Other product companies take note: the tide is turning on all this “tracking” nonsense. Clean up your house now or find yourself shamed into submission later.
Consumers increasingly don’t care that “the lawyers said it was OK because it’s on page 73 subsection C line 4 of the use agreement For the product.” Privacy is the new black.
Ahh... I so much wish that this was true. However, there is just too much money involved and consumers don't seem to care, at least the "silent majority". This won't end anytime soon
I'm not so sure. I prefer to remain optimistic about this because it does seem positive progress is being made. No problem like this will be solved overnight, even with heavy-handed federal legislation made effective yesterday.
Things like this do take time. New companies are being built right now that plan to base their entire identity on personal privacy and respect. Someone is building the next generation of competing products that offer privacy as a priority feature. I would cite Apple as a potential candidate in this pack with some caveats and unknowns...
Trust is a tricky thing to establish and virtually impossible to regain. For me, it's not hard to initially gain my trust if the intent is clear. If I feel the vendor of my home security product is actually trying to use the best techniques, encryption schemes, etc. to protect me, I will be much more likely to trust the solution. If I see buzzwordy bullshit on the box or get a whiff of negative experience or intent from other users (whom I trust), you are immediately starting out with -10 to charisma. Good luck getting out of that hole.
My daughters generation isn't fazed in the least by being bombarded by ads, and I've even heard some of her friends express (paraphrased) "why worry...everyone has something embarrassing on the Net".
Ring is (apparently) wildly popular. I know dozens of houses in my neighborhood who have installed it, and many of them think the privacy invading parts are, at worst, a 'necessary evil', and some folks think the parts like "open access for LEA" are awesome. I've only talked to perhaps 2 homes where they were "I'm not comfortable with that".
Trust is a tricky thing to establish and virtually impossible to regain.
I don't disagree, but I don't think 'trust' is still built on the things it used to be built on.
There's an entire generation that's growing up with "why bother with privacy I've already lost it". They're comfortable living their lives out in the open and prefer convenience
Just look at the popularity of streaming models, "I know Facebook listens to my conversations but what can I do?" type conversations, the prevalence of porn games on Steam (which broadcasts what you're currently playing to friends and anyone who looks at your profile), and the popularity of porn tube sites
This is the same generation that coined the term "side-piece phone", no? I don't think they're living their lives in public; I think they're just getting better at compartmentalizing their identity. Kids don't care if Facebook sees everything they post on Facebook, because they would only use Facebook for the kinds of things everyone should see. Other stuff goes on Snapchat.
"Side-piece" as a concept has existed for a while. I don't think coining that term has any meaning; people have been compartmentalizing their dalliances since the dawn of time
I'm not so sure I'd be so quick to dismiss the differences here. Another example is the notion of having a "finsta" vs their normal Instagram. The finsta is a private Instagram they only show to real friends, while their normal Instagram account is for the world.
This isn't merely "compartmentalizing their dalliances," it's compartmentalization of public vs private (or at least quasi-private) self.
Yes. Generational trends are like a pendulum. They swing. This year's "We don't care" is next year's "No way man." The safest route is respecting privacy. A reputation as a violator won't be easy to shake.
> There's an entire generation that's growing up with "why bother with privacy I've already lost it". They're comfortable living their lives out in the open and prefer convenience
I really don't think that's a fair assessment. Yes, people are comfortable living their lives in the open, and people do prefer convenience, but is that really because they don't care about privacy? Or is it more because we have all the abilities to do this?
If you grew up before that ability, did you really have all that privacy? Or did you only have it because of the lack of technology, and not by choice.
> the prevalence of porn games on Steam (which broadcasts what you're currently playing to friends and anyone who looks at your profile), and the popularity of porn tube sites
What does this has to do with privacy? Maybe the current generation is just more open about the fact that they look at porn, or play some porn game. It's really not a taboo subject anymore, we all know everyone does it, so why hide it?
I'm not sure it counts as positive progress, it's a positive regression to what was normal 20 years ago and as such requires little to no problem solving.
The bigger challenge is making people care, they don't understand how their private information gets weaponized against them, usually to manipulate them to spend more.
Crashlytics/sentry is quite useful for tracking the impact a particular error has on your overall userbase. As for the other trackers, I haven't found statistics other than DAUs/MAUs useful (and these can almost always be tracked via server-side analytics).
The Hard Problem in analytics is getting data that lets you tell real users apart from bots, when bots are motivated to present themselves as real users. Usually can't be done purely server-side.
The time decay of data is something that is rarely discussed in my view. Facebook, Google, et. al. are sitting on mountains of archaeology. Why not purge it all and adapt to a new business model where you actually generate value for other market participants and, god forbid, maybe even the consumer.
Honestly what we need is an equifax-style hack at the NSA/Facebook/Google to absolutely shock people into reality about privacy.
Imagine being able to type in anyone's name and see their entire search history for the last 10 years. It would be total chaos. We'd have a constitutional amendment enforcing digital privacy within a few months.
While I laud the call to be optimistic, Equifax debacle taught us that people can be desentized to seemingly constant stream of news about breaches. And that one breach actually affected people's money.. something sacred in US.
I am honestly not sure what would have to happen. Cynical part of me thinks a powerful senator needs to be seriously compromised, exposed and then, if he/she retains power, things might change a little.
Another option is to attempt to run yourself and be the change you want to see, but I have charisma of a wet blanket so it is not an option for me.
> Equifax debacle taught us that people can be desentized to seemingly constant stream of news about breaches.
Well, sure, because "a breach" isn't anything scary in-and-of-itself, it's just the possibility of something scary.
If tons of people were suddenly victims of credit-card fraud or identity fraud due to the breaches, I don't think that would have been desensitizing in the same way, because that's a real consequence, not just the possibility of one.
Any one of these on its own should be enough but i'm not convinced the average person on the street could tell you what the deal was with any of these scandals.
None of those things had meaningful impact - either at scale or in newsworthy level awful for a smaller group... without that, the story wasn’t sticky and didn’t scare the masses.
E.g.: When a wave of echo users are blackmailed after their private conversations or sexcapades are snooped on, then you’d see outcry.
Equifax was already pretty bad. After that, I imagine there's nothing that can happen to get things to change, even what you're stating. It will be a big deal for a week or two, then completely blow over.
The only way something even as bad as what you stated will cause a change is if it affects politicians directly and they have personal messages and DM's with back-door dealings revealed that make them look bad. Sadly this is typically the only way things get done now is if there's some personal vested interest in the lawmaker.
