this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
116 points (98.3% liked)

Privacy

6660 readers
216 users here now

A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy

Rules:

  1. Be civil
  2. No spam posting
  3. Keep posts on-topic
  4. No trolling

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
iopq@lemmy.world
116
I need help advocating for privacy in my HOA, which wants to set up cameras in common areas (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 day ago by NaNin@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/privacy@lemmy.world
42 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

A new neighbor moved in and is really advocating for them, but I think most people in the HOA are split. It's come up after some recent thefts after someone left a garage door open. I'm thinking of organizing my arguments like this:

  1. Even with a camera capturing a thief's face, police are unlikely to actually catch the person or retreive the stolen property.
  2. Invasion of personal privacy, I don't like being tracked and my whereabouts being monitored
  3. Surrendering biometric data without my consent
  4. Police / ICE using the data without permission to harass our residents

How does this sound? It's so exhausting fighting against this. Does anyone have any other good points or articles that can provide support? Many thanks in advance

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] swizzlestick@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Hi fellow HA user in the wild.

Whatever cams you go with, most important thing is that they support a direct rtsp connection. Frigate is an excellent add-on for recording, and for object detection if you want to do that.

We have some generic IP cameras here that have local access only, and a couple of Arduino camera PCBs in printed housings.

A coral TPU is essential if you want to get into object detection on more than one camera. Can use the CPU for testing, but it's very easy to tap it out.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 1 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

IP cameras here that have local access only

This is the right way.

No proprietary SaaS portals, no cloud uploads, no apps, no external network links.

Hopefully the local connections are encrypted and the devices on the network are segmented into VLANs, otherwise anyone on the local network could just watch the video stream.

[–] swizzlestick@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 hours ago

Honestly have not bothered too much on the internal security side. Everything is in a melting pot on the same subnet, with pfsense managing what's allowed out. At the very least, the cams and any other accessible internal devices do not run default/duplicated credentials.

Only two users on the network, and the occasional trusted guest. I don't see the need to go further quite yet.