The author of the article says that a network of regular security cameras is a better solution. He must not be married.
There's no way my wife would allow all those wires everywhere. And the wireless security cameras are a pain because you have to remember to recharge them.
Now, before the wannabe This Old House crowd starts up with "You just put the wires in the walls," consider that 43% of Americans rent their homes, and the number is even higher in other countries. The vast majority of landlords won't allow you to run wires in the walls.
That said, there's NFW I would have one of these in my house because I don't trust any tech company to have a camera in my house.
It's marketed as a security device, but it's not like a toy quadcopter is going to stop an intruder any better than a non-flying camera. Which means "not at all."
If you want home security that can reach all parts of your home, and provide alerts when someone breaks in, get a dog.
No, the dog can't alert you when you're not home, but again, it's not like you can do anything about a break-in when you're not home either way.
Then again, iOS has the built-in ability to detect dogs barking and react to that. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, your Homepod can detect the dog barking and hit you with a text message.
I have a lot of IoT devices in and around my home, including some cameras. I don't trust any of the smart devices, which is why they all have offline/locally controlled operation modes and are segmented off from the rest of the network with their own manufacturer/purpose specific VLANs and firewall rules.
I don't think most people comprehend what their devices are doing, or how their data could be used against them. My robovac has a LIDAR sensor that maps the house - that's cool - what isn't cool is that by default it uploads those maps to Xiaomi and they can connect it via GeoIP (or GPS if I ever use their app) and have the location and floorplan of my home. I'm not special enough for that information to be very valuable, but it's still super creepy and I would prefer they not have it.
Are you doing any hand-rolled home automation? I just finished building a house and I had power over ethernet (PoE) put throughout before I discovered that security items using this command a hefty price premium over simple wireless / battery operated. I've toyed with the idea of just buying a Raspberry Pi with a PoE module and a decent camera module and seeing if I can replicate the functionality for half the price or less (and obviously not valuing my time at anything).
where do you find the necessary protocol information for the various devices? that (and the trickiness of getting the firewall rules just right) seems to be a barrier to adoption for vlan'ing all the things. i still have issues with this on my little home network, typically with service discovery (e.g., mdns) and control app to device(s) communications (e.g., tradfri) across vlan boundaries.
A friend of a friend had a break in in his house last week and could see the burglars in his kids room via his cameras on his phone.
He also had the hopeless feeling of there being nothing to do, but had some sort of Eureka-moment and started playing “Fuck the police” on max volume on the floor above (all via his phone), and that apparently sent the burglars running!
(When he later talked to the cops they did call him a genius but questioned the song choice.)
The distinctive sound of a walkie talkie chirp is also a good sound to play, had it as my message alert on my phone - the number of people who suddenly think your a cop and get spooked.
Though any music works best as shows somebody in and most burglars don't want anybody there as then it becomes a robbery and those sentences are higher. So playing music good and your choice is pretty excellent in the psychological factor upon the burglars.
to the contrary if he played the Public Enemy song loud I think they'd fear being counter ambushed by some thugs unless the house gave away the identity of the owner. In otherwords the criminals may recognize that specific song, or at least discern some hard old school rap music.
I mean, who actually does need an array of security cameras? Traditional alarms work well without the need for cameras, specially when cameras are simply defeated by a face covering. At that point, the camera is just a glorified motion sensor.
In the case of the drone, it's just a geeky toy that will be inevitably marketed via fear-mongering, so they can collect even more data on you.
Aside from general documentation of damage, cameras can also be used to measure the body and movement (for instance gait) of the criminal, which is actually useful for an investigator. It shows where the criminal walked, which is also useful for securing tracks, prints or even DNA samples. Means you can save a ton of time looking. Many criminals aren't smart enough to discard or burn their clothes after use either, so this would also positively ID the perp if found. So yeah, I'd say that cameras are pretty useful for investigating crimes outside of mere facial recognition. ^^
My only thought for practical use would be to checkup on a pet while you are away from home. Since if the pet has feel roam of the house you can't necessarily see if from a stationary camera.
I've never been interested in using cameras for security concerns. By the time you need to use camera footage for a security concern, it's usually too late.