I'm already thinking of doing any "sensitive" searches (i.e. stuff i would rather google not know, e.g. my mental health state) on google through chrome's incognito mode, but then I think about it more and I realise that if I do a search on incognito mode, the browser probably knows and marks it as an extra special search and hence becomes even more "sensitive" (and reports back to Google)
Incognito mode does literally nothing. You're still doing your Google search from the same IP address so they still know it's you and store it the same as anything else.
If you’re worried about Google knowing, you shouldn’t use Google’s browser. While they might not mark searches like that, we don’t know what Chrome does when we tell it to search for something we’re sensitive about.
I wish someone would make a router with a subscription service for blocking these connections that in no way benefit me. Throw a nice cpu in the router, make it L7. Charge me 5 bucks a month, I'll pay it so long as you never once challenge my trust in you, future router OS provider.
I can't manage this per device. Some, I don't want to, and most, I can't. Let's move the bandaid from the fingers to the wrist. Sell me a privacy aware router that sends 30% of my packets to 0.0.0.0.
Yes, yes it will be another page from the arm's race. Yes, websites will stop rendering content for not letting the tracking get through. I don't care, I live a year at a time and that is how this race is run. We won't win it, but we can die before we finish.
Forgive me, I'm not familiar with pihole's feature set; would this protect from connections not relying on the DNS at all? There is no requirement to use DNS to phone home, and it is protection from that I am interested in - at the packet forwarding level.
Absolutely this... if it doesn't affect buying decisions it doesn't matter. Whining about it without changing behavior is a waste of time.
From what I've seen the most important factors in customer use and purchasing behavior are user experience, user experience, user experience, user experience, and user experience, in that order. Did I mention user experience?
I've even been a little shocked in the B2B market by how rarely corporate customers ask about privacy or security. Only the most seriously security-conscious customers have ever asked my company about e.g. what kind of crypto we use, and these are people dealing with financial or national security data. Everyone else seems to not even care.
No they do. They just don't know it until it happens to them. I have a perfect example.
Someone on reddit was making a statement about how they didn't care that X product was secure. So I entered their username into one of these reddit user analyzers. After I asked them how their dog was enjoying the weather in (wherever they were), they promptly deleted those messages and their account.
> When people are willing to pay more for privacy focused products, then we'll know that the tide has turned.
Or when politicians realize that people care and start including stricter laws as part of their electoral campaigns. Privacy shouldn't have to come at a cost.
I don't think a few incidents would turn the tide over. Literally all of every American's personal information is out there. It's really just a question of targeting.
Decentralization seems like the only good outcome for privacy but it seems unlikely. Privacy has a monetary value and the simple fact is that most people are willing to trade it for very little.
The move for decentralization seems dwindling but I have hope. If companies become the target of sophisticated cyber attacks, there will emerge an economic opportunity for decentralization.
It’s easy to say that nothing has changed. I know that I felt that something was changing when Verizon (of all companies) created and publicized a new privacy-focused search engine.
You can argue how successful their privacy-first search engine is or isn’t going to be. But I think this is yet more evidence that the pendulum of privacy is starting to swing back in the opposite direction.
My internet connected device (not factory IoT) goes through extensive lengths to not ask for a password or ask the user to make an account or provide any data outside exactly what I need to do the job. It’s a lot more work.
You're dreaming, mate. I'm dreaming too, that's a world I'd rather live in, but this will go away as soon as the media remembers that surveillance is how they pay the rent and replaces all these stories with more pro/anti Trump garbage.
It's more of a 'too complex to understand' issue than a care issue. If you spelled out what these trackers really track, a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable with it. Since it's tracking is hidden, people are not worried about what they are not aware of.
I disagree. I think most people just want to view cat memes and connect with their friends online. If the cost of that is their privacy, so be it.
At the end of the day, I think privacy loss will have to have a materially negative impact on people's lives before they start to care enough to change their behavior. Right now, the only material negative impact requires what I would characterize as fear mongering.
Reminds me of that video where Jamie Oliver showed a group of kids the rather disgusting process for making chicken nuggets, and all the children were appropriately disgusted, but when he asked the kids afterwards who wanted to eat some of the chicken nuggets, they all wanted to eat the nuggets.
It's not just about someone seeing your information, it's that it's being weaponized against you, usually to make you spend more money than you otherwise would have. Advertisers aren't charities, they expect a return on their investment.
For those that want to avoid such sillyness, Reolink sells relatively cheap cameras. Rated for out doors, power over ethernet, $50-$60 per camera, and includes a microphone.
They can easily be connected to zone minder, or any software that can take a rtsp:// URL. Even handles motion detection for specific areas of camera, so you can include the driveway but exclude the sidewalk. You can have it email or upload videos... without access to any reolink related cloud.
So you could easily put them in production with zero network access and let something you control notify you with images or video clips for any activity.
There's numerous cheap products, but the reolink seems to be one of the better ones that play well with others and doesn't require any WAN network access.
Ubiquiti and Axis also have some very nice products, but generally are more expensive.
Slightly OT, but I'm curious to understand the use-case for indoor/outdoor home-security cameras. Yes, it sounds pretty awesome to "catch" someone, or trigger a motion alarm, but does it work in practice? Like, is it hooked to the police or to a security firm, or what? Because someone with a face mask is unidentifiable anyway, and even if you can identify some feature, a burglar can leave with whatever valuables, or cause damage... So it's not preventing the crime, but might marginally aid in after-the-fact investigation? so is it worth it?
I'm probably not a good example, I live in a small apartment, don't have any valuables besides passports and loose change. I just don't see much of a point for having cameras. Instead I focus on deterring casual burglars by using semi-intelligent timer-based lights plus a simple radio tuned to a station with lots of talking when we're away from home. Perhaps a security cam has a deterring aspect, but not sure of the legality of it in Germany where I live, and I guess a dummy camera would achieve a similar effect as a real one?
Well my motivation started when I found an uncoiled coat hanger on top of my car. So I bought two cameras (both with IR illumination) and pointed them to the two sides of my car. Even a casual observer will notice the two cameras (with 2 rings of glowing red lights) pointed at them when they enter my driveway. I figure it's a $120 worth of prevention... hopefully.
The cameras can read the license numbers of cars going up and down my dead end street, and have a NTP synced time stamp on them. So I have reported license plate numbers to the police a few times when various neighborhood issues have come up.
But no, I don't think it will magically arrest someone breaking into my house. But they are still pretty useful. Did someone leave a package on my front door? Is my kids friend's parent here for pickup/drop off? Did the garbage truck get here yet? WTF is that loud truck noise out front? Is that knock at the door someone with a clip board? Or someone trying to get me to believe in their god?
