Is this hurting Amazon? No, it is not. As long as they're honouring return requests freely, you know that the number of returns is within their accepted levels of distressed inventory. If it's getting into uncomfortable territory, they'll start rate limiting people by saying they're past the return window, or they should try again after a week.
If Amazon's return policy changes, that'll be much more interesting to see. But chances are, people forget about this in a month and their sales are unaffected. This may go the way of #deleteUber, #deleteFacebook and similar boycott campaigns - minor blips at best.
The implication is obvious, the feel is inhuman.
The power of a few seconds of video is why TikTok had to be brought under control ( and sadly not just because of worrying about what others might do, but to specifically censor and promote specific messages ).
The issue really isn't about whether your neighbourhood has camera's, the question is who is in control.
Didn't USA's current regime take over TikTok in order to use it for propaganda? Twitter-X was used so successfully that they're expanding their psyops.
Regardless of how you see it, although the ad was a kind of manipulative reframing of surveillance infrastructure by using pets as means of psychological manipulation, the Super Bowl ad seems to have just been an unfortunate (or fortunately) timed ad that caused people to glimpse through the cracks in the control matrix being constructed around them.
I don’t think it will really make a difference though. It’s like wildebeest watching their compatriot snatched underwater by a crocodile, to only momentarily pause before venturing right into the same river.
This is to be studied by geeks, how to approach non-technical audiences.
Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OheUzrXsKrY
With that said, I'm not sure it will have any long term effect on them... sure some people return their stuff, make a post about it, but it's like (insert people with certain political affiliation) cancelling (insert big brand) by burning their stuff. It makes a splash in social, but I'm not sure it really significantly changes user behavior.
FWIW, I don't like being a tech downer/skeptic, but every fucking thing is like this now. Every social media is being turned into surveillance. Every cloud-based application, no matter how useful, is bending over so the state can shove it's hand up it's ass and turn it into yet another way for the Christofascists to shove their bullshit into my life. I'm fucking tired, y'all. I'm tired of finding something cool and interesting, and then needing to audit the entire backend to see if my friends and I are endangering ourselves by engaging with it. I'm tired of seeing something fucking useful, a goddamn video doorbell, and being like "oh that's pretty fucking nice!" and then having to box it up years on because the company that built it is going to turn my porch into a node in the nationwide Good Citizen network.
And it's asymmetric because they seemingly NEVER get tired. There's just a whole like 1/3 of the population out there that seemingly never even sleeps, they're just constantly trying to figure out how to make my life just slightly fucking worse, either for profit or to advance their weird evangelical agenda.
I'm so, so, profoundly sick of these freaks.
Edit: And please just SPARE ME the both sides horseshit. Yeah both sides have problems, but one side is fucking dragging us back to 16th century social politics, and THEY'RE the ones I'm sick more of.
I don't see Ring as a politics problem, I see it as a policy problem. Just because something is legal in the federated, ad hoc instance doesn't mean it is advisable to systematize.
It's not a partisan issue. From leftist utopias to god-fearing Texan ranch lands, the police are abusing power and harassing innocent people. Trying to bring religion and partisanship (in one word, even) doesn't help your message.
I'm sorry I'm having a hard time remembering the role leftists are playing in the US right now what with the Executive, Congressional and Judicial branches all being stacked to the tits with Republicans, right up to the top with our dementia-addled conman of a president, sleepily signing into law the policies that will see us excised as the center of world economics.
Also like, how many escaped child murderers are there per year in the US? Like... one? I don't think that's worth pervasive mass surveillance, though I would understand how a parent whose kid had been abducted might believe it would be.
Not only did it give me peace of mind but two specific examples come to mind. One was when the garbage company’s truck picked up my trash can, and never put it back down (the whole thing fell into the back of the truck). I was able to get a replacement can for free, otherwise I wouldn’t have had any clue where it disappeared off to.
The second time was when my first Steam Deck was stolen in-transit. You could tell from the very hollow sound the box made when the delivery person threw the box onto the porch. It helped prove that it wasn’t stolen off my porch (side note, screw UPS, bunch of thieves, I also had another Steam Deck stolen from one of their drop boxes, last time I ever used one, by one of their employees. No recourse at all, I just had to eat the ~$700. Also, Valve, stop shipping the Steam deck in an incredibly obvious box).
Same concept though, local NVR, remote access via WireGuard.
That’s why police looks to piece together from a larger surveillance network. Maybe you can’t see the face on the home camera but in another camera down the road, or a license plate on the getaway car down the street, or an accomplice without disguise. They want everyone to have cameras and then they can abuse the system.
