Drop dead

I think you guys are missing the point a little on this one. It&#x27;s not that there is a picture of this dudes bare ass somewhere online and he&#x27;s upset about it, it&#x27;s that no matter what he did or tried he could be guaranteed in absolutely no way that the data was removed or under his control. Once it&#x27;s in the pipes, it may or may not be there, there&#x27;s no way to know. Anything you put online, in all sorts of incidental ways be it from giving your TV voice commands, sending your location to google maps, or your net connected security devices, becomes someones property other than just yours. Not that it&#x27;s legal, or that people are spying on everything you do, but that you have no way of knowing about or controlling the data once it&#x27;s there.<p>This isn&#x27;t supposed to be scary, just a reminder that you can lose control easily.<p>This is a complex issue and if you think it goes away by saying things like &quot;well then don&#x27;t stand in front of the camera naked.&quot; then you are missing the point.

The &#x27;oh&#x27; moment of data dissemination.<p>Somethings are not good for the cloud, not only is there a picture of your buttocks in the cloud, its a lot easier to get a warrant to peek at Dropcam&#x2F;Google&#x27;s data than it is to get one to get a computer from your house and scan its hard drive. And if someone is fishing for a reason to get your attention, well getting snapshots inside your house is a lot easier than getting a search warrant for your house.<p>I was looking at the comm vaults Comcast and others put into the ground where they are doing fiber pulls and realized that it wouldn&#x27;t be that hard to put one in a back yard, or in a weird kind of data center (kind of like a cemetery but selling server vaults instead of burial plots) which would at least keep your data &#x27;off site&#x27; in the sense that your house burning down wouldn&#x27;t cause it to go away.

On the one hand, &quot;If you don&#x27;t want naked pictures of yourself in the cloud, don&#x27;t take naked pictures of yourself and put them in the cloud.&quot;<p>But this is like saying &quot;If you don&#x27;t want to get scammed, then don&#x27;t respond to scammy emails.&quot; That is, it&#x27;s perfectly good advice, which is fine for people who visit Hacker News, but maybe not sufficient for the vast majority of people who aren&#x27;t aware of the ins and outs of our rapidly advancing technology.<p>There are whole communities of people devoted to the practice of finding women who accidentally configured their phones to upload all pictures to a publicly accessible cloud storage server. The women whose nudes are distributed this way may not realize their pics are being mirrored- or they may assume it&#x27;s to a private site (because why the hell isn&#x27;t that the default?!?)- or they may have shared these pics with a dude who made the same mistakes.<p>But regardless, the point remains- any <i>individual</i> is easily capable of being immune to this problem. But there&#x27;s a <i>whole population</i> of vulnerable victims who don&#x27;t even know they&#x27;re being victimized. And that <i>is</i> a real problem.

Funny. We&#x27;re all so (justifiably) afraid of NSA and Google violating our privacy that we don&#x27;t even consider the ways we do it to ourselves.

I&#x27;m missing something here.<p>If you don&#x27;t want naked pictures of yourself taken, then you don&#x27;t undress in front of a running video camera, right? Seems kinda obvious.<p>This fellow put together a setup that automatically takes pix of whatever happens and uploads them to a company&#x27;s server and ... he&#x27;s shocked when it does what it&#x27;s supposed to?<p>I don&#x27;t get it.<p>--------<p>EDIT. Been pondering this. Perhaps he began with a misconception akin to that of a politician who wants a backdoor for the good guys to use, but who doesn&#x27;t understand that if the good guys can use it, then so can the bad guys. Then the e-mail and his resulting thoughts showed him that he wasn&#x27;t thinking about the world properly; thus his feeling of shock.

The principle of the matter and all, I know, but you&#x27;ve got to love his response here: &quot;now there&#x27;s a web-accessible picture of me naked! Here, it&#x27;s this picture: &lt;insert web-accessible image&gt;&quot;

I have a Dropcam in my garage for miscellaneous reasons. I, too, have wondered the implications of providing the Google&#x2F;NSA complex video evidence of my comings and goings...<p>It&#x27;d be nice if Dropcams were more hacker friendly, and allowed recording to personally-owned devices, instead of forcing you to use their (fairly expensive) cloud recording service.<p>(Not to mention the ~100ish GB&#x2F;mo bandwidth savings to stream this video, which is a fairly nontrivial requirement.)

I actually have my laptop set up to take a snapshot every 20 minutes (unless I&#x27;m connected to work wifi - never know when it might be pointed at confidential data on a whiteboard, and it felt unfair to opt all my coworkers into it.)<p>It has definitely made me more mindful of situations like this.<p>(It actually sporadically refuses to take a photo on the new laptop right now, so <a href="http://lishin.org/pavelcam.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lishin.org&#x2F;pavelcam.jpg</a> doesn&#x27;t always get updated.)

I have a device similar to a Dropcam but by D-Link, and have it configured to transmit data to my NAS, rather than the cloud. I can then SSH in to view the images on it.<p>If you want a camera monitoring your home, but don&#x27;t want it stored on someone elses&#x27; system, it&#x27;s pretty easy to roll your own with a variety of configurations.

&gt; It’s at this point you ask yourself if having a net-connected camