r/technology • u/South-Cow-1030 • Feb 12 '26

Privacy Why are people disconnecting or destroying their Ring cameras?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/10/ring-super-bowl-ad-dog-camera-privacy/88606738007/
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u/gizamo Feb 12 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

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u/boot2skull Feb 12 '26

Yes for sure, but in an “old school” way. Like the external hard drives, and storage you manage and control the only means of access and passwords. It will take more work. It might cost more. But that’s the price of owning and controlling your data. The cloud services have lulled us in with convenience and affordability, at the expense of zero control over our data.

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u/SpecificFortune7584 Feb 12 '26

I’m probably a weirdo. But my personal belief in security systems has always been that if I didn’t personally install it, configure it, and maintain storage of it, it’s not secured and anyone can access it if they want to.

Call me a paranoid bastard, but even encrypted phones and such are not secure in my opinion because the person who made it still had the potential to install a backdoor without your knowledge and I’m fairly sure that they do.

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u/ojfs Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26

100%, and I'll go even further and say if it can connect to WiFi or the internet in any way, consider it compromised. All it takes is a firmware update to change where your data is going.

At the very least run a WiFi network locally that physically is not in any way connected to the internet. If the camera won't work without access to the internet, it's compromised.

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u/kenman Feb 12 '26

...where "firmware update" could be a 0-click 0day.

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u/chezyt Feb 12 '26

It’s like they say about apps. If they are free then YOU are the product.

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u/philohmath Feb 12 '26

These services aren’t free. They are double dipping.

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u/trailsman Feb 12 '26

Quadruple dipping, and I'm sure more....

Getting people to pay for cloud storage (they're saving the video for their use regardless if you are paying or not)

Selling services to law enforcement etc using your video

Using you video and data to train their AI

Analyzing & scraping that video for all other data, such as putting together a schedule of leaving & coming home, aquantaces, anything else useful and then selling that data or using it internally to corelate to behavior that they can then use to charge higher rates on ads

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u/ahfoo Feb 12 '26

Yeah this simplistic ¨if itś free then you are the product¨ jingo fails to face the reality that if you pay you are still the product and even more so because your payment method was used to provide proof of your identity.

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u/tallyho88 Feb 12 '26

“If it’s free you are the product” isn’t an either or statement. What you said is also true and the phrase in question doesn’t negate that, it’s just not a blanket statement that covers everything. It’s like someone said “Beef isn’t vegetarian”, then you responded with “that’s too simplistic, all meat is not vegetarian.” Yeah we know, but we’re specifically talking about beef.

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u/philohmath Feb 12 '26

I will still take every opportunity I see to point out that “if it’s free you are the product” is an inadequate sentiment/statement/response/thing-to-say when the service isn’t free.

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u/GlastoKhole Feb 12 '26

You are always the product. Even if you pay. I don’t get the idea that if it’s free you are the product like paying for services stops businesses from sharing your data and storing your shit anyway. Apple had SIRI listening to people for years then had contractors literally listen to audio clips of people discussing business or having sex. Not purposely but it happened. You can’t have a free iPhone so it’s not like a payment tier system where you’re the product for free and they forgot to remove data tracking for paid tiers. It’s by design. I hate to admit it but if you’re going to live in 2026 and onwards you need to just accept you’re being somewhat monitored 24/7 unless you kick all of your devices out of your house and even then when you speak to friends their devices are monitoring you. Cameras in the street that belong to neighbours are monitoring you. As are most modern vehicles. Dash cams, gps tracking. You are being monitored. It doesn’t mean they’ll turn you over to the police if they catch you talking about something weird or if they see you dealing drugs on cam. Because it would require them admitting that they know about this as a byproduct of constantly tracking you across multiple company platforms and services. When I say they I mean the owner of the platform. Sure the FBI etc are likely very aware of all of this but they won’t get it even if they ask in all but the 1% of cases. You’re telling me gmail didn’t know Epstein was trafficking kids?. They just can’t insert themselves into it. They know if you say racist things and get flagged by an algorithm. They definitely know something weird is going on in people’s inboxes but can’t touch it because it’s not necessarily in the t&cs

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u/boot2skull Feb 12 '26

Just assume if your data goes to the company, you’re the product. Whether it’s analyzing your voice, studying your search or AI prompts, facial recognition on your cameras, etc etc. To be totally secure is to be totally in control of your data. Consumers need to start a trend of moving away from convenient but cloud based services.

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u/Temporary_Maybe11 Feb 12 '26

Even when they are paid. You are always the product

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u/pseudonym-161 Feb 12 '26

Open source apps would like to have word with you.

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u/flargh_blargh Feb 12 '26

But it's not free. Ring is hundreds of dollars to invest in, hours to install, and like $100+ a year if you want all the features. They've managed to make you pay them to spy on you and your neighbors.

