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.
I had the creepiest conversation with a cop a few months ago.
My neighborhood is seemingly getting rougher by the day. I do have a video doorbell, but it’s not one of the major U.S. brands.
Anyway, it was trash day. Garbage had been collected. I had noticed several police cars around, but didn’t see any police. I went to collect my bins, and one of them popped out of nowhere to chat at me.
He was light on details, but needed to track the comings and goings of a parking lot across the street from my house. Didn’t need super clear images, just said he needed timestamps for a timeline. Said my camera angle was ‘perfect’.
And it is! I get so many alerts that I disabled it unless motion is detected within the area of my yard. (Which was not helpful to them.)
But he was explaining this to me, and said that he needed me to send them the video (before I told him that it was unlikely I had video, and then confirmed that I did not with him). A moment later, he did a quick scan of my various neighbors houses, and said (to himself) “Okay, that’s a Ring, that won’t be a problem.”
A problem?!? Just casually warrentlessly seizing footage from people’s homes is not a problem?
For those curious, the system I currently have is by Eufy and I cannot recommend the brand. Anker as a brand has been great (Eufy’s parent company), but I find the Eufy app to be riddled with spam, the offered features to be mediocre, and generally, customer service to be poor. They even had an amazon review removed once. (I called their app a piece of crap, and they hit it with a community standards warning to get it removed.)