I think they're really handy for monitoring the status of routine household tasks, though.
"Did I get a package today? What time does the mail normally arrive? How is the dog doing? Did the garbage truck come by yet? Did the storm do any damage while I was away?"
you get most of the benefit out of a security camera before you even turn it on. past that, probably only useful to document the actions you take if someone breaks in while you're actually home.
> Then again, iOS has the built-in ability to detect dogs barking and react to that. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, your Homepod can detect the dog barking and hit you with a text message.
Oh cool. I always wanted to get texts all day alerting me to people walking dogs across the street and that the squirrel that lives in the tree in the front yard has descended again.
Contrary to the promotional ads, I feel the main use case is to have a closer look at small things where your main cameras are unable to have a good enough look eg, is the stove or toaster still on? Did my kid leave his school project in his room? Did I drop my wallet in this spot? What is my cat or dog doing right now?
Even without visible wires I don't think many people would put security cameras in every room. This drone looks like a good solution to check on the house while you are away without compromising everyday privacy (you can always turn it off when not in use). Also good tool for those of us being paranoid if they turned off the stove/water/etc.
This was actually one of the first things along these lines that looked sorta interesting.
In normal times, I travel quite a bit. I do have one camera (RPi) looking outside along with a couple other sensors. And I don't really care enough to put cameras all over the house so I can look over things when I'm traveling. (Or, given where I live, enough to subscribe to a security service.)
But, for general peace of mind, to have a single device that lets me look in on things now and then? It actually seems reasonable.
> If you want home security that can reach all parts of your home, and provide alerts when someone breaks in, get a dog.
Agree with everything you said except this. This is terrible advice for most people. Don't get a dog unless you really want a dog. And if you do get one, adopt, because there are people who do think like this^ about animals, and a significant number of those animals will end up at a shelter at some point.
I have a few cameras and the cables are all hidden. The camera doesn't have to be mounted on a wall to be useful - mine sit on existing furniture and the cables hang down behind, out of sight.
As for their utility, meh, dubious utility. Yeah, I get a notice on my phone when they detect movement. That just means I know when my maid is moving between the basement and the living room. But, I know this going in - bought them more as a nerd gadget thing that actual security.
> Now, before the wannabe This Old House crowd starts up with "You just put the wires in the walls," consider that 43% of Americans rent their homes, and the number is even higher in other countries. The vast majority of landlords won't allow you to run wires in the walls.
It also assumes typical American construction styles. In my country all houses are made of brick. Opening up the walls to run some cables is often borderline impossible.
TBH My main use for home "security" cameras has just been to check-in on my cats while away, and make sure that the people who're coming by to take care of them have given them food etc.
A flying security drone solves a few big problems for me A) sometimes a cat decides not to come downstairs for a while, being able to see them is great. B) Stuff gets wrecked while we're gone, its nice to know what we're walking in to and figure out how to have less stuff wrecked in the future.
I'd imagine other folks have various "peace of mind" concerns while away such as the classic "did I leave the oven on?". A patrolling camera is the perfect solution to this problem and is only tangentially related to true home security.
>There's no way my wife would allow all those wires everywhere. And the wireless security cameras are a pain because you have to remember to recharge them.
Several manufacturers sell battery powered cameras that last up to two years without charging. Or you can get solar powered ones for outdoors. They have very low power consumption as they're normally off, until PIR triggered. That's a reasonable trade off, I think. The downside is triggering is potentially unreliable and they're not good for continuous monitoring/recording. But for detecting someone at the door, or in your garden, they're not a bad choice.
> It's marketed as a security device, but it's not like a toy quadcopter is going to stop an intruder any better than a non-flying camera. Which means "not at all."
Preventing break-ins isn't the point of security cameras. Their purpose is reacting to break-ins. Maybe you can give the police a picture of the burglar's face. Or their license plate or car make/model/color. You can see what they took, so you don't leave something off your insurance claim because you hadn't yet noticed it was missing. Your dog can't do any of these things, and a camera is a much smaller commitment than a pet.
Is there a jurisdiction where the cops actually care to track down burglars? The clearance rate is something like <20% in the US and I suspect many of those were luck based (ie: the caught the burglar for something else and found stolen property).