Friends showed me high quality close up footage of someone stealing their bike. Absolutely useless, all you saw was an average guy that you wouldn’t recognize if you walked past on the street.
No. Unless your camera is being held by a human being who can take action.
Cameras do not prevent crime. That's just marketing.
All they do is let people watch crimes after they've happened, and share the videos to spread fear to other people, which then sells more cameras.
If doorbell cameras prevented crime, the internet would be full of videos of people trying to steal packages, then changing their minds when they see the camera.
Instead, it's all just recordings of a crime that has already been committed.
Some countries have laws for this, as in you can only point the camera so that you don't catch everyone. This can have downsides, e.g. if you have no (even short) front yard and your (organization's) door is directly on the curb - but I completely agree that this is just tough luck, the privacy of random people walking on public property past private property should not be filmed.
No cloud involved if you run your own VPN.
Or even better, _just a little_ cloud involved if you expose through Cloudflare tunnel for just you and whoever else needs to access it.
Working as intended? It’s a wireless CCTV.
I hate it, but you are being recorded everywhere you go. Your plates and your face get scanned every single day, all day long. This is normalized. Privacy is dead.
You will never get access to any of that data when you need it. It is not there to help you. You need to keep your own evidence of the world around you; you never know when you will need it.
Not condoning it; just accepting reality.
> It is not there to help you
It’s like those “This call may be monitored for 'quality' purposes.” service calls.
You can bet, that if the recording helps the company, they’ll have it, but if it helps you, well, they didn’t record that call.
https://news.com.au/world/europe/danish-teenager-likely-to-b...
My armchair take is that we need to start going after those who provide the systems. If a regular person buys a streaming doorbell or a car with a sentrycam, it should be up to whoever takes his money and handles those streams to ensure that they're not doing illegal surveillance of public spaces, IMHO.
In the Netherlands you can record, but only share it with the cops and otherwise you need some clear exception (e.g. dashcam images with minor accidents to your insurer). In all other cases you can either not store them, at least not publicly and all cloud falls under public, or have to inform everyone about their presence on the images, or blurr every identifiable mark (e.g. faces, number plates, names etc). Pretty sure all cloud door cams violate that. So the cops sometimes ask for people's doorcam images, and they are allowed to do that, but likely the people providing them will have recorded it illegally due to it being stored on some cloud account.
This question has already been answered by security footage videos and as long as they are overwritten withing a certain time, stored non publicly and only shared with allowed officials, it's ok.
There are exceptions, but very limited, like clear public good (e.g. whistleblowers).
Now the cat is out of the bag and it has become an untenable position to be against this type of surveillance. And don't get me wrong, I want rapists and murderers to be caught, but I am at the same time also worried about the effect that this will have down the line, in particular when live AI analysis of footage becomes cheap enough that it gets integrated into these cameras so the cameras can report (what they deem to be) suspicious activity automatically.
It’s against the law to post cctv onto things like Facebook in the U.K. but people donor all the time. Early on the law could have banned cloud cameras but it’s too late now, far too many people like to answer front their phones. So glad I no ln get deliver pizzas.
I live in the UK and first time I'm hearing about this - it's definitely illegal to record your neighbours or members of the public without permission, but AFAIK if you are recording videos of your own driveway you can post those anywhere you like since there is no privacy issue there.
Have you got any more info about this?
Edit: let me clarify - sure, there are _circumstances_ under which it's illegal to post a video on facebook, whether it's recorded with CCTV or your phone doesn't matter. But there is no blanket ban on posting CCTV footage anywhere, and your post makes it sound like it is.
https://sprintlaw.co.uk/articles/can-you-film-people-in-publ...
Would love to hear more from a lawyer on this!
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/domestic-cctv-usi...
Data protection laws are very rarely enforced though
>>(for example it will not be appropriate to share any recordings on social media sites)
Again, that's not what the legislation itself says and it's not so black and white. Posting a video from your own driveway of you parking your car would be perfectly legal even if taken from your own CCTV system. Posting a video of a postie that comes to your door every day for no reason other than to identify them would be not.
I agree. And that's sensible. We don't want the law and culture to diverge too much. The former is meant to serve the latter.
But I do still think it would be possible to start going after the suppliers of the services.
Bear in mind europe is known for millennia of pogroms and ethnic cleansing (like, I'm sure, many other parts of the world). Sometimes the culture must bend towards the needs of a stable culture.
Of course. I'm absolutely not saying that culture shouldn't bend. I'm just saying the law must bend to follow culture to some degree.
And let's be clear: it wasn't a change of law that ended the millennia of pogroms and ethnic cleansing. It was culture that changed. Once culture was enough changed for enough people, the law followed and took care of the stragglers.
No. In Poland it's legal to record everything, only when you publish the recordings you need the recorded people to agree.
The core issue is that "nothing to hide nothing to fear" argument is correct as long as the government is trustworthy. Not only that, but mass-surveilance greatly improves life because it allows much better crowd management. Case in point - speed cameras. Would you support the removal of all speed cameras in Norway?
Interesting. Thanks for this perspective. But for the sake of this debate it's still more or less the same situation.
> The core issue is that "nothing to hide nothing to fear" argument is correct as long as the government is trustworthy.
The government and everyone else who might have access to the data.
> Not only that, but mass-surveilance greatly improves life because it allows much better crowd management.
Hard disagree.
> Case in point - speed cameras. Would you support the removal of all speed cameras in Norway?
No. Speed cameras are different. They do more or less not record people who are not reasonably suspected of committing the crime of speeding. They are more analogous to a doorbell camera (or car sentry system) that only actually starts storing/sharing/streaming data when very good evidence of a crime is in progress. I would, for example, be OK with a camera pointed at a public area if the operator of the camera can prove that the data is only stored whenever say the house's burglary alarm trips (this is equivalent to speed cameras when the induction loop in the ground says that a car passed faster than the speed limit). That minute of recording that may include innocent people in public areas is something I would consider to be in the public good. It's at least very different from a system that monitors continuously.
The fact that nothing is stored in normal circumstances of course needs to be backed up by very public audits. For example the operator would need to release source code and be liable to an enormous fine if state inspectors find that different code actually runs on the device. At least that seems like the ideal situation to me.
So basically your entire argument revolves around the government pinky-promising that it won't use the data from speed cameras to track innocent citizens. Because when the network is dense enough, you can tell who went exactly when and where. This isn't any different from Amazon pinky-promising that it will only use data to improve customer experience.
The bigger point I'm making is that mass-surveilance technology does have benefits to the society, and any absolutist "but but but my privacy" who fails to acknowledge them is doomed to lose the debate.
To make a real statement here, we'd probably need several million returns in the US alone. (A quick search suggests more than 20M installs in the US.)
its kind of like how in videos of altercations, the first thing all parties involved will do nowadays is grab their phones and start recording.
It takes a special level of delusion to think you're pulling one over on the billion-dollar company who just paid millions to advertise this capability during the Super Bowl as if everyone didn't already know.
Hasn't Ring been sharing video with law enforcement for years? Ignoring that zomg ICE is the Reddit cause du jour (these people live for this), did they just now figure out how cloud-connected cameras work?
I fully expect these to all be replaced with generic cameras from Amazon full of security holes, that upload all video to CCP-controlled servers in China.
Maybe he realized it and wasn't interested, but man that would have been an epic move, by using their teen angst and have a hundred million active users overnight.
Except that’s not the only reason to participate in such a boycott. Perhaps they simply do not want to participate in one voluntary node of participation in the surveillance capitalism network.
What could go wrong by installing cheap cameras in such places?
https://www.euronews.com/2026/02/04/bulgaria-probes-secret-f...
https://www.ocnal.com/2026/02/bulgaria-launches-criminal-pro...
[2]:https://ring.com/support/articles/uds27/Community-request
E.g. he won't (didn't?) own a mobile phone, but is okay with borrowing someone else's. He won't use Wi-Fi where he has to log in but would happily borrow someone else's.
It's not being right; it's shifting responsibility in exchange for his own personal convenience.
One might disagree with value of the example being set, but I'm not sure I would characterize his choices as in any way convenient for him.
Setting an example would be just doing without the things he doesn't agree with. Need to make a call but only other people's cell phones are available? Well, you don't make the call. Need wifi but no open networks are available? Well, you don't get wifi. Is this even more inconvenient than the already-inconvenient use of other people's cell phones or wifi logins? Absolutely. But it's actually sticking to your principles.
Live like the Amish in 2026 (though I assume they have phones now).
It's not setting an example. We have a word for it and it's called being a mooch.
The attitude is consistent with that famous video where RMS explains that he's "never installed GNU/Linux" because he could just ask someone else to do it for him, and suggest others should do the same.
For that matter, why own a car if we can borrow someone else's? Especially with license plate readers and traffic cameras everywhere, who wants to be tracked? Let your friend be tracked instead. That is the level of logic here.