One thing it does help, is that at least in my area it's common for a thief to knock to see if anyone is home, then break down that door or force a rear door to enter the house is nobody answers. So being able to see and even respond to the knocker might well prevent a breakin, even if you aren't physically there.
Chances are low to identify someone (for the time being, but increased video quality and facial recog. vs. a simple driver's license/ID database may change that soon). Obviously like you said, nothing you can do with a face mask.
But at least if you know something is happening in real-time, motion triggers being the most important, there is at least some chance to intervene or call the police depending on the circumstances. Even if you can't stop them, speed is key, and if they are on foot they could be caught in the area afterwards with vague id such as clothing only. Capturing a license plate is probably optimal though, if they aren't on foot. Cameras are very good these days - HD and higher 30/60fps video - not the pixelated/blocky/useless recordings of 10 years ago.
Also good to know ahead of time if there is anyone snooping around looking for easy targets (as small-time burglars do). Some systems do also have monitoring services.
Otherwise yeah, cameras are at best a deterrent and source of evidence, nothing more as a passive device. Best security system I've ever had was a German Shepherd. Fully autonomous deterrent + active response if necessary :)
The cameras are also a great deterrent just for being there. After installing some on our vacation house, our gardener told us there's almost never junk flyers anymore.
I like the Ubiquiti cameras because unifi handles the webrtc handshake so you can run your cameras local and see them from anywhere while keeping data on-prem.
It's a little annoying Protect doesn't have a software install but the legacy unifi video still work fine. I put in ~5 cameras over the last few weeks and been really happy with them.
FWIW: I just upgraded to UniFi Protect (with the CloudKey Gen2). Although it's annoying I don't get to run the software on my own server anymore, I've found the Protect app for iOS is much more polished and is much more responsive than the older UniFi Video app.
Good to hear. I led the UniFi Protect effort at Ubiquiti. Responsiveness and fast time-to-video were our top UX priorities for the system. The WebRTC direct-connect and bypassing cloud servers were big factors in delivering that responsiveness. The added security and lack of monthly fees was another major bonus.
While I have you here, please consider the option to install the software on-prem.
I was this || close to not going unifi because it wasn't clear what the longtime support for unifi video was. I'm still not super-happy with that aspect as it's not clear if the hardware is tied to protect or not.
Having thrown countless hours into zoneminder I had to give up. It's just too buggy. Does anyone have any other alternatives they've got to work? Open Source or otherwise
I tried zoneminder in earnest and was severely disappointed. I've been running Ubiquity Video in a container on my local server, which is pretty great as a simple NVR, but _only_ works with their cameras, which won't work for me.
Blue Iris seems to be the overall favorite, and it's pretty inexpensive considering the fact that it seems to be so well regarded. I don't have Windows on my network, and I was strongly considering running BI on KVM, but I don't think my old server is beefy enough to reliably run windows with video software. I was also looking into building a box for it, but it turns out buying a used Optiplex on Ebay was cheaper and should be more than enough for tracking a few cameras.
I'll be setting it up this weekend, so I don't have much of my own experience to share, yet.
I saw a commercial software solution a number of months ago that used some kind of machine learning or AI to reduce false positives on motion detection but now I can't find it. Are you familiar with any software that does this?
Another option is from Amcrest and is built as a doorbell. I got it because it doesn’t require a cloud connection to function and plugs in easily to Home Assistant. Easy install with existing wiring and uses WiFi for data.
Note: one disappointment was that the app automatically reached out to an Amcrest server by default (I assume) on the assumption that everyone wants access to their home doorbell cam from outside the network ... I could not find a setting in the app so just took care of it the usual way—blocked it with the firewall. Regardless, it still works in this config.
Ever since I blocked the outgoing connection via firewall, the app now says my camera is offline. That being said, the camera feed is still working in Home Assistant, which is all I wanted. If you were using HA and wanted more functionality (audio, etc), it does appear to be available.
I've been using Wyze to keep tabs on a new pet while I'm not at home. It is very convenient, but I was pretty worried about privacy, even before that came out.
That's probably going to be difficult mostly because of heat dissipation issues. You'd probably have to make the case out of metal to act as a big sink for both the Rpi itself and the converter heat outputs.
> They can also run off of a wall wart or solar panel
Which is still a nonstarter for me, since none of the locations I would want to put a camera have an electrical jack handy, and many of them don't get enough sunlight to make a solar panel a viable option.
The camera still has to run for that to work, unless you're also going to power a separate motion sensor and/or a small computer to handle automating the recording; all of this just decreases how long the battery lasts.
> The camera still has to run for that to work, unless you're also going to power a separate motion sensor and/or a small computer to handle automating the recording
Security cameras will have motion sensors built in. Recording would be elsewhere, the camera would just need to stream video for some configurable time if the motion sensor detects an event.
(This is all functionality built into Ring cameras, so for anyone looking for an alternative to them it doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me.)
Yes, Arlo also makes good battery operated cameras. They are higher quality than Blink cameras, with higher resolution. On the other hand, Blink cameras have better battery life.
Nor did I. But I bought a PoE switch for my garage and installed one near my Front door, two pointing at my driveway, and one pointing at my fence door. PoE is just cat 5 cable, it's considered "low voltage" so you can just run it where you need to. It's much easier than trying to running normal power, which you'd need to do for a wifi connected camera (unless you want to regularly replace batteries).
It's a nice clean mount, I just use the template, drill a 1/2" or so hole for the PoE cable, and then 3 screws to finish the mount. It looks nice and clean, works great, never runs out of power, and is never impacted by the random Wifi issues.
Sure it's a pain to run cat5 everywhere, but I haven't found a better solution, none of my camera locations had power.
Are many Ring units sold outside of the US? I see them advertised as a way to combat this "porch pirate" thing. But to me, as someone living in the UK, the idea of a delivery person leaving a package on my doorstep for someone to steal is mad. If I'm not in I expect another delivery attempt or for the package to be taken to the secure local* depot where I can pick it up. If they decide to leave it outside my door and it gets stolen, I fully expect (and will get) another one delivered at no cost to me, other than the time penalty. Why is this even a thing? Is this a new thing that Amazon created with their delivery strategy and now you also get to buy the solution from them?!
And if it's just a security camera watching my property/car, then a dumb one sounds fine and cheaper. Not to mention it'll actually look like a security camera which is arguably more valuable as a deterrent.
Deliveries left unsecured on a doorstop is a common practice in the US, typically found in low-crime residential areas. It was by no means invented by Amazon -- it's been a thing for a long time.
