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.

  • plz1@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    The best way to ensure privacy is by not buying spying equipment in the first place. Ring and Flock are two sides of the same coin, where Ring is driven by consumer choice, and Flock is just outright insidious. They both serve the same goal, and it isn’t public safety.