Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Options for securing a doorbell camera? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by shoo@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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My new place has a ring doorbell camera and, for now, I can't get rid of it. What are my options for keeping it operable but not streaming to big brother 24/7? The easier the better.

I've heard you can flash and self host some models but I'd be happy with something as crude as a remote privacy flap that I can cover/uncover independently.

Edit: Removing/modifying it isn't an issue, but my household wants to use it since it's there.

I'm not personally opposed to a camera but would need to be in full control of the feed. My main goal is keeping it simple and cheap for now, so not replacing a functional camera is very tempting. Later on I can look into real alternatives but an afternoon project will do for now.

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[–] pishadoot@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago

There's no reason to try and salvage a ring camera. Their business model is subscriptions and data collection; I'm not aware of any projects to flash them with custom firmware, and my guess is they're locked down hard to prevent it because that's their entire revenue model, you're free to keep looking but I'd bet it's a dead end or at the very least much more than an afternoon project.

Get a Wi-Fi reolink and connect it to an ONVIF capable NVR. You can use a paid solution like blue iris on a Windows machine or there's plenty of free options for any OS of your choice. You can probably directly access the feed by navigating to the camera IP but I'm not sure, I don't use mine that way. Without some kind of NVR software you won't get a lot of the features people like such as notifications and two way talk, object/person recognition, etc.