This is very common even in higher density suburbs. Unless an area is known to have a crime issue, it's standard practice in the U.S. to leave the package on the front steps. I've lived in the burbs for the vast majority of my life and have never had a package stolen. Despite common media portrayals, the U.S. is mostly a very nice place to live.
I feel like Europeans often forget just how big the USA is. I live in a major metro. Just like in EU, it would be ludicrous to leave a package on someones doorstep.
But if you live in a rural area, things are completely different. Which from my understanding is the same as EU for the most part.
In the past 20 years, I've lived across the major metro areas of Seattle, Silicon Valley, and now Los Angeles. in all places, it's been common practice for delivery companies to leave packages outside unless the shipper has specified otherwise for a high-value or theft-prone item.
Over literally thousands of deliveries during that time, the number that have disappeared mysteriously is under 1%. In fact, more have not been delivered at all (i.e., fraud on the part of the delivery person) than have been stolen.
1% is pretty high theft rate. 1% means if you get a package every week, once in 2 years one will be stolen. Or it means in a city of 100,000 1000 people will have thefts of their packages.
A different way of looking at it is, with ~5 packages that were likely stolen out of 2,000 or so delivered, that's about a 1/4% loss rate, which is much lower than the typical retail store suffers from shoplifting.
So, it's pretty much priced into their margins already.
Its pretty common in non-rural areas in the US. I live in a suburban area and its normal. Some of my coworkers who live downtown have had issues with porch pirates, so I'm assuming they have porch drop off as well.
Indeed, pretty much for most Europe would be: not signed -> not delivered. Either they call before hand (if the delivery company has the phone number or they can fetch it), have another attempt to deliver, or leave the parcel in a self servicing pick up area, dropping a note in the mailbox with the code to open.
So they don't leave it on your doorstep, but they put the code in your box? That sounds even better for thieves! Get the code from the box, go to the self-service area, type in the code, and walk away without any suspicion, since that's what everyone else there does!
In UK, and most of Europe AFAIK, the "mailbox" is a hole that goes through to inside the house. The thief would probably have to break in to the house to get the code. Porch pirates are specifically avoiding breaking-and-entering.
Here in Australia if I'm not home and miss the attempted delivery of a package a card will be left in my mailbox. The card has a barcode on it and will tell me where to pick the package up from, typically it is from my local post office.
When I bring the card to post office they scan the barcode then send someone out back to fetch my package they ask me for some ID and check the name and address on the id with the name + address on the package. No fuss no drama. The idea of leaving package on doorstep seems bizarre.
Most delivery companies in my part of the US allow you to specify what will happen if you're not there when they attempt delivery. You usually have options like "try again later", "deliver to my neighbor", "let me pick it up", and "leave it on my doorstep".
Most people prefer to have it left on their doorstep because the other options are a bit of a hassle.
>If I'm not in I expect another delivery attempt or for the package to be taken to the secure local* depot where I can pick it up.
It's not the lack of localness that's the problem for me in the UK, it's more that most depots are only open 9-5 when people are at work. If you have anything resembling a long commute (particularly by public transport) then you can get really screwed over, especially if you can't drive for whatever reason you pretty much have to take half a day off to collect your package in many cases.
I'm in the US, and I have a UPS depot that I can walk to if I miss a delivery with signature required, and that depot is open from 10AM-9PM seven days a week. The absolute maddening part is that, instead of taking undelivered packages to the depot at the end of each day, they wait until the next business day!
I try to avoid using UPS when I can, since they are the most user hostile delivery service in my area. I have more of a chance of getting a package on time when they leave it on my porch unattended.
This is part of why FedEx has been doing deals with companies like Walgreens, where some locations are open 24x7. This is in addition to their FedEx Office (was Kinko's) locations, some of which are open 24x7.
Amazon has "Amazon Lockers" that are available in many places in the US, many of which are open extended hours, and some of which are open 24x7.
These are not the only options.
Even the USPS has Post Office Boxes, and many US Post Offices have external spaces where the PO Boxes are accessible 24x7.
In Sweden most packages are delivered to third party businesses that sign agreements with the delivery companies. Places like gas stations, convenience stores and grocery stores.
Nowadays there are companies that offer evening time home delivery so that you can always be there.
we have this here in the USA too. UPS has what's called "access points" where things can be delivered, or are dropped off if they can't get you. Some packages are signature required, so if no signing, it gets sent there. Convenience stores, etc.
It's just mostly people aren't used to doing that and are hard to change. People often just send packages to work or a friends house instead. With access points, they can and will return a package to sender beyond a certain time.
-send it to an amazon locker and pick it up on the way home.
If you have it sent to your house and you're not in, a lot of the time it gets dropped off at a neighbours house. I've taken in a few parcels when I've been working from home.
All of that. Additionally, Royal Mail stuff goes to the local sorting office which for most people is pretty close by. Services like "Click and Collect" let you deliver your parcels to local shops. Amazon don't want to support that because it's a cost they cannot control.
It is true that the local depot for other parcel service (DPD etc) can be quite far away, but those services usually offer a a number of repeat delivery attempts or an option to leave with a neighbour.
The number of working adults in a household is irrelevant to delivering parcels securely.
> send it to an amazon locker and pick it up on the way home.
That's not always a realistic option. I'd have to go pretty far out of my way to get to the nearest Amazon locker. And it only works if your packages are coming from Amazon.
You solved it! Except the post office won't accept Fedex or UPS packages, and if you try to have a package delivered to one, UPS and Fedex will refuse the shipment.
You can redirect FedEx packages to any local Walgreens up to midnight before the delivery day. UPS has something similar with CVS. For me this is even more convenient than USPS due to more locations and longer hours. It works even for signature-required packages.
That's cool and something I didn't know about, but I'd still argue it does nothing to solve porch pirates in 90% of the country. CVS and Walgreens are non-existent in rural America outside of large towns/cities.
If only post offices were used they'd become a huge bottleneck in many cities due to queuing and also packages get delivered by many other private companies. So lockers (Amazon locker, DHL locker) or designated drop off locations that can be a regular store or kiosk also pick up the slack.
In the UK most building have a "porter" so most deliveries go straight to him/her, he/she signs and then drops off the packages INTO the flats (yes some keep keys of all flats). In the USA you have something similar, building manager(?).
I don't really understand it either. Just seems like a way to preserve costs. Only thing that would come to mind is that the US is less densely populated compared to Europe, making delivering them to neighbors/local depot a lot more time consuming
I don't know if the density part is really relevant. One the whole, they are comparable. Country to US it varies, and States (US) to other countries it varies even more [0]. I have lived in several very densely populated cities and they all still do porch drop off. I think this may just fall down to a cultural difference than anything else.