This does not make any sense at all.
And? That’s actually one of the strategies to counter any risk, if you can’t avoid it or mitigate it, you transfer it.
Consider that there are two components here: one is that Stallman is uncomfortable with the risk of carrying a tracking device (aka cell phone) around with him. The other is that he wants to make it known that people shouldn't carry cell phones because of that tracking; part of his platform is advocating for and against things like this.
If he was merely worried about the risk, and was just out to protect himself, then using someone else's cell phone (which would be at hand regardless of whether or not he used it) would be a perfectly reasonable, pragmatic thing to do. Transferring the risk, as you say.
But using someone else's cell phone is a violation of the principle. How can I take his advocacy seriously if he freely admits that we need cell phones out in the world, otherwise it's even too inconvenient for him to go about his business?
>How can I take his advocacy seriously
You could just listen to what he has to say and consider whether or not it's true. His personal behaviour at the end of the day has little bearing on that. "He doesn't even do XYZ therefore I won't believe him" feels more like a rationalization one comes up with because one doesn't want to believe him in the first place.
People online claim all kinds of things.
>>This Reddit user is alleging
The story, in part, revolves around one post on Reddit. Isn't this a low effort article? Isn't this just a wild guess by the Redditor posted as fact?
I'm not affiliated btw, but I found the instructions really useful - they walk you through an install of Debian 13 (small version of the OS with minimal components), set up low maintenance options (auto updates etc.), install Docker & Frigate, and set up your cameras for best performance depending on your needs.
Keep everything local (if you want). I also integrate with HomeAssistant and expose that through a free CloudFlare Tunnel for access when away from home.
CloudFlare tunnels by the way - these are a great solution to accessing home-network resources without punching holes / port-forwarding etc. because all the access is outward from the home network, then an authentication layer added by CloudFlare.
– George Orwell, 1984
These days there is more experience with it, and for example to get "invisible" in IR one of the tricks used by the stormtroopers there is to put on an IR-protective coverall (it works to some extent and for short time) and to walk over warm asphalt.
In general even without IR the regular camera sensors these days are very sensitive, and you can pull a pretty good image out from the darkness by shifting dynamic range well down.
[0] Is it fancy if IR camera tech has been around since like the 1980's or 1970's?
[1] Since WWII if Wikipedia is to be believed.
https://philipbloom.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/SONY...
This camera is capable of iso 409,600, 4 stops higher than this image. I mean this is turning night into day.
Actually most real cameras had/have subpar videos to normal phones. Small volumes so hard to develop good optimizations in small teams, sensors optimized to the max for still photos. That market is basically slowly dying (I stopped using my full frame too the day my S22 ultra phone came despite lower quality of photos, tried taking it on trips few times but it mostly stayed in the backpack).
Its better now regarding video quality, but if you say travel to exotic places, more than 95% of the folks have phone only. Even those with cameras rarely pull them out unless its proper photo safari.
EDIT. I'm really confused how you concluded that this comment is anti European. Quit whatever drugs and social media if something like this is triggering your paranoia.
You frame it like the only alternative to American surveillance cameras is Chinese surveillance cameras, but no cameras seems to be no option for you.
Who is the one with the paranoid, imaginary reasons?
Edit: Ah btw, here in germany we have of course cameras to see who is in front of the door, it is called Türsprechanlage. It does not record, it does sent to the cloud, it is not smart, and is developed and produced in Germany, for example by Siedle.
Work related: We sell solutions including CCTV and video-intercom and we have only recently started providing customers with stickers they can use to make those installations comply with regulations. Technically, it has been the responsibility of the customer installing the device, so us doing this is just nudging people towards compliance because nobody cares. I can guarantee you that there are tens of thousands of cameras here filming public ground and it is not prosecuted. In fact, someone at the office put one up a long time ago for a PTZ demo (not recording) that was not compliant and it took almost 10 years until we got ordered to take it down.
Most of these are not recording, only recording situationally or only locally. Still not legal technically. However, ever since cheap cloud-connected doorbells have become available, they have definitely been installed here. They do not comply with regulations whatsoever and next to nothing is done about it.
Are there sources?
Or is this just a fantasy story?
> Or is this just a fantasy story?
People buy them from Ali, Temu, Allegro, eMAG and install all over the place. Simply freaking take a walk and look around.
Then maybe those cunts can sell a camera without cloud storage for once? Or the one that connects to local hub, like Chinese cameras do?