Yeah, the arguments the author made against it aren't that strong, either. I like the idea of being able to check on my older but self sufficient pet (via a loud drone that will scare her unfortunately). I like knowing that if an intruder gets into the house, they will have to look directly at the camera and get close to swat it down. Quite a bit more difficult than defeating a static camera in the corner of a room.
I don't know what your situation looks like but nearly every spot I can think of where a camera would work well there is no outlet. Not too many people have outlets just hanging out up near the ceiling in corners or on the outside of their homes on the roof.
I have Wyze cams in the front and back of the house and when I am away I leave one pointed at where everything intersects downstairs on the inside. It just needs wire for power unless you get the outside one, those you only need to mount somewhere no wires just recharge. They let you only store things on an SD card. Really cheap anr awesome company.
TBH I think the best use case for this device is anxious pet owners who want to check up on how their pets are doing. Often pets sit somewhere where the cameras are not pointing.
But this also might not be good for the pet's mental health either as a loud ass drone buzzes around them.
> There's no way my wife would allow all those wires everywhere. And the wireless security cameras are a pain because you have to remember to recharge them.
This is some misogynistic bull because you’re implying that only women would care about unsightly wires strung around the place.
This is some misogynistic bull because you’re implying that only women would care about unsightly wires strung around the place.
I am implying nothing. I am stating a fact. My wife hates visible wires. Every time we move, it's a pain in the ass to hide all the wires for the TV. When Bluetooth became a thing, she was first on board with a wireless mouse and keyboard. It's been an ongoing theme in our relationship for decades.
Educate yourself.
I don't need to educate myself about my wife. You might want to educate yourself about projection, and making false assumptions to fit other people into your stereotypes.
I’d be perfectly happy to buy tons of gadgetry like ring and nest products just so long as it doesn’t need some kind of cloud service, and it doesn’t need any kind of subscription.
The drone looks really well designed and practical (compared to buying dozens of separate cameras you can have just a couple, and a drone).
Yet most things that come to market are exactly this. Cloud services, subsctiptions and integration with these “smart speakers” (I’m not getting one of those either, so long as they are connected to whoever sold it rather than just to the weather web service).
I wish someone who didn’t have an interest in knowing everything about everyone but could actually make money from hardware would do this.
Thats because the "real" product they are selling is the data collection. Also, subscription services are much more attractive to companies because its a guaranteed and predictable revenue stream.
Also, doing everything over the internet to centralized "cloud" servers is easier to develop for and manage, and its easier on the end user to set up, strengthening the product. Although I think this is more of a cherry on top of the big pile of data they're getting on you.
It also probably subsidizes the unit cost. Companies would much rather sell you a "cheaper" device with a subscription plan than a potentially more expensive device with one-time payment. Your average consumer will choose the device that is cheaper up-front for the same reasons.
The technical, privacy-focused crowd that tends to populate this forum is already being served by the type of cameras you can already buy on Monoprice, Newegg, or some other related store. Can you imagine a company like Amazon selling that kind of product? I sure can't.
With that said, if anyone would sell a privacy-focused device with all the same benefits as Ring, it would probably be Apple since privacy is part of their brand. I don't think the odds of that happening soon are high, but I could be wrong.
>Thats because the "real" product they are selling is the data collection. Also, subscription services are much more attractive to companies because its a guaranteed and predictable revenue stream
The issue with remote access is you need a service in the middle to provide that remote access, and provide it securely. Otherwise you're just talking something in the home (BLE, etc).
If you don't have some type of service the average consumer will not be able to use it, people aren't going to setup NAS devices, or other servers in their house to collect video data. Even a wireless DVR system can be a pain (another box, likely another TV to see it, etc).
I know that this community is more on the side of the skepticism of collecting data, but keep in mind the total addressable market is mostly people who don't want to deal with these problems.
Now if you're talking about "if the cloud service is down my device doesn't work" then I completely agree, these devices need to have enough local functionality to operate/buffer without their service working for extended periods of time, or being removed.
Ring already has a base station. Why doesn't that base station have a solid state drive to store all the video/images, and allow the user to view them on their smart phone by connecting to the base station through the wifi?
The argument "you need to upload all your data to our servers or you'll likely have to get another to TV to view it" is just beyond lame.
The issue with remote access is you need a service in the middle to provide that remote access, and provide it securely. Otherwise you're just talking something in the home (BLE, etc).
Does Apple use iCloud for HomeKit, or is it all on the iPad/AppleTV that acts as the home hub?
> The issue with remote access is you need a service in the middle to provide that remote access, and provide it securely.
This is a pain, but solvable by punching holes in all the NAT pair combinations. At a previous startup we all communication peer to peer (phones, custom home devices, laptops), no data traversed our servers ("the cloud"). It worked beautifully.
I get that most people don't like to deal with that sort of set up. But we live in a world where the Raspberry Pi is extremely popular, yet also the most average consumer unfriendly computer in the entire world. Not everything needs to be a mass market product to be successful.
Don't pretty much all drones need internet access in order to confirm it is not flying in a restricted area? Unless you baked in the maps beforehand, I suppose. My brother bought a drone to inspect my parents' roof for damage, but then he couldn't even fly it until it updated the maps and after that there was baked in DRM saying the current GPS coordinates were restricted (likely because of nearby military base) and the drone refused to take off.
Seems like the golden age of drones for hobbyist pilots was before all the regulation kicked in, but in this case perhaps Ring could get an exception to restricted areas since they are indoor drones.
There are plenty of toy drones with cameras and no location awareness. I’m pretty sure that functionality is not legally required, but is just enabled by drone manufacturers who don’t want their products causing trouble. And I believe anything under 8 ounces doesn’t even need to be registered with the FAA, and it’s likely that this little drone camera is under that.
> I’d be perfectly happy to buy tons of gadgetry like ring and nest products just so long as it doesn’t need some kind of cloud service, and it doesn’t need any kind of subscription.
Same here. Is there any company working on this product space?
It will never be created by a large corporation or VC-backed startup because those have a need to extract every penny of income from the product line which means there will be a subscription and there will be cloud data gathering which will be sold to advertisers.
But a small privately held company could sustainably target the niche of stand-alone home automation devices for the target audiences who care about privacy and/or prefer no recurring monthly fee.
(I worked on a startup addressing a small segment of this space but over time we (the initial engineering team) lost control to the investors and it morphed into a cloud-dependent service and then promptly died. Would love to work on that space again but without the investors to keep the focus sharp.)
For the most part people are not capable of having internet connected IoT devices that don’t go to third party servers. You really think it’s a good idea to open up ports to shitty Chinese cameras inside your house and let them run as servers on the naked internet? Cameras that connect to third party servers need subscriptions to pay for the resources they consume.
Cameras that don’t need to be accessed over the internet are not the same market as internet connected cameras. For a thousand bucks or so you can get a few decent cameras and an NVR and have all the local camera viewing and recording you want. But most people don’t really need that.
This is one of the problems that need solving. Perhaps I could buy a service from a third party that could relay or store traffic from things in my home, without me having to fear that it’s used for advertising?
I imagine there is 100% a good medium sized market for disconnect smart home technology but no one cares about medium markets anymore? The BIG players are in on this space and they know if they make a cheap and ubiquitous enough product the next treasure trove of data is theirs.
So, any company in that space is competing against FAANG which is pretty daunting...
> “They’re using this type of consumer data to create a database version of who you are, and then using it to sell you things. The data collected is increasingly invasive, as with the Ring drone capabilities, such as mapping your home and collecting audio and dynamic aerial video of you and your family in your bedrooms, bathrooms, everywhere you live.”
> As this July article from the EFF points out, “with a warrant, police could also circumvent the device’s owner and get footage straight from Amazon, even if the owner denied the police.” The EFF is talking about the Ring doorbell camera here, but it’s not clear to me that the Ring drone would be an exception.
Yes, creepy does not even begin to describe my feelings.
So basically you install a snitch for the biggest corporation on earth that does not needs a warrant to share any of the recording with the police so you can have a neat toy. And I thought ring was creepy.
"It looks like you're running low on {product}. I have ordered Amazon Basics {product}. Please check your email if you would like to cancel the order in the next thirty minutes."