Personally I don't even want a smart TV with a camera or an Alexa in my house but a friend was just proudly telling me about his new Ring doorbell and I know one neighbour with one. (both in the UK).
> But to me, as someone living in the UK, the idea of a delivery person leaving a package on my doorstep for someone to steal is mad.
I think it's true that across most of the U.S. if it weren't safe to leave a package at one's house then people would be up in arms demanding that the police do their jobs. ISTR that the U.K. crime rate is about 2½ times that of the U.S.
This was such a terrible experience the 2 times in my life that I've been forced to do it, that I still remember both of them vividly almost 15 years later. You can be sure I'll never do that again regardless of the purchase or price. There is nothing for sale anywhere on this earth that would be worth it.
> If they decide to leave it outside my door and it gets stolen, I fully expect (and will get) another one delivered at no cost to me, other than the time penalty.
That's exactly what happened the one and only time I've had a package stolen from my porch. It was an external hard drive worth around $100. Amazon sent me a new one immediately. I even tried getting the serial number out of them (at the request of the police) and they were like "haha, no. Here's free one day shipping on your replacement, and we consider this matter closed."
The benefit of something like Ring is that criminals will know what they are and that somebody has very likely just been alerted to their presence.
I speak from experience when I say they tend not to care about traditional 'dumb' cameras as, generally, nobody is going to be watching them until after the act.
I wonder why Ring is being specifically called out for this practice. This combination of “trackers” are very common in the app ecosystem as they perform much the same analytics functions used on the web ecosystem (e.g. Branch offers ad
campaign attribution - did this user sign up from an ad campaign and which one so I can work out ad ROI). I’d hazard a guess that analysis of the apps on your phone (Android and iOS) would result in well over 50% of them using some combination of these services.
What’s more interesting is that it could be argued these fall under the intent of the EU cookie directive (even though in a lot of cases they don’t actually use cookies). The only app I have seen asking for cookie like consent is Airbnb (who use all of these same services and more)
I think several companies are routinely called out for nefarious privacy invasions. Ring is extra interesting because of the hypocrisy in claiming they're in the home security business, while actually gathering and selling information that can be be directly counter-productive in that effort (such as when a customer is likely to be home or not).
The thing is they aren’t actually selling that data. All the services mentioned are paid services that ring are paying to use. And ironically they sprang up to fill a need because Google and Apple made it almost impossible to do app install attribution to protect people’s privacy. So we now get more invasive tracking to work around that.
They aren’t trackers in that respect. Read up on the companies in question. They basically provide analytics to mobile apps so they can better understand their customers to allow them to improve the experience of the app.
It’s the equivalent of Google Analytics.
Now how those companies then use the data they collect as part of providing analytics is another question (and why lots of people prefer to block Google Analytics for example)
> This combination of “trackers” are very common in the app ecosystem
True. This is why I have to firewall off all apps so that they can't communicate out without my permission. This is also the primary reason why I'm leaving the smartphone ecosystem entirely.
The invasiveness of apps is intolerable to me, getting worse, and getting increasingly hard to mitigate.
Word! I never really installed much on my smartphone to begin with. If you ask me, a lot of services and app developers have this horrible sense of entitlement to all kinds of information about their users. It creeps me out.
The difference is that Amazon isn’t an advertising company and has little incentive going through user data on their systems. In addition, the data isn’t in a standardised format so they would have to spend considerable efforts parsing the data first.
Facebook and Google on the other hand make their money from stalking people and developers are giving them data in a nice standardised format.
Is there a difference here between "an advertising company" and "does a lot of advertising"?
Amazon is very much the latter and that would seem to provide plenty of incentive to do dig through data / recognize the value / use it as they wish.
I'm sure they do plenty of analytics on data from their own platforms and that considerable effort could easily be extended to include any other data that they have access to.
> Facebook and Google on the other hand make their money from stalking people and developers are giving them data in a nice standardised format.
Do we know that the privacy policy/terms of service for these services allow Google/Facebook to use the data in the way that the BBC article seems worried about?
And before you say that "it doesn't matter what the ToS says", it does very much matter, breaking a ToS would paint a very big target no these companies, there are tons of lawyers out there that would love to catch companies at this, easy money.
Facebook claimed 2FA phone numbers would not be used for advertising. They eventually broke that claim.
There are thousands of companies breaking the GDPR (Facebook and Google included) and yet I have yet to see the tons of lawyers going after the easy money. Companies keep doing it because they know the regulation isn’t enforced.
There's no easy money for lawyers in GDPR - the big financial 'teeth' of GDPR are in the form of fines enforced by regulators to the state, not (as often in USA) in the form of huge civil lawsuits from which private law firms could get a share.
Amazon is working their way towards vertical integration across as many industries as possible. Since effective advertising is critical for some of those integration steps, Amazon is 100% incentivized to hoard and process user data.
AWS is the only thing that keeps Amazon alive; if they lose their clients’ trust they will go down the drain in no time so there’s no way they’ll risk it.
i have no doubt that if you have a ballooning SaaS business hosted on AWS there is a capture team lead investigating what your tool does and whether or not it is worth amazon creating a team to re-implement in order to crush you.
they definitely do this for physical goods so i'm not naive enough to think they aren't talented enough to do it digitally.
How would they be "sacrificing it"? Where are people going to move to? AWS is the industry standard for public clouds, Azure's feature set is worse, and GCP is basically an also-ran.
There's a big difference between Google Analytics and Sentry. Putting those in the same list is so reductive that it undermines your argument.
Tracking everything you can about your users so advertisers can better target you is evil.
Capturing all the local variables during some unexpected Exception (that might happen to include some user data) for the purpose of debugging is not even remotely evil.
User-data is totally fine to have, it's what you _do_ with it that matters
I disagree. By interacting with a web server, you are inherently sharing some data with the operator like your ip address (so you can get a response back) or any request headers you choose to set (User-agent for mobile vs desktop sites, for instance). Nobody is forcing you to make requests to any particular site, and nobody is forcing to you include all this info. If you don't want your data spread around, don't do all that spreading.
I agree that using user-data outside of some agreement is bad (and illegal under the GDPR), but I believe that an implicit agreement exists between web-server provider and user that their data will be used for the mechanical operation of the website, including logging stack-traces. Otherwise TCP/IP wouldn't work.
I could show this article to my neighbor who owns a Ring doorbell and he wouldn’t care. Nobody I know seems to care about digital privacy. And it’s not just people who are less technically knowledgeable, either. A friend of mine who has worked in computer sciences his entire life doesn’t care about privacy. A different friend, who already has a raspberry-pi connected to his home network, refused to install pi-hole (pi-hole.net) because, in his words, “I don’t really care.” Nobody cares.
