I’m shopping around for a front door camera and I wanted some input as far as security goes. I want a camera from a company that stores minimal to no personal information and doesn’t share user info with third parties.

I don’t really want to have to pay for cloud storage but if I have to and the company has a secure cloud storage model that would be fine, preferably it’d be nice to be able to store footage on my local file server but a mix of that and the ability to rent cloud storage would not be bad either.

Thanks in advance for your input.

  • browner87@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    If you’re willing to buy into the brand a bit, Ubiquiti makes some decent cameras. PoE cameras are really great if you can run the ethernet but don’t have a power outlet around, and the wifi ones are great if you have the opposite.

    The first thing you have to buy is a CloudKey or Dream Machine from them, and it stores all the video locally. You use their app to review footage and get alerts for motion/people/cars. If you allow it, it’ll connect with Ubiquiti and you can tunnel all your video watching and alerts through them. In theory they don’t record or capture anything, but if they were compromised they could. There is a direct connection option if you expose the CloudKey to the internet, which I think gets you all the same features but without Ubiquiti in the middle. You can weigh the risks of each (internet exposed device that could be hacked, vs Ubiquiti in the middle of your traffic). You could probably use VPN and “direct connection” without exposing anything if you want, I doubt alerts will work right though.

    Once your storage device is setup, you just start plugging in cameras and away you go.

    Their old software stack came with a version where you could host the server on a VM and store all your video on a NAS, but I don’t think they ever added that support back since the change a year or two ago. A lot of people were really cheesed about that.