Yeah most of these companies say "we'll share your information with local law enforcement upon request and we may require a warrant at our discretion."
Anything that gets rid of pointless anxiety for me is good. If I can have someone in the passenger seat search for the cabin keys while I drive back home, or check if I turned off the stove, or that the fridge door is closed, or that I left the tap not running, or the windows closed, or that I left enough food for the itty bitty cataroons.
But I use drugs, so I'm sorry homie, I ain't giving the cops straightline access into the house.
Whatever, not interested in burglars. I could've used that thing to check basic status of the apartment that I don't use. Broken windows, water leaks and stuff.
I'm the founder of Cobalt Robotics [1]. We develop "security" robots for commercial spaces -- though ours are wheeled, have a screen for 2-way video chats, etc.
Turns out that security is a euphemism for "observation & reporting." Use cases span a host of shared services: Traditional Security, Employee Health & Safety, Facilities Management (e.g. leaks & spills), Customer Service, and others. Breaking & Enterings do happen, but they are rare. Facilities incidents such as the ones you mentioned are vastly more common.
This seems like a much more useful usecase to me than burglars, but apparently you can't manually control the device beyond automated paths, which makes this almost useless I think.
But even if you could manually control the device, I'd be too afraid of having Amazon capturing full video of all my belongings. They have the resources to easily hook up the feed to an object detection ETL or some other AI system to extract a ton of information about the owners, and then sell that as specialized advertising intelligence. All of a sudden my mailbox fills up with lots of high focused ads.
OK I realize that's probably going down the conspiracy theory path a little much :), but I don't think it's too far off.
Honestly I would be shocked if that's not the goal. Imagine being able to not only know someone has your product, but not advertise to them until that product disappears, is in a state of disrepair, or reaches a particular age.
Of course that's what they'll use it for. Don't worry -- the terms and conditions that nobody reads or could understand even if they did read, says they just send "metadata" back to improve the user experience.
I also find it interesting for a place I leave empty for months at a time, but for that purpose doesn't it seem... fragile?
Seriously: I haven't put in a camera because my DSL craps out every month or so and requires a hard modem reboot to reconnect, which seems like a lot to ask from the friend who checks my mail.
I would love to see a solution tailored to people not in their domiciles, but I don't feel like this is it.
This announcement (not yet a product!) is for people who really need to look around the places they're going to return to in a day or two anyway, max. Maybe that's a market; it's not me.
That’s exactly what I want. Just like “wouldn’t a doorbell with a video feed connected to your own computer fulfill those purposes?” for a ring doorbell. Yes!
But I want a product, not tinkering. The appeal of this isn’t just what it does but that it does it right after I unpack it. I want it to fly by itself using some wizardry that a person at a huge company cooked up. I just don’t want it to phone home to do it.
That’s what I want in the “standalone” one too. Mass market product appeal. No tinkering.
Yes, I think this could actually be a good product, or at least something similar to it for anyone who suffers from OCD. I think a lot of smart devices can help people.
1984 sort of glosses over how the monitoring hardware ends up in everyone's homes, but I think it's safe to say that they participated in the installations in the beginning.
Brit here, once again failing to understand this complete obsession with filling your houses (and lives!) with cameras at all let alone with useless flying ones??
From this side of the pond it just looks absolutely insane, full of paranoia and fear. I know there's a country there full of gun totin' lunatics in many places, but I just don't get it.
This is less criticism, btw, and more social commentary. Explain for me how it got so insane?!
> Brit here, once again failing to understand this complete obsession with filling your houses (and lives!) with cameras at all let alone with useless flying ones??
Is that because you guys prefer your cameras outside? Brits love CCTV and the watchful eye of big brother
Point taken but in defence I believe they're almost all state and not private, plus distribution is fairly much exclusive to cities. And yeh, outdoors.
I'm not sure it's typical to have cameras all over one's house. Maybe at the entrances or just one to watch for porch pirates, but I have no reason to believe they're common indoors. In fact, that seems to be a reason to have a drone like this. You get to add an indoor camera that's difficult to be used for spying since it has to visibly and audibly move off the dock (it could be moved while the person isn't home, but if they spot it, they'll know something is up)
Impression here is that all US homes have interior alarms and cameras - interesting if that isn't the case!
