In a recent Guardian article about the Guthrie kidnapping (and probable murder) they indicated at the end of the article that efforts to identify the kidnappers had been stymied because her Ring camera subscription wasn’t active:
They had said that one roadblock in the ensuing search for Guthrie was the fact that somebody had disconnected her doorbell camera when she disappeared. And because she was not actively subscribed to the doorbell camera service provider, they could not immediately get images, they said.
Only for Patal (as of course he would seeing he has no comprehension of opsec) to expose the fact that the FBI able to obtain recordings from Ring cameras, even when the owner is unsubscribed to the cloud storage service they provide:
The FBI director, Kash Patel, published the images as the search for Nancy Guthrie, 84, stretched into its second week, saying the images had been “previously inaccessible” but were subsequently obtained from “residual data located in back-end systems”.
Pretty horrifying for those who don’t want their cameras reporting back. And yes yes i get that Ring has some pretty severe security breaches and problems and you shouldn’t be using them but the idea that video is being stored for over a week in Ring’s non-volatile storage systems, even when you’re not paying for it, is pretty damn bad,
Apologies if this fact, breach of privacy, was already known and in the public domain. This is something i’ve just learnt about.



Can you share the model? People were asking me about this recently and said that there are no good alternatives to ring. Thats obviously bs but i didnt wanna spend a bunch of time searching to prove em wrong.
I have a Eufy T8210 with a Home Base. The Home Base holds the hard drive. Eufy does have cloud storage now so I don’t know if they still sell this or not.
Some of their products also have an SD Card slot.
Ah damn so it requires an app. Sadge :(
I want one that has a “home base” like this that just works without my phone and serves a local webinterface that i can access from my computer/phone. That would allow you to VPN into you home network to access it remotely all without any cloud bullshit or reliance on a third party.
I went and searched for a bit and found this post https://www.thesmarthomehookup.com/local-control-video-doorbells-reolink-unifi-amcrest-hikvision-dahua
which lead me to reolink which lead me to this product https://reolink.com/product/reolink-video-doorbell-wifi/
They have a battery version as well, but that requires the “hub” for Homeassistant integration. This one just directly talks to homeassistant and the company even has a guide for it. The only issue is that for two way talking and the initial setup it once again requires their app (actually maybe not if you have the PoE version > reddit post). But after that everything else (motion/object detection, notifications and automation, remote access to video stream) works completely offline.
https://community.reolink.com/topic/16031/work-with-home-assistant-reolink-doorbell-wifi-for-a-hassel-free-smart-home-security-setup
Ooh saved for if/when I live somewhere with outside facing doors