this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Privacy
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The challenge is… how do you convince all your neighbors to take down their Ring doorbells?
Aside from the obvious concerns, from a cost perspective why would you chose ring when you have to pay for it to be useful. There are other options that are cheaper and free to use as long as you pop an SD card in them. Obviously they aren't totally innocent of concern but feels like people do zero research into what's available.
My experience is that people are conditioned these days to do everything by subscription, even when it provides no additional value.
A mix of blackmail and extortion
Just kidding, in reality there is no ethical way to control what your neibours do. What you can do is inform them about the recent controversies regarding Ring cameras.
Pffft. Good luck, your neighbors will dismiss you as a crank. Take it from an environmentalist fighting herbicides and the like.
They trust authority.
It'd be nice if my HOA banned Ring cameras instead of solar
I’m imagining a series of signs I could walk in front of the cameras….
A cleverer angle'd be to find out how to get them to switch to an open-source cctv alternative instead, I feel. 🤓
Community action. ✊🏼
A CCTV setup likely won’t work for people who just want a video doorbell.
But replacing a Ring with something like a Reolink means they can start with the same service, and over time move to RTSP and a local server as they become more aware of privacy implications and are driven to invest in a contained system.
Likely people will never go CC though, as the entire point for most people is to see what shows up at their door when they’re not at home.
I use reolink at my office.
There are ways to see what's at your door when you aren't home that don't rely on third parties having access to the footage at least
Frigate NVR and Netbird VPN. I don't use it like this, but it would work excellently.
Is Reolink something you can see the live video remotely? I could see a motion detection system at your doorstep that lets you know someone is there but you'd have to be able to login somehow to get a view.
Reolink doorbells allow you to configure them how you want; you can use a cloud-hosted feed, cloud-hosted notification only, self-hosted feed, self-hosted notification only, and write-to-microSD only. They can use WiFi or wired Ethernet.
I have mine set to do cloud push for notifications, RTSP to my internal home server only; so I log in via VPN if I want to see the video.