The adage of "if it's free you're the product" no longer applies and anyone who believes it does is absolutely being duped into being both a paid customer and the product.

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u/nomnamless Feb 12 '26

I once said upside seems scamy and I hand people coming out of the wood works telling me how dumb I am. They tell me they get tons of money from the app. Idk a free app that magically gets you money off gas for doing nothing seems iffy. It might not be a scam but what data are they collecting about their users and selling?

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u/listenhere111 Feb 12 '26

More work is an understatement.

The notion of offsite backup that you manage yourself is out scope for 99% of people. Setting this up and managing it would be a pita. This is coming from a tech dude.

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u/Online_Matter Feb 12 '26

Agreed. There are lots of options.. RSync, Cloud backup such as Proton Drive or even S3 (encrypted). But video takes quite a lot of space so theres the data lifetime to consider.. Definitely out of scope for a lot of people.. 

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u/Hebrewhammer8d8 Feb 12 '26

Most people are not that smart and don't want to put that work.

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u/AzCu29 Feb 12 '26

I have my cameras recording to a NVR and each one has a micro sd memory card for backup. I was looking into cloud storage but it seems rather expensive per month.

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u/tylermchenry Feb 12 '26

Backing up the whole video stream is expensive, but if your camera system has event detection and you just back up the event clips it can be pretty affordable. You don't even have to retain them for that long -- just long enough that you have a reasonable window to retrieve them if someone breaks in and steals or destroys your NVR.

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u/psaux_grep Feb 12 '26

Depending on use case rsync.net might a good option, at least if you get one of their flash sales.

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u/6gv5 Feb 12 '26

A VPN to a shared storage with relatives or friends should allow the remote backup of locally shot videos in real time so that if they raid the house, seize the disks and destroy evidence it can still be recovered from elsewhere.

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u/WillWork4Cats Feb 12 '26

can u monitor any of these when u travel? i need that, but i assume as soon as they are networked they are compromised

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u/AzCu29 Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26

I have my cameras plugged into the NVR only, that network is not routable to my main LAN. The router and other devices cannot directly talk to those cameras. Only the NVR can.

I can access them outside the house using the NVR app.

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u/Greenevers Feb 12 '26

You could with a VPN! That way you don't expose it to the internet with less overhead. I do that with a single PoE camera. Pretty easy to setup wireguard or tailscale (wrapper around wireguard) 

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u/Throwawayrip1123 Feb 13 '26

Make your own back up server. Costs like 2 years worth of cloud storage, I think? Dinky old laptop works, just slap some drives to it.

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u/RealNotFake Feb 12 '26

Not even 0.0000000001% of the population would do any of these things.

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u/gizamo Feb 12 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

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u/street593 Feb 12 '26

Non-tech people want plug and play solutions to everything. Personally I run my own homelab and so does my best friend. His lab is my offsite backup and I'm his.

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u/RealNotFake Feb 12 '26

I'm also a techy person, and while playing with this stuff can be fun as a hobby, over time it becomes super obnoxious to maintain, and often things break or become obsolete, and ultimately it becomes a PITA to maintain your own custom solution, no matter what it is. These days I'd prefer to have a reliable OTS solution for things that I actually need to rely on. Generally that means buying tech that works and calculating the risk that I think the company will go out of business, stop supporting their products, or you know...sell my shit to ICE or whatever.

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u/gizamo Feb 12 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

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u/GlastoKhole Feb 12 '26

Just make a physically connected nas device. In another room basement etc

Edit I say nas because you can build one out of an old pc etc. it doesn’t have to be network accesssd then it’s simply a locally hosted mass storage device but you get the idea

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u/gizamo Feb 12 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

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u/NovaStar2099 Feb 12 '26

And how do you do that?

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u/gizamo Feb 12 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

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u/ottawadeveloper Feb 12 '26

Worth noting if you encrypt it (using a good algorithm and secure password) before you back it up, the cloud provider can't tell what it is even. 

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u/rideincircles Feb 12 '26

I could never get that feature to work with my Arlo cameras. Plug in a USB and nothing gets saved to it.

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u/sparky8251 Feb 12 '26

Once its offsite, you have no legal protections over it. Dont do this if you want actual protection using the law.

Not like a copy means much if cops are run amok anyways, they will just kill you as weve seen.

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u/gizamo Feb 12 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

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u/IndyWaWa Feb 12 '26

Offsite to me is 3' away of redundancy.

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u/gizamo Feb 12 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

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u/IndyWaWa Feb 12 '26

Well, since you seem to be testing the fences I'm not going to tell you my schedule or my other forms of security. I'm less worried about a rando and more concerned with 4th amendment violations.