Our decision to use the Raspberry Pi 4 and not a proprietary development board was due to the ease in which AIKEA can be recycled into other projects and devices, should backers no longer need a home security device.
I suspect it means using ML to identify things in the camera. Like say cat, dog, man with clip board, man carrying box, etc.
I've love to get a hangout/signal/IM text identifying anything approaching my door without having to look at a picture. Bonus if the face recognition is good enough to recognize family.
" Ring doorbell 'gives Facebook and Google user data"
I hope I really don't have to explain the implication in this statement of how the doorbell sits there, records/listens, and then sends out data to FB/Google.
Versus saying that a smartphone app collects tracking analytics, like pretty much every other major app out there.
Is there an opt-out? Or, more importantly, was there an explicit opt-in?
Data from crashes on my device is still my data, not Google's. Google can pop up an alert telling me things went pear-shaped, and then ask to send it back to the devs for analysis.
This is a company already trusted with extremely sensitive information and who have suffered a stream of stories suggesting they may not be fulfilling that trust in the way a reasonable customer might expect, all the while while charging users enough of a price that the service isn't obviously ad/data sale supported.
The bar should be a lot higher for them, it's not some free tic-tac-toe app.
iOS crash reporting and analytics are built in, but requires explicit user opt-in. It's not a requirement that an iOS app use Crashlytics or similar to get this sort of data, so saying "every single app will use such service" is not exactly truthful. And, besides, saying that "everyone does it" is not an excuse for the behavior.
Highlighting Ring makes sense as it represents a new dimension in terms of data collection and data risk. Highlighting Google and Facebook makes sense as they are the major data collectors who take great liberties in using the data to help undermining democracy and manipulate individuals through hyper targeted advertisements.
Worth noting that "crash reporting" is very much worth reporting on and paying attention to, as transmitting a lot of sensitive data in crash reports could be beneficial to fixing bugs (but obviously not beneficial to the indiviual's rights).
This sort of pedantic hand-wringing is tiring. Google sells many things, one of which is advertising. Firebase Crashlytics may be free, but it's made available by Google in the hopes that developers pay for Firebase's full suite of paid offerings—it's not to populate additional user data to their ad or search algorithms.
This may be an excessively optimistic read. A person has to know a reasonable amount about software systems and common development practices to decide crash reporting isn't worth writing about.
The bar to deciding that Google is getting user's data somehow and this is newsworthy is lower, and requires no grasp of underlying details. Technology journalists are often journalists first, and technologists second if at all. I don't blame them, it's the nature of the job.
The crash data is needed for debugging. It's debatable if it's your data, it's the developer's misbehaving code. An app can be architected so more of the code runs on the server than on the client, if an action you took on the client causes a crash on ny server I'm not going to ask you for permission to look at my crash logs.
Not by me. I'm not going to debug the app; I'm just going to kill it and restart it. If the developer of the app wants my data to help his debugging, he needs to ask.
> if an action you took on the client causes a crash on my server I'm not going to ask you for permission to look at my crash logs.
Of course not, but your crash logs aren't coming from my phone. If you want to look at data from my phone, you need to ask.
Do you have some kind of source that would indicate that phone apps on iOS cannot possibly have any sort of 3rd party trackers?
No claims in the article were made regarding the iOS version of the app, so I don't know why we should jump to the conclusion that the iOS version doesn't track what you do and report to 3rd parties.
It looks like the iOS app was not included in the test at all, so no conclusion can be assumed.
Loads of Android apps do this. If you are running Android >=9 then you can block the trackers by changing your DNS settings to use one from https://nextdns.io/
The article references Crashalytics and MixPanel as third party services where the data is sent. Aren’t those just tools for error logging and usage measurement? Not sure about the others though.
I work at Google (on Firebase) but I am asking this question as a regular mobile developer.
What do people on HN find acceptable in the apps they use? As a developer I want some basic analytics and crash reporting so I'm not just stumbling in the dark but I would hate for my users to say that I'm tracking them involuntarily. Is there a way to strike a balance that seems fair? Are there particular services people trust?
I think it all depends on what you use that data for. I have no problem with a developer tracking me throughout the app, as long as they use the data to improve their app. The same goes for crash reporting.
But as soon as that data is sold, or used to somehow push sales or content, then it becomes a problem for me.
It's frustrating that Amazon is trying to hard to win the prize for being the creepiest tech giant. I generally like Amazon and much of my online shopping is through them, but this makes me more inclined to try alternatives.
I've already mostly dropped Facebook and Google, it'll be harder for me to ween myself off of Amazon.
Wow what a great irony - a device that's designed to help your surveil your own property is being used to surveil the people that bought the device and by extension put their trust in it and the company.
It's one thing to have a business model where it's understood that a service is free in exchange for user data but what we are seeing increasingly is this greed where its not enough to sell a good or service for cash because that would be leaving money on the table. These companies seem to have an expectation and entitlement that your data is part of the business model despite not disclosing that to their customers.
This may be a workaround for the app for those who are more technical. Since I have NextCloud Server set up, I added a custom script on the server to auto-download all my ring MP4s from the Ring Server every 15 mins. Also:
- creates GIF for faster viewing through the nextcloud app.
- updates info for current status of the ring devices.
If you are an EU citizen, you can ask the company for that data yourself and if they don't reply, file a complaint with privacy commission of your country.
The various privacy commissions (PC) in the EU are actually talking to each other. The privacy invading companies are testing whether or not they can force their case to be decided only in the jurisdiction of the PC in Ireland. (legally, this is just nonsense... )
I've seen many try this tactic and it has always failed. I'm guessing they are using this as a delay tactic to prevent it being decided by the courts.
Is there any legal precedent for a retailer being held accountable for the products they sell. Enough to sway decision making at the C-Level? Perhaps we're one Home Depot or one Lowe's away from "Sorry. We're not going to sell these type of products." A massive return of unsold product could crush a young company. If CVS can stop selling cigarettes, perhaps others might follow but in a different way.
This rampant surveillance economy will continue to fester until it bites some influential people where it really hurts. Until then nobody will be safe.
The privacy horror aside is there a possibility that this data sharing could possibly be used to subvert the security of the owners home that ring is protecting? Could patterns be inferred such as a home owner's work schedule, when they are on vacation, that they might be using a device with outdated firmware etc? Or is that too far fetched?
