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.
I love Timeline when I'm traveling. It's great to be able to remember all of the random wandering in foreign cities. I've seriously considered printing and framing the timelines, but it's difficult to crop them so they all match.
The way I explain it to people who say that to me is that it doesn't even have to be something illegal or sketchy.
Everyone...and I mean everyone has something about themselves that, were it common knowledge, would change the way your friends and family look at you. Maybe for the better. Maybe not. And if you, for whatever reason, don't want that they be known, then so be it. That's totally your decision, not the governments.
If you want to let your freak flag fly proudly, go ahead. You have my full love and support. If you want to fly your freak flag privately and not have it be common knowledge. You also have my full love and support.
It's not about "having something to hide". It's about the you that you choose to present to the world. And that is a fundamental right.
It's also about the fact that social standards and laws change. What may be perfectly acceptable today, could cost you your job or freedom in a few years.
Look at how many people lost their jobs, careers, and social standings because of old tweets that were resurfaced years later. That's not even legal changes, just social propriety changes. The internet used to be the Wild West. People would go out with guns blazing, hootin ' and a hollerin'. Then several years later we found ourselves in this socially progressive identity focused environment and shit people said in passing, likely without any thought at all, suddenly became part of their public identity.
Now imagine that there's a drastic change in the law. Today you're celebrating pride month, and 5 years from now homosexuality is outlawed retroactively... Seems preposterous, but it's really not. We need our privacy, from both the government and corporations.
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'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.
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
I've got a bit of a VPN question if anyone wants to educate a newbie a little. When I tried a VPN (Mullvad actually!) it defaulted to Sweden but then accessing my banking information didn't work. If I switch a VPN to reflect that I'm somewhere randomly in the USA, is that still sufficient protection?
for my use case, that'd be good enough, i don't want my school/building admins to snoop on the websites i visit, and don't want to fear academic repercussions for torrenting and such
though if you think your government is out to get you, then tunneling to another country is probably best!
Nothing that serious, thankfully. Just want to obfuscate my data and leave as little of an impression on the internet as I can. Good advice, thank you!
Your bank probably wants to make sure your account isn't being hacked. Either they think you're using a VPN, and they believe it could be a malicious person from literally anywhere, or they think you're in Sweden, and they have no idea how you got there.
It's cases like these where you might want to temporarily disable the VPN or make a special exception for your banking app, but that's up to you.
I've torrented in the US and haven't been hit with anything. So I think it should be fine as long as you vpn anywhere. Except maybe very totalitarian countries.
I love Mullvad. You don't see them in any ads (No "this video is brought to you by Mullvad VPN") and you can pay them any way you'd like... Including cash!
I don't understand. I mean I see why not having port forwarding would turn someone off from going with Mullvad, but I understand Mullvad's rationale for doing so.
I understand their decision to stop offering it, too, especially if I were in their position as a service provider. I still like the feature as a consumer.
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