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.
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.
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.