Do not use Ring Cameras. Their are a lot of news stories on tv about these being used by police without notifying the owners. The fact is the police departments across the nation have signed up for a special access to these cameras. In many cases they do not notify the owner nor do they get a court order. Some agencies can see the cameras real time. And can monitor a neighborhood or even follow a car thru town using Ai. It is best not to have a car that stands out. If you have a ring camera realize they will know when you leave your house and everyone that comes to your house. Amazon even gives free cameras to police departments so they can give them to people in areas they want to watch for free. This happened in my neighborhood they gave everyone but me a camera. These things have motion detectors and can see good at night. Police have given these to houses at all 4 way stops in town in some places. I have even noticed them on houses going into town. There have been many small videos about this happening on youtube. If you need a camera system I highly recommend getting one that does not connect to a cloud network. Something you control yourself.
Data is big business. I didn't know this until recently but Walmart bought the Vizio TV brand/company. Not so they would control the TV mfg business, but to have direct access to the data that people put into the "SMART" TV's. Where there is tech there is money to be made in the data.
I have posted in the past about this, pretty much anything you buy now "phones home". I first noticed when I was doing traffic shaping on my home network after I installed cameras and Blue Iris. Every damn one of the cameras were sending low bandwidth RTSP streams to China IP addresses. Then I had to block ports on my TCL tv that was sending random packets of something to Korea. Pretty much anything you plug into your internet phones home for whatever reason.
I'll never use a camera that requires off net access to a vendor for security and reliability reasons. That rules out Ring on both accounts. All my wired cameras to to an isolated POE router that is connected to my blue Iris server that is also dual homed to my internal home network allowing my other computers to access the BI web page. I love being able to use the computer backed TV's in my bedroom and living room to monitor my cameras. My sole wireless camera is an Amcrest that connects to a router that runs in access point mode that only allows the camera's MAC to connect and nothing else. Have some injuries that need to heal before I can run the CAT6 to replace it with a wired doorbell. Pic below does not show the Amcrest wireless connection. I use my own acronyms. IOT = Internet Only Traffic (anything that should not access my network like wifi colored lights and other nonsense) NOT = Network Only Traffic (printers, NAS, etc) INT = Internet Network Traffic (devices that need network and Internet access
Sorry for the thread drift, but something else to point out is that so many devices come with bluetooth and have it enabled by default. Bluetooth is handy and convenient, but it's also fairly easy to compromise. Printers in particular come with Bluetooth enabled to make it easy for people to get set up to print. They are among the most frequent devices on your network to be compromised. They are designed for ease of use and not for security. If possible you want them hard wired and then disable wireless and Bluetooth. Hard wire where possible Wireless as a last resort Turn off any connectivity protocol that is not in use for a solid reason.
Y'all are so fancy. I just have 9 big ass loud dogs for an alert and security system. The pug, cats, chickens, and pigs roaming the yard aren't good for much.
Our pug IS our alarm system! Nothing in 150’ radius of the house gets by without her notice. She’s backed up by the Hanging Tree Cowdog who will tear your achilles out! LOL!
