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Home Security Cameras and Privacy Concerns

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Cerebus:

--- Quote from: jonpaul on June 24, 2022, 08:07:37 am ---Storage of Penta-Exa bytes of  data is no longer an  issue.

--- End quote ---

Moving it over consumer broadband/mobile data connections is still an issue. When you're talking about video cameras you're talking about 4 to 25 megabits per second, per camera, after compression. People notice that kind of drain on their resources. Plus anyone with a decent firewall at home would spot it almost immediately. Secret government surveillance tends to try to be exactly that, secret, so they don't do things that would make it immediately obvious to a large group of people.

There's sensible caution and skepticism about what governments will/do do with our data regardless of the strict legalities of doing so, and then there's wearing a tin foil hat.

SiliconWizard:
With surveillance cameras, think of your own privacy, sure, but also think of the privacy of others.
Is it going to run at all times or only when you are away and nobody's supposed to be there?
I would hope it's not the former, but if you really want that for some reason, please inform your visitors. That would be common uh... courtesy. :-DD

Berni:

--- Quote from: Cerebus on June 24, 2022, 01:21:26 pm ---
--- Quote from: jonpaul on June 24, 2022, 08:07:37 am ---Storage of Penta-Exa bytes of  data is no longer an  issue.

--- End quote ---
Moving it over consumer broadband/mobile data connections is still an issue. When you're talking about video cameras you're talking about 4 to 25 megabits per second, per camera, after compression. People notice that kind of drain on their resources. Plus anyone with a decent firewall at home would spot it almost immediately. Secret government surveillance tends to try to be exactly that, secret, so they don't do things that would make it immediately obvious to a large group of people.

There's sensible caution and skepticism about what governments will/do do with our data regardless of the strict legalities of doing so, and then there's wearing a tin foil hat.

--- End quote ---

Security camera footage is much much more compressible than your typical youtube video. Most of the time nothing is happening so you don't need to save much frame data if every frame is near identical. To save even more space cameras typically do motion detection locally, so it might be only recording for a handful of minutes per day in a quiet area. They know people have crappy internet so they have to work around it in order to avoid unhappy costumers when videos are garbled or missing in the phone app.

If the camera stores footage in the cloud then it is going to be barfing loads of data into the internet anyway, if you don't see a lot of traffic from it means your camera is broken. If the footage is sent from the camera on demand (Like when you open your browser or phone app) then they could still store the footage as it flows to the server and is forwarded onto your phone. Heck they could even pack in other footage you didn't request since they are sending a big pile of data anyway. They could also pack in spinets of data in keep alive packets that it sends to the server so that they can notify you if your camera went offline. This was one of the ways they caught cheaters on WordOfWarcraft, the game would grab random parts of its RAM area and tack it onto some genuine data packets, the server would then reassemble it slowly over time and a detection algorithm was run over it to find anomalies and ban the cheaters.

It is not just about the government scraping data together (well in places like China it is a big deal tho) but it is about trusting the company running the service. Lots of companies have questionable security practices and suffer being hacked into all the time. Once the servers of such an always online IoT appliance are hacked they could even potentially push out a malicious firmware to them, effectively from the inside infiltrating millions of networks around the world (Okay sure you have VLANs.. good for you, most people don't as they don't even know how to open ports on a router)

Cerebus:
The context was Jon-Paul's remarks about deliberate "embedded HW/FW/SW backdoors". You don't hack a whole nation's private security cameras without someone noticing.

Kleinstein:

--- Quote from: Cerebus on June 27, 2022, 12:01:46 pm ---The context was Jon-Paul's remarks about deliberate "embedded HW/FW/SW backdoors". You don't hack a whole nation's private security cameras without someone noticing.

--- End quote ---
Backdoors (or poorly secured service access) and severe security flaws do exist in common products. As there is normally not much probing is done they do det unnoticed for quite some time. About the worst contenders here are DSL modems and similar. They kind of need a regular fix for bugs comming up on a more or less regular basis and they are at a vulnerable spot. A camera is ideally used behind some kind of firewall that isolates it from most attacks.

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