> Cloud connected doorbells must die as well as dragnet surveillance.

I'd disagree and restate that cloud services willing to make these kinds of deals must die, painfully, in a fire after being stung by a million killer bees, after receiving a million paper cuts and having lemon juice poured all over them.

It is possible for a company to charge a monthly fee to provide a service and only that service without attempting to leverage their users and their data for any other form of income. Companies used to do it all of the time. It just takes a C-suite/board/founder to have the moral fortitude to not sell out their users.

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dgxyz 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Cloud services change. Politicians change. Once the data is in someone else's hands it is at risk.

Imagine our current data corpus in the hands of the Stasi for example.

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trinsic2 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem now is how can you trust any of these companies? The infrastructure is there to link this data if you have cameras that connect to the internet. How can you ever be sure this wont happen in secret? We have no guarantees that companies will follow the laws and laws are not even being enforced.

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noduerme 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How hard would it be to sell a solution that makes it easy for a consumer to set up on-site recording? Ship a small box loaded with Tailscale and some software that connects to cameras over a LAN, and runs a webserver that allows user logins through a web interface. Nothing needs to go into the cloud. Yes, then you sell it once to a customer and that's it. No subscription or planned obsolescence. Fine, so factor that into the price. Make your money and go on to do other good things.

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iamnothere 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s called an NVR and there’s a whole industry of companies catering to this, though you rarely hear about it in the news. There are plenty of consumer options in the space too.

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dylan604 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They have been selling NVR based camera systems for decades. It's clunky. It takes a network savvy person to open up their home network to allow remote access. It takes an even savvier person to not do that in a way that guarantees getting their network pwnd.

Having a cloud based solution from an ethical company would be the consumer friendly solution people are actually wanting. Lots of people are willing to spend money to make problems go away.

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noduerme 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I know businesses that have these setups and outside tech support to maintain them. I've also seen them have all kinds of issues when routers are replaced or they change ISPs. That's why I was saying a company could sell a box preloaded with Tailscale and a custom installer that walks a non-technical person through it. The default setup for a tailnet is pretty safe. Yeah you could have your own signaling servers or whatever, but TS usually manages to punch right through most NAT issues. They don't need a reverse proxy to login to their private webserver, although I guess you could provide that as an add-on service. They just need TS on their phone.

[edit] To my mind, the biggest hurdle wouldn't be networking to allow this box to host its own app that was accessible to the user from elsewhere. The hurdles would be things like lack of "smart" reporting / facial recognition, backup power, backup connectivity, etc..But in theory, a repurposed smartphone as the platform could solve the backup power and connection issues.

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crote 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This isn't an inherently unsolvable problem. Peer-to-peer file sharing and video calls have been able to work around it for ages.

The same approach could be used for cameras - see for example Home Assistant's remote access. Sure, you'd still need a cloud-based STUN-like discovery service, but a small one-time fee should easily cover operating it.

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noduerme 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Right..Or instead of STUN/TURN just use Tailscale for now. I think the reason no one's packaged this into a slick Ring-like plug-and-play probably comes down to corporate greed and how hard it is to raise money if your intention is to start a business that doesn't have ever-expanding verticals. Like, this is a set of solved problems. They just need to be smoothed and packed for the user.

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dylan604 4 hours ago | parent [-]

You seem pretty sure of yourself. So when will you be releasing this product that you claim is such low hanging fruit? Right, now you know why this product doesn't exist.

	▲	fc417fc802 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		He just explained why. Because packaging, QA, setting up a storefront, customer service, the sum total requires significant up front investment to get off the ground. Good luck raising money when your pitch is "we won't be greedy and do the things that could make even more money". Or was your intent merely to taunt him for failing to be independently wealthy?

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antonvs 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It just takes a C-suite/board/founder to have the moral fortitude ...

Just for context, could you provide some examples of such people?

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macki0 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Craig Newmark (Craigslist) and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) come to mind, both founders could have made platfoms that would have been ad-ridden (and made a boat full of cash) but the founders chose not to

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fakedang 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Uhh, Craigslist is literally an ad platform. They just didn't want anything to do with a middleman.

	▲	dylan604 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think we can all agree the "ads" on CL are not even close to the same ballpark as the offerings of ad tech. Like to conflate the two as the same would be the most disingenuous bit of logic that I'd be embarrassed if I were the one to have made it.

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SecretDreams 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In America, whether a deal is publicly made or not, if your personal data is stored on the cloud, it is neither private nor your data any longer. Any belief to the contrary is just to help you sleep better at night.

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camillomiller 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No it is not. Your mandate is to grow your company’s revenue and profits, not act according to your conscience as an executive, especially if something is not illegal.

This is why regulations are extremely important. There need to be a strong enough counterincentive or companies will eventually always follow the path of least resistance to growth. Ethics when present may create some form of friction along some specific paths, but it’s never enough for those to not become, eventually, that very path.

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mwillis 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why, in this given scenario, does the individual’s mandate to their company automatically trump the mandate given to them by an ethical society, or even their own moral code? Why is this position held up as infallible? The situation could easily be re-framed as “my corporate mandate is to grow revenue, but the larger mandate I have is to my own ethical truth.” Why are corporate desires allowed to get the “shrug, that’s just what I’m supposed to do” treatment?

If the answer is you lose your job and your means to provide for your family if you don’t put corporate desires first, then we’ve constructed the society we want already and no one should be complaining.

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dylan604 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can easily put it into the corporate charter that you will not "do evil". At that point, you have a mandate to grow revenue while abiding by the charter..

Just because majority of people choose to be assholes does not mean everyone has to be. Be the change you wish to see in the world, or something

	▲	camillomiller 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That worked for Google, didn't it?

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kulahan 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Companies primarily consider profit" is not the gotcha you think it is. It's possible to consider profit via goodwill towards customers. A number of companies do this. This doesn't mean that you're inherently wrong, but this argument certainly isn't the right one.