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.
There are companies that advertise their products doing everything locally. Eufy for one. Although, be warned that anything that sends you a push notification must send SOMETHING to the cloud. People lost their minds a year or two ago when someone pointed out Eufy’s push notifications send recognized faces to th cloud as part of their push notifications. Eufy did add a warning and the option to disable, or made it opt in I think.
Anyway, the point of all that is it’s all a matter of degrees. Ring and Nest rely heavily on the cloud to process your video and do just about everything. But there are local solutions with varying degrees of local.