I'm also slightly unclear why. I mean, you look at your phone and see some guy wandering around your house - how does that actually help? If you're in the house you st your pants and hide under the bed or worse case grab your gun and go get shot. If you're out, you phone the police which is what a good intruder alarm would do anyway.
Seems really odd to me.
Oh, plus the thoughts in the article, namely "buy a couple of cheap cameras instead" if you really want this stuff in your life.
Readit News
There's no way my wife would allow all those wires everywhere. And the wireless security cameras are a pain because you have to remember to recharge them.
Now, before the wannabe This Old House crowd starts up with "You just put the wires in the walls," consider that 43% of Americans rent their homes, and the number is even higher in other countries. The vast majority of landlords won't allow you to run wires in the walls.
That said, there's NFW I would have one of these in my house because I don't trust any tech company to have a camera in my house.
It's marketed as a security device, but it's not like a toy quadcopter is going to stop an intruder any better than a non-flying camera. Which means "not at all."
If you want home security that can reach all parts of your home, and provide alerts when someone breaks in, get a dog.
No, the dog can't alert you when you're not home, but again, it's not like you can do anything about a break-in when you're not home either way.
Then again, iOS has the built-in ability to detect dogs barking and react to that. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, your Homepod can detect the dog barking and hit you with a text message.
I don't think most people comprehend what their devices are doing, or how their data could be used against them. My robovac has a LIDAR sensor that maps the house - that's cool - what isn't cool is that by default it uploads those maps to Xiaomi and they can connect it via GeoIP (or GPS if I ever use their app) and have the location and floorplan of my home. I'm not special enough for that information to be very valuable, but it's still super creepy and I would prefer they not have it.
https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo
He also had the hopeless feeling of there being nothing to do, but had some sort of Eureka-moment and started playing “Fuck the police” on max volume on the floor above (all via his phone), and that apparently sent the burglars running!
(When he later talked to the cops they did call him a genius but questioned the song choice.)
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you
or
One way, or another, I'm gonna find ya
I'm gonna get ya get ya get ya get ya!
Though any music works best as shows somebody in and most burglars don't want anybody there as then it becomes a robbery and those sentences are higher. So playing music good and your choice is pretty excellent in the psychological factor upon the burglars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_bUcNjmuSk
* Danger Zone by Kenny Loggins
* Welcome to the Jungle by Guns N Roses
* Surfin' Bird by Trashmen
In the case of the drone, it's just a geeky toy that will be inevitably marketed via fear-mongering, so they can collect even more data on you.
I think they're really handy for monitoring the status of routine household tasks, though.
"Did I get a package today? What time does the mail normally arrive? How is the dog doing? Did the garbage truck come by yet? Did the storm do any damage while I was away?"
Oh cool. I always wanted to get texts all day alerting me to people walking dogs across the street and that the squirrel that lives in the tree in the front yard has descended again.
I would like to politely inform you that the neighbor has gone out to get the mail. This is an urgent matter, you must attend to it at once.
Sincerely,
Doggo
Also don't get a Lab because he'll just lick the hands of the burgler.
In normal times, I travel quite a bit. I do have one camera (RPi) looking outside along with a couple other sensors. And I don't really care enough to put cameras all over the house so I can look over things when I'm traveling. (Or, given where I live, enough to subscribe to a security service.)
But, for general peace of mind, to have a single device that lets me look in on things now and then? It actually seems reasonable.
Agree with everything you said except this. This is terrible advice for most people. Don't get a dog unless you really want a dog. And if you do get one, adopt, because there are people who do think like this^ about animals, and a significant number of those animals will end up at a shelter at some point.
As for their utility, meh, dubious utility. Yeah, I get a notice on my phone when they detect movement. That just means I know when my maid is moving between the basement and the living room. But, I know this going in - bought them more as a nerd gadget thing that actual security.
It also assumes typical American construction styles. In my country all houses are made of brick. Opening up the walls to run some cables is often borderline impossible.
A flying security drone solves a few big problems for me A) sometimes a cat decides not to come downstairs for a while, being able to see them is great. B) Stuff gets wrecked while we're gone, its nice to know what we're walking in to and figure out how to have less stuff wrecked in the future.
