A Super Bowl ad for Ring security cameras boasting how the company can scan neighborhoods for missing dogs has prompted some customers to remove or even destroy their cameras.
Online, videos of people removing or destroying their Ring cameras have gone viral. One video posted by Seattle-based artist Maggie Butler shows her pulling off her porch-facing camera and flipping it the middle finger.
Butler explained that she originally bought the camera to protect against package thefts, but decided the pet-tracking system raised too many concerns about government access to data.
“They aren’t just tracking lost dogs, they’re tracking you and your neighbors,” Butler said in the video that has more than 3.2 million views.
Initially, NBC Nightly News (Savannah Guthrie’s network) stated that Ring cameras could only record 4-6 hours before the footage would start to rewrite over itself. Yet being able to uncover what they did after the fact seems hella sketchy.
deleted by creator
Not at all, that’s tons of time.
That was a nest and I don’t know about them, but for Ring they store snippets activated by motion or ringing the bell. Once you’re only saving snippets, 4-6 hours video could be weeks
Ring can also save snapshots, at regular intervals, but that’s a still photo taking much less storage.
I used to have a nest doorbell. You can set it to record continuously, just FYI.
E: that will also require a subscription, which includes 60 days of saved footage (and other stuff)
Not really if you know how this kind of computing/information technology works.
A file consists of the data itself, and a pointer to the data location on the storage device or index record. When the computer wants to retrieve the data, it looks at the index to get the data location, then goes to that location to get the data. This is how the majority of computers/devices work. When a file is “deleted” the index is usually the only thing that goes away, not the data itself. Over the course of time, the data is eventually overwritten as its in areas marked as “free space”. So other new files will occupy some or all of that space changing it to hold the new file data.
If you want to get rid of the data itself, that is usually considered “purge” where the data is intentionally overwritten with something else to make the data irretrievable.
What the Google engineers were able to do was essentially go through all the areas marked as “free space” across dozens (hundreds?) of cloud servers that hold customer Nest camera data and try to find any parts that hadn’t been overwritten yet by new data. This is probably part of why it took so long to produce the video. Its like sorting through a giant dumpster to find an accidentally discarded wedding ring.