Makes you wonder why Facebook needs that data? To link who comes home to FB location and people's profiles? I'm sure they pay them for this but then you read what happened after the NSA leak in recent times where the NSA had put intentional backdoors in with companies
I hope they do Audible next. I'd really like to know whether or not the extreme sluggishness of the app is due to what I suspect: badly designed activity tracking that implemented by developers who don't know how to do this asynchronously.
I would love to see some financial documents leaked from these companies.
Let's say Apple pre installs Google+ on all its phones. Then I want to know how much apple got paid for this, i.e. how many cents is a users privacy worth to them. And how much money did Google make by using this data, i.e. how much was the data really worth.
Because until we have such data, companies can always hide behind phrases such as "... share with partners ... to provide relevant services" and all that nonsense.
Does that really matter? Let’s say they get a hundred dollars per service, does that make it better or worse, or maybe it doesn’t change anything?
Having said that, I’ve always wondered the same for TV ads. Let’s say I wanted the option to pay extra to never see ads, how much would that be? Why doesn’t the market give me that option?
That everyone does it is hardly a justification. And companies have no divine right to analytics, especially not when it concerns PII and paying customers.
This all is a side effect of the paranoia built by the corporation's. Why would you even want to look at the door when you are 1000's of miles away from your home. I understand pet and baby monitors but this information being on the web for anyone is just bonkers.
We are in an age where Technology is advancing at a pace where we don't understand what we need to do with IoT devices.
Aside from the obvious use of monitoring my door while I'm away, it's also useful to knowing when a package is delivered unexpectedly when I'm away from home so I can ask a friend or family member to pick it up so it's not sitting on my front porch for a week or two.
Are you a darknet dropshipper? (Nothing wrong with that, just can't imagine what carrier doesn't give you a tracking number that you can get alerts on delivery/check status of.)
Family sometimes send me packages unannounced, not all shippers (especially international) give real-time tracking numbers, not everyone in our household keeps perfect track of their inbound shipments, and sometimes delivery agents just make a mistake - one time I came home from work to a big screen TV on my porch. It was supposed to go to neighbor, but that's something I wouldn't want on my porch for a week - even if I don't care if it's stolen, it's like a big "No one is home here!" sign.
All those Chinese products with free shipping were like that. They'd show up one day randomly. Also, I buy most of my stuff online so there's always something in flight. Books, toothpaste, whatever.
I use 17track for that. It's an app that I drop all my AliExpress/Amazon/eBay tracking codes in and I will get a push notification that the package has been delivered. Don't need a camera monitoring my neighbours front door for that.
We order a lot online. I can't even count how many times we get notified of a delivery via the app, but it is nowhere. A day or three later is when it actually shows up on our door. When we've complained, we've been told to wait a day or three. Sometimes the notification comes in a day late too. So a door camera helps us know when to look out for a delivery for realzies. Oh, and if a neighbor drops by while we are out, we can chat real quick over the door camera.
I'm guessing you don't buy stuff off of AliExpress much? Sometimes the shipping window is like 1 month or bigger, you just never know when it will finally reach your house.
I bought a cheap ring doorbell for our vacation house and indeed, it's a piece of junk. The picture quality is atrocious lol.
However, it and the other cameras I have (including an actually decent one in the entryway) almost eliminated the random door-to-door solicitors and people leaving flyers all over my front door!
It's also really funny because people hate cameras. I've seen someone cover their face before pushing the doorbell button and then walk away because they felt too afraid to be seen on camera.
OTOH, the ring app is really, really terrible. Woof! If you install it and leave it on defaults, it'll notify you about anything your neighbors post. And boy the things they post lol. Kid riding their bike by? SUSPICIOUS! EVERYONE KEEP AN EYE OUT! Random dog?
My grandma used a similar product to send video of a break in attempt to relatives so they could pass it on to the police while she was in another city.
But I get your point. A lot of this IoT stuff is mostly pointless and serves only to make people feel like they are living in the future.
> There goes the argument "if you're not paying for the product then you are the product" because ring and associated services aren't cheap.
Not really. If you aren't paying for the product, then you certainly are the product. If you are paying for the product, then you may still be the product, but you also may not. It all boils down in that case to how trustworthy and greedy the vendor is.
I think the OP's point is that the latter is so common nowadays that it makes more sense to not give the benefit of the doubt and assume that paying for something gives you privacy and makes vendors less data-hungry, and I think that's probably becoming good advice.
You could buy a TV worth several thousand dollars and they'll still show you advertisements. Also in Samsung's case they'll take screenshots of what you're watching to find out what you like. There's always money in the advertising revenue stream.
Are you talking about smart TVs? Because ads only show up on real TVs if you tell them to. It's the cable you plugged into it or the ads at the beginning of the movie you just paid money for. It's not the TV. The TV is dumb as hell. It only shows you what you tell it to show you.
I remember buying a PS4 and still had to opt-out of data collection and then change like 20 settings on their bullshit social network I don't even want to use.
Windows 10 is paid and yet it has ads and insane data collection.
When I made the GPT-2 Chess notebook (sigh... do I link to it and risk seeming like I'm plugging my stuff, or let people google for it? Whatever: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/12hlppt1f2N0L9Orp8YC...) one of the first questions a reporter asked me was "How many people played it?"
I had to be like "I have no idea. A few thousand at least, based on bandwidth bills."
Then they started asking if I was tracking the games. "Nope. I don't like apps that track data, so I didn't want to make one here."
And at the end of it, I was like... this is stupid. I should have tracked clicks and tracked the games.
We should have a clear distinction between "user data" and "data that common people might reasonably care about being tracked." The headlines are a strange game of telephone. Every app tracks data. That's what most apps are for.
> And at the end of it, I was like... this is stupid. I should have tracked clicks and tracked the games.
Why do you feel this way? I agree with your positions at the beginning ("I don't like apps that track data, so I didn't want to make one here.") and the end ("Every app tracks data. That's what most apps are for."), but I don't see why that would cause you to want to have tracked games and interaction data on your own project.
Perhaps if I'd ever built something that got popular I'd know the feeling better.
Well generally I think anyone who creates something is interested in some feedback on how well it's going.
A developer might react differently if 10 people used their software or 10,000. Or even if 10 people used the program 1000 times vs 10,000 people using it once.
Not to mention that it's hard to iterate on something and make clear improvements if you can't tell how the software is being used. Sure you can read forums, tickets, issues, etc. But if your settings allow 1000 different configurations and 99% of your users use one of 5 different configurations that can be a very useful thing to know.
Hm. Well, being able to answer basic questions like "How many people played it?" and "Can you use the human inputs to help improve the engine?" would be nice.
