lonefighter@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
What drives me crazy is that even if you don’t install them yourself, you can’t opt out. I live in an apartment complex. I don’t have a doorbell camera, but I have to go past at least 2 of them every time I leave my home. It feels like an enormous violation of my privacy, especially knowing that some companies participate in facial recognition and tracking and freely share that information with the government. I want to complain to management but I know I’ll just be treated like the creepy neighborhood criminal.
I don’t have a doorbell camera, but I have to go past at least 2 of them every time I leave my home
A spray-paint can goes a long way. Just make sure to approach the damn camera from a blind angle.
The thing with a spray-paint can is, it takes you 2 seconds and a fraction of a penny to disable the camera, while it takes the man beaucoup bucks and a lot of time to fix it.
What a genius idea, just walk up to a fish eye lens security camera on someone’s house, one that you know is recording, and do a bit of criminal damage.
I hate that I have to clarify that I’m not defending these companies that people brainlessly support in the name of convenience. I’m saying that unless your appearance is completely obfuscated, then spraypainting people’s personal property is a dumb idea.
Use lasers. It’s far more expensive to replace and entirely burnt out sensor than it is to clean off spraypaint. (For legal reasons this is a joke)
Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 11 hours ago
I had the creepiest conversation with a cop a few months ago.
My neighborhood is seemingly getting rougher by the day. I do have a video doorbell, but it’s not one of the major U.S. brands.
Anyway, it was trash day. Garbage had been collected. I had noticed several police cars around, but didn’t see any police. I went to collect my bins, and one of them popped out of nowhere to chat at me.
He was light on details, but needed to track the comings and goings of a parking lot across the street from my house. Didn’t need super clear images, just said he needed timestamps for a timeline. Said my camera angle was ‘perfect’.
And it is! I get so many alerts that I disabled it unless motion is detected within the area of my yard. (Which was not helpful to them.)
But he was explaining this to me, and said that he needed me to send them the video (before I told him that it was unlikely I had video, and then confirmed that I did not with him). A moment later, he did a quick scan of my various neighbors houses, and said (to himself) “Okay, that’s a Ring, that won’t be a problem.”
A problem?!? Just casually warrentlessly seizing footage from people’s homes is not a problem?
For those curious, the system I currently have is by Eufy and I cannot recommend the brand. Anker as a brand has been great (Eufy’s parent company), but I find the Eufy app to be riddled with spam, the offered features to be mediocre, and generally, customer service to be poor. They even had an amazon review removed once. (I called their app a piece of crap, and they hit it with a community standards warning to get it removed.)