while that's probably true (diminishing returns), what's more probable is being able to track other devices by triangulating BLE.
Amazon can watch who comes and goes at your house, even if just a few neighbors have ring.
As problematic as they all are I'm glad I switched to a Nest doorbell when we bought our house. It's a needed accessibility tool for us but at least I'm not getting that alongside it.
Self-hosted NVR where all storage is local and there is no external network connectivity other than what you control through a similarly self-hosted backend. Unfortunate, but how it goes.
I'm out of the NVR game these days, but an example of what I'm on about might be https://github.com/blakeblackshear/frigate these days.
I use Frigate (and it's awesome integration with Home Assistant) and I swear by it too. The quality, stability, and pace of new features for a free and open source (with optional paid features that I don't use) is truely impressive.
Through the new Image Classification features I now have it detecting garbage trucks and if my bins are out or not.
It does facial recognition, arbitrary classification where you provide sample images, recording, retention based on movement, detection, and more.
I am a techy person though, so if you're really not it is admittedly more complex to set up than throwing up a Ring camera.
The camera isn't even connected to the internet and Frigate runs everything in my house, so all of this happens locally, which aligns with my privacy focused home setup.
I have a coworker who swears by Frigate.
The way I related/look at it is through the Alexa Echo Dot speakers I bought years back. They were basically the cheapest game in town, and I was using them for voice controls of other smart devices I had, even once I set up HomeAssistant I was still using Alexa for voice controls. In that specific case I had turned on/off all security and privacy settings I could find as I would go through every nook and cranny of the settings I could find, minimized as much of the advertising or nuisance elements of it as I could, and then just tried to get as much value out of what I paid for it. Pretty sure they do similar things with those speakers as you mentioned with the Ring camera where they add new stuff you have to turn off.
I haven't taken my speakers out of storage for awhile to know what they are like nowadays but I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to using them again depending on how much shittier they may be now. The interesting thing about them before is they didn't have a good way to advertise, but now that they've baked in LLMs to Alexa I'm not sure if that's still the case anymore. I was just using it to turn off lights or turn on a TV or something so I really never needed it to tell me anything, I just wanted it to execute a command, so other than Amazon was able to collect my speech data or something like that I felt like I got decent value from it because they didn't have a good way to monetize it against me at the time.
Here's the thing.
When I set it up years ago, I turned off a lot of the settings.
Over the years, they keep adding new settings and features and I have to keep figuring out how to turn them off. And one of the most prominent menu items is to shop for more junk.
I miss just buying something and having it just work as advertised and not morph into some thing I didn't buy. This is the problem with anything internet connected that can get updates: You have to check every once in a while if your Krusty doll has reached back and set it's switch back to "Evil".
At this point I expect a ring to see me in my driveway and send a message "Middle age man who forgot to upgrade to Ring Premium with AI Updates brought to you by Spicy Nacho Doritos™️ found in driveway"
The poster of the "Drink verification can" story was prescient.
Not only does everything trend towards ultimate annoyance, it also makes me go through that cycle again and again, buying something that looks good because the old one sucked only for it to start behaving terribly in short order and making me do it again.
I bought a baby monitor three years ago and the associated app is becoming a blight, asking for more and more unnecessary (literally, I can deny and it still works) permissions and adding in AI stuff when I just need it to open the damn camera.
You could consider unifi doorbell instead, you can control it a lot more and store the footage locally.
Out of curiosity what do these cameras do for you? What problem does it solve?
I use Tapo cameras, for which I've written my own alerting system, bypassing their cloud and app. They're supposed to be 'local only' and I switched to them after Eufy were found to be lying shysters.
At least with Tapo I can know my cameras are not connecting to any cloud, as all outbound internet is blocked on the port they're plugged in to.
I use Eufy cameras and have been happy with them. They've had their share of incidents, but I don't believe they are involved in any active spying like many of the other big companies. Plus, you can use it with local storage and an SD card without any subscription costs. The human and movement detection are also locally hosted on the device.
I'm sure some will have strong opinions about the brand, but it's worth looking into if you want to switch.
But the only way to truly guarantee a "safe" system from corporate meddling is to create your own, sadly.