Can't use the human inputs to improve anything if the data doesn't exist.
Lichess tracks all games, for example, and I don't think they ask for permission. Is that a bad thing? I was forced to conclude it's probably fine, but perhaps an argument could be made.
I had a ring for one week. After about 24hrs of ridiculous setup, constant notifications when I left the house or anything happened inside the detection zone even shadows, and realizing I didn’t coming home to look into a camera that was constantly uploading to someone’s computer I’ll never be allowed to access - I put that POS back in the box and returned it.
Nice idea in theory, exploitive data mine in practice. I hate it.
Sounds like you didn't configure it to what you wanted. You can turn off the motion detection and just listen for door bell presses instead. Mine runs off the battery instead of hooking to a power line so I had to disable most of the features so that the battery would last longer than a month.
If you are remotely concerned about handing data to a 3rd party then I would just not use this doorbell. You can probably find a "dumber" one or construct one yourself. I might end up doing it, too, tbh.
Well, despite the implication I’m just “didn’t do it right” I adjusted every possible feature in the app. The whole thing is garbage.
I won’t apologize for Ring being a bad product while this and every other related article supports that they take ownership and share your data without your approval.
Ring doesn't upload data unless you pay for a cloud storage account.
You could argue that the doorbell transmits the video/audio over the internet, but that transport is encrypted to the Ring app, and its deleted off of AWS after its viewed on the App.
If you really want privacy, you should also return your cellphone and go back to using a flip phone.
> and its deleted off of AWS after its viewed on the App
How do you know this? And how are you sure that information isn't shared before being deleted?
Also, it's not only about privacy (although I do think people should care a bit more about it than they do on average). Data stored and sold makes money that is dependent on you to produce, yet you get no compensation for it. Many people have a problem with that, including myself.
I mean, nobody REALLY knows, but if that's the standard you are going to use, then you pretty much have to assume that any company can and will spy on you, and apply the same critique to them.
Based on reports and news, Amazon has been perhaps the best out of the big companies when dealing with privacy, as they are fairly transparent on the data they collect for what use, and had not had any major cases of leaks despite them perhaps having the best data set of peoples behavior with shopping history which is the most relevant to advertisers.
Being that Ring uses AWS for back end, as can be verified through network traffic inspection, I personally don't see any red flags with them saying they delete the data.
>Data stored and sold makes money that is dependent on you to produce, yet you get no compensation for it.
This is HORRIBLY wrong. Gmail, youtube, reddit and most everything that is free on the web and on mobile is your compensation for your data. Yes, companies make profit, but they still spend that advertising revenue on hosting and maintaining that service, and recouping the initial investment they put into building the thing.
> I mean, nobody REALLY knows, but if that's the standard you are going to use, then you pretty much have to assume that any company can and will spy on you, and apply the same critique to them.
That is the standard I use and I do apply the same critique to every company.
> Gmail, youtube, reddit and most everything that is free on the web and on mobile is your compensation for your data.
First off, I don't use all of those services. According to your logic, you and every other person who has data in their system and is not using a service is owed cold hard cash. Secondly, the value that I get out of using them is not commensurate with the profit they are making. These companies are making EXORBITANT amounts of money off of peoples data. It is in no way acceptable compensation. Third, I can't opt out of them using the data, even if I stop using a service or if I never used their service at all.
>That is the standard I use and I do apply the same critique to every company.
Then why are you on HN? They could be collecting your IP and data on you.
>First off, I don't use all of those services. According to your logic, you and every other person who has data in their system and is not using a service is owed cold hard cash.
The only data that exists for people that don't use services is 3p tracking data, which is from people visiting websites, that are supported by ads. So yes, if you view content on a website and a tracking cookie or pixel records you, that is you using the website, and the advertiser is paying the host for this which allows the host to continue hosing the website.
> These companies are making EXORBITANT amounts of money off of peoples data
Whoa, this is like almost a communism argument. Dictating how much money anyone should make is not a good road to go down on. There is nothing wrong with companies generating profit, they are capitalizing on supply versus demand.
> Based on reports and news, Amazon has been perhaps the best out of the big companies when dealing with privacy
They pitch their Ring doorbells as a surveillance network to police departments, provide law enforcement with an easy to use interface and map of their camera network, and allow police to go after people who choose not to share their recordings without a warrant.
With a warrant or subpeona, all police have to do is serve it to Amazon, and the company can hand over your recordings without ever letting you know.
> If you really want privacy, you should also return your cellphone and go back to using a flip phone.
Or how about an iPhone with minimal or no 3rd party apps?
Which is practically impossible unfortunately because in order operate in the modern world you need at least a few 3rd party messenger apps, your bank's app and maybe a few more. Theoretically, however, I can have a phone free from social platforms and 3rd party analytics platforms like MixPanel or AppsFlyer, with regard to whom I have absolute zero trust.
> Which is practically impossible unfortunately because in order operate in the modern world you need at least a few 3rd party messenger apps, your bank's app and maybe a few more.
I think that this may be true for convenient operation, but not for operating period. I have none of these apps on my phone and, in fact, don't regularly use my phone for anything but receiving calls and listening to audiobooks. (Oh, and alarms, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting; but not otherwise for interacting with the outside world.)
I've tried that. All things aside, in business if there's even one important person you deal with (your investor?) you will have to install at least one of the messengers they use. It's a question of the balance of power. And you'd likely end up having more than one VIP in your contact list anyway, unless you live a totally isolated life.
I have a home lab set up, where i have a second router that is behind a older laptop with ip forwarding set up so I can inspect the WAN traffic that devices send out.
If you ever take a brand new iPhone and connect it to wifi and inspect the traffic in this manner, you will see all the crap it sends to apple servers.
On the other hand, I also have a custom rooted android phone, with no google apps and minimal 3d party apps (use the mobile browser for most stuff). If you inspect it in the same manner as above, the only requests it makes when it turns on is to the ntp time server, which I could probably kill with a firewall if I cared enough, making it 100% silent until I use an app.
It does, but letting one known company gather it is better than letting 10 obscure ones, and I mean especially the analytics platforms I mentioned that most apps use today. We don't know exactly how they use the data, who would end up acquiring these companies, etc.
Having the same issue with the motion detection. It’s so bad.. it’s been a few years since I used it, but I think the motion zones UI on my cheap Foscam security camera was way better. It blows my mind that they cost so much, the company has so much money, and it works so poorly.
Mine was a gift otherwise I’d have returned it too.
Consumers increasingly don’t care that “the lawyers said it was OK because it’s on page 73 subsection C line 4 of the use agreement For the product.” Privacy is the new black.