A Super Bowl ad for Ring security cameras boasting how the company can scan neighborhoods for missing dogs has prompted some customers to remove or even destroy their cameras.
Online, videos of people removing or destroying their Ring cameras have gone viral. One video posted by Seattle-based artist Maggie Butler shows her pulling off her porch-facing camera and flipping it the middle finger.
Butler explained that she originally bought the camera to protect against package thefts, but decided the pet-tracking system raised too many concerns about government access to data.
“They aren’t just tracking lost dogs, they’re tracking you and your neighbors,” Butler said in the video that has more than 3.2 million views.
Which cameras do you use?
TP-Link (which are cheap but so unreliable I had to add smart switches to reset them when they stop working), Foscam and Dahua. Dahua is by far the best. All of them record to a local server running Home Assistant and Frigate.
I hope its not one of the 32 TP-Link cameras that have unpatched auth flaws allowing malicious actors to reset the admin credentials in them.. This is a local exploit, so you’re probably okay, but these exploits could be used in concert with others to compromise your security/privacy.
The cameras have no Internet access at all. Someone would need to be already inside my network for this vulnerability to be a problem.
I really need to set up frigate. Been procrastinating for months 😐
Frigate is a marvel. Setting it up and tweaking it does take time but once done it requires almost no maintenance (at least in my experience) and is close to flawless. It’s only had 1 false alert in the last year and that was caused by a spiderweb on the camera. I wish all my applications were as trouble free.
Make sure you fill out a bug report.
Booo!
Well done.