I don’t want to sound like a “aluminum foil hat” guy but I’m concerned about CCTV cameras (private and public) around our towns.
All of these cameras do not send the stream to private servers (as the closed circuit would imply) but it’s sent to the manufacturers’ servers, usually in countries unfriendly to privacy regulations, let alone to human rights. I don’t think I’m in immediate danger, but I personally think they likely flow into some AI models and into some government-controlled hands in order to do whatever they want with it.
Another risk is the fact they’re very insecure.
I don’t know how to battle this. I try not to look directly into a camera when I see one, but that’s it. I wish more people would be aware of such risks.
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People in this thread apparently aren’t paranoid enough or have some ridiculously optimistic beliefs about the US and surveillance policing.
Here’s an article about how the police in my city (New Orleans) worked a secret deal with spy company Palantir to consolidate data from numerous sources to create a crime-prediction system that we’ve been the unwitting beta testers of. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd
And here’s a page from my own city government bragging about the same: https://nola.gov/next/homeland-security/topics/real-time-crime-center-en/
I can’t find the story now, but at one time (less than 10 years ago), Palantir and NOPD were working a deal that would require the CCTV feeds from every bar and restaurant in the city to be fed into the “crime control center” which would have instantly made NOLA the most surveilled city on earth. The citizens voted down the bill that would have made it happen, but there was no technical limitation. I’m not convinced they don’t have secret access to them anyway.
Police can also subpoena camera operators for footage. This happens with Ring doorbells, Amazon is only too happy to hand over footage from the camera on your front door to the police.
If you are buying cameras for yourself, any video that goes “to the cloud” is now government property. Very few companies have the desire or power to deny their host government’s or their police’s access to the video. If the cloud is in the USA then our spys already have it. Keep your video local or sync it through your own networks.
If the camera is attached to a business though, you should just assume that government can look through it.
Most are not sending video to the manufacturers servers. More likely some milestone server here and there + cloud.
Most of them do have ML accelerators to do “AI” on the edge.
We use cameras from many suppliers at work, at least 3 that are chayna based. We do log their connetions, and see very little data ourside of fw/app update checks. Might be some sinister stuff happening but its not very wide-spread.
Maybe consumer stuff is different.
Edit: also consider bamdwidth. This is the reason most places record to local NAS or server. Our ipvpn woukd be filled if we was to centralize this
Maybe not most, but some are. An old job I had used HikVision cameras, those sent continuously until I changed our router firewall.
Is it ok to be cautious? Yes! But mostly when you want to setup your own system and record or monitor your own premises. In which case you can select systems or cameras that have features and functionality, as well as connectivity, in ways you decide.
You want to use the ring app to be notified someone is at your door? You’re gonna have to give their system access to the video. But, you can also setup your own system without ring, and use self hosted tools to do essentially the same thing.
As for being cautious that cameras on the street are tracking you? Hard to really do anything about that (even though the effort required would be prohibitively immense to track an individual through all the various systems).
I think you’re looking for an IR blocking solution like this: https://github.com/nickbild/freedom_shield
I’m not worried about CCTV footage in the US, at least as far as government surveillance is concerned. The main reason is the difficulty in wiretapping, compared to the payoff. For the government to get access to CCTV cameras owned by private citizens, they’d have to backdoor every single manufacturer, then figure out how to stream footage without being detected. This is definitely possible, but it’s considerably more difficult than wiretapping phone conversations. I’m sure the NSA/CIA/etc has done this before on a targeted basis, but doing it in general is very risky and a ton of work(if they want to keep it a secret), and what do they get in return? The NSA has a lot of resources, but it’s still limited.
Amazon turned over ring data… No warrants.
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