#ipcameras — Public Fediverse posts

Update to this: The cameras are designed in such a way that, without cracking this IP68 sealed device open, I literally cannot access the camera itself directly. The USB-C port is power rails only. The base station that the cameras connect to is sniffable on the network but doesn't have any accessible ports for me to try and access anything. I'm going to have to wireshark it I guess to see what's even going on between the base station and the internet.

I have done zero research into how the cameras are talking to the base station. I'm presuming some obscure bandwidth that I can't hijack.

I don't have the option to disassemble these devices because they're expensive and belong to the company.

The AI features are decent. I really hate that you're locked 100% into a phone app.
You can enable an RTSP stream but it only comes online when motion is detected.
It doesn't support ONVIF and there's no way to look at the cameras from anything that isn't an iPhone or an Android phone.

I'm willing to concede that, personally and professionally, I'm super duper not their target market for this product. S3 photo/face data insecurity aside, I'd much rather have this (mostly) local camera configuration than a Wyze camera or a Ring. They straight up put your shit onto servers in a completely opaque way.

ACAB includes Ring cameras, btw. Amazon owns Ring and will give that footage to local PDs without a warrant. They own your video data and are using it to build an ad-hoc police surveillance botnet in the suburbs.

At the end of the day, I'm always going to choose IP cameras on their own subnet routing into a VMS. I have the knowledge and inclination to do that but most people do not.

At this moment, there are literally zero cameras in what I'll call the "end user" class that I would recommend if you're concerned about privacy and security. Every single one of them is able to offer you convenience at the expense of your control over the data.

If you HAVE to go the route of cameras like this, Eufy is probably the closest to being secure but that isn't saying a whole lot.

If you do choose to use cameras in this class (or really even more enterprise-grade hardware) for your home, my advice is this:
- If you can, use an ad-blocking DNS on your network such as a Pi-Hole, NextDNS, Cloudflare DNS, etc. that will allow you to find and block suspicious URLs your camera may be chattering with
- Only place them on the outside of your home. You'll get the same amount of security but a bad actor will only be able to see things that are publicly visible anyway. Putting cameras inside your home gives bad actors an INCOMPREHENSIBLE amount of data pertaining to your daily life, habits, and the nice things you own
- You CANNOT rely on these cameras as your only form of security if break-ins and the like are your concern. Most will only record specific types of motion and you simply can't rely on the motion triggers working every time.

#surveillance #cameras #ipCameras #security #homeSecurity #Eufy #Ring #Wyze