I'd imagine other folks have various "peace of mind" concerns while away such as the classic "did I leave the oven on?". A patrolling camera is the perfect solution to this problem and is only tangentially related to true home security.
https://www.theverge.com/21300261/ios-14-update-smoke-alarm-...
Several manufacturers sell battery powered cameras that last up to two years without charging. Or you can get solar powered ones for outdoors. They have very low power consumption as they're normally off, until PIR triggered. That's a reasonable trade off, I think. The downside is triggering is potentially unreliable and they're not good for continuous monitoring/recording. But for detecting someone at the door, or in your garden, they're not a bad choice.
That's a business model right there!
Maybe version 2.0 will have lasers?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
Wouldn't you just have them located near an outlet so they could be plugged in all the time?
> Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, your Homepod can detect the dog barking and hit you with a text message.
Considering that our dogs bark at things way across the street, we'd be bombarded with false alarm text messages with a system like this. :-)
But this also might not be good for the pet's mental health either as a loud ass drone buzzes around them.
Deleted Comment
Say what? Seriously?
This is some misogynistic bull because you’re implying that only women would care about unsightly wires strung around the place.
Educate yourself.
I am implying nothing. I am stating a fact. My wife hates visible wires. Every time we move, it's a pain in the ass to hide all the wires for the TV. When Bluetooth became a thing, she was first on board with a wireless mouse and keyboard. It's been an ongoing theme in our relationship for decades.
Educate yourself.
I don't need to educate myself about my wife. You might want to educate yourself about projection, and making false assumptions to fit other people into your stereotypes.
Dead Comment
I'm not. It's a marriage. We make decisions together.
The drone looks really well designed and practical (compared to buying dozens of separate cameras you can have just a couple, and a drone).
Yet most things that come to market are exactly this. Cloud services, subsctiptions and integration with these “smart speakers” (I’m not getting one of those either, so long as they are connected to whoever sold it rather than just to the weather web service).
I wish someone who didn’t have an interest in knowing everything about everyone but could actually make money from hardware would do this.
Is there really no market for that?
Also, doing everything over the internet to centralized "cloud" servers is easier to develop for and manage, and its easier on the end user to set up, strengthening the product. Although I think this is more of a cherry on top of the big pile of data they're getting on you.
It also probably subsidizes the unit cost. Companies would much rather sell you a "cheaper" device with a subscription plan than a potentially more expensive device with one-time payment. Your average consumer will choose the device that is cheaper up-front for the same reasons.
The technical, privacy-focused crowd that tends to populate this forum is already being served by the type of cameras you can already buy on Monoprice, Newegg, or some other related store. Can you imagine a company like Amazon selling that kind of product? I sure can't.
With that said, if anyone would sell a privacy-focused device with all the same benefits as Ring, it would probably be Apple since privacy is part of their brand. I don't think the odds of that happening soon are high, but I could be wrong.
that's the money-shot line . you nailed it
The issue with remote access is you need a service in the middle to provide that remote access, and provide it securely. Otherwise you're just talking something in the home (BLE, etc).
If you don't have some type of service the average consumer will not be able to use it, people aren't going to setup NAS devices, or other servers in their house to collect video data. Even a wireless DVR system can be a pain (another box, likely another TV to see it, etc).
I know that this community is more on the side of the skepticism of collecting data, but keep in mind the total addressable market is mostly people who don't want to deal with these problems.
Now if you're talking about "if the cloud service is down my device doesn't work" then I completely agree, these devices need to have enough local functionality to operate/buffer without their service working for extended periods of time, or being removed.
The argument "you need to upload all your data to our servers or you'll likely have to get another to TV to view it" is just beyond lame.
Does Apple use iCloud for HomeKit, or is it all on the iPad/AppleTV that acts as the home hub?
This is a pain, but solvable by punching holes in all the NAT pair combinations. At a previous startup we all communication peer to peer (phones, custom home devices, laptops), no data traversed our servers ("the cloud"). It worked beautifully.
