Bill Bernard of Between Two Firewalls, on the “the underpinning privacy issues” of the aforelinked Ring “Search Party” feature:

It sounds great, doesn’t it? “More than on pet per day has been returned” per the ad. Laudable goal, and I’m sure that across the nation there being at least 366 families each year who are reunited with their pets are quite happy. (that’s as many as it takes to be able to claim more than one per day) I know there are a couple times I was worried that my dog had been lost, and I might have appreciated such a capability.

But there’s a lot going on in order to make that work, and every single bit of it has privacy implications that you need to be aware of as the ad - and indeed the concept itself - does a great job of downplaying these implications.

Let’s put this another way: do you believe there have been more or less than 366 personal privacy violations from this self same system per year? The rest of this post will be a consideration of those privacy concerns and what we can do to still have home security cameras that we trust without participating in an outsourced mass surveillance system.

Bernard goes through several issues with this feature (and similar features from other companies), including:

• Cloud Based Home Security Camera Storage: “In order for this system to work, your camera recordings have to be stored and viewed by the company behind this technology. Read that again. Stored. Viewed. By somebody who isn’t you.”
• Law Enforcement Access To Your Recordings: “the companies that run consumer cloud services must comply with US law. Not only that, many of them want to curry favor with federal and state government, after all the same companies that run these cameras have lucrative contracts with those same government bodies.”
• Facial Recognition and AI Review: “The unspoken part of this is that these companies have AI which is capable of performing facial recognition on your recordings.”
• The Impact On Your Friends and Neighbors: “Surely we have some level of responsibility for their privacy expectations as good friends and neighbors, don’t we?”

He suggests alternatives to cloud-based security systems, recommending Ubiquiti for example, which I second. (I can also recommend Eufy and Eve, both of which I use with Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video.)

Bernard concludes:

I realize that this advice may mean that up to 500 pets a year aren’t recovered as quickly as they could be if you have a cloud-based camera solution, but I’m comfortable suggesting that the privacy you give up in order to reunite those pets with their families isn’t worth it.