Seems like the golden age of drones for hobbyist pilots was before all the regulation kicked in, but in this case perhaps Ring could get an exception to restricted areas since they are indoor drones.
seems like you've answered your own question there
Same here. Is there any company working on this product space?
It will never be created by a large corporation or VC-backed startup because those have a need to extract every penny of income from the product line which means there will be a subscription and there will be cloud data gathering which will be sold to advertisers.
But a small privately held company could sustainably target the niche of stand-alone home automation devices for the target audiences who care about privacy and/or prefer no recurring monthly fee.
(I worked on a startup addressing a small segment of this space but over time we (the initial engineering team) lost control to the investors and it morphed into a cloud-dependent service and then promptly died. Would love to work on that space again but without the investors to keep the focus sharp.)
Cameras that don’t need to be accessed over the internet are not the same market as internet connected cameras. For a thousand bucks or so you can get a few decent cameras and an NVR and have all the local camera viewing and recording you want. But most people don’t really need that.
So, any company in that space is competing against FAANG which is pretty daunting...
https://www.pine64.org/cube/
> As this July article from the EFF points out, “with a warrant, police could also circumvent the device’s owner and get footage straight from Amazon, even if the owner denied the police.” The EFF is talking about the Ring doorbell camera here, but it’s not clear to me that the Ring drone would be an exception.
Yes, creepy does not even begin to describe my feelings.
My air cleaning machine has the option to phone home and automatically order replacement filters.
3M has an air filter that Bluetooths with an app that will automatically order new air filters.
The copier at work automatically orders new toner when it runs low. (Though not soon enough, and the threshold is not adjustable.)
I had an HP home printer that also had this ability.
Is it just in the Ring terms of service or something?
But I use drugs, so I'm sorry homie, I ain't giving the cops straightline access into the house.
Turns out that security is a euphemism for "observation & reporting." Use cases span a host of shared services: Traditional Security, Employee Health & Safety, Facilities Management (e.g. leaks & spills), Customer Service, and others. Breaking & Enterings do happen, but they are rare. Facilities incidents such as the ones you mentioned are vastly more common.
[1] https://www.cobaltrobotics.com/
But even if you could manually control the device, I'd be too afraid of having Amazon capturing full video of all my belongings. They have the resources to easily hook up the feed to an object detection ETL or some other AI system to extract a ton of information about the owners, and then sell that as specialized advertising intelligence. All of a sudden my mailbox fills up with lots of high focused ads.
OK I realize that's probably going down the conspiracy theory path a little much :), but I don't think it's too far off.
Seriously: I haven't put in a camera because my DSL craps out every month or so and requires a hard modem reboot to reconnect, which seems like a lot to ask from the friend who checks my mail.
I would love to see a solution tailored to people not in their domiciles, but I don't feel like this is it.
This announcement (not yet a product!) is for people who really need to look around the places they're going to return to in a day or two anyway, max. Maybe that's a market; it's not me.
But I want a product, not tinkering. The appeal of this isn’t just what it does but that it does it right after I unpack it. I want it to fly by itself using some wizardry that a person at a huge company cooked up. I just don’t want it to phone home to do it.
That’s what I want in the “standalone” one too. Mass market product appeal. No tinkering.
I think the majority of people aren't very good at flying drones. Even outside, it can take a lot of practice.
People don't want to spend hours or days learning how to fly a drone in their homes. They want stuff to just work.
Maybe there is a better product though.
https://action.aclu.org/petition/amazon-stop-selling-surveil...
(Ex?) NSA is literally now on the Board https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24426500
From this side of the pond it just looks absolutely insane, full of paranoia and fear. I know there's a country there full of gun totin' lunatics in many places, but I just don't get it.
This is less criticism, btw, and more social commentary. Explain for me how it got so insane?!
Is that because you guys prefer your cameras outside? Brits love CCTV and the watchful eye of big brother
I'm also slightly unclear why. I mean, you look at your phone and see some guy wandering around your house - how does that actually help? If you're in the house you st your pants and hide under the bed or worse case grab your gun and go get shot. If you're out, you phone the police which is what a good intruder alarm would do anyway.
Seems really odd to me.
Oh, plus the thoughts in the article, namely "buy a couple of cheap cameras instead" if you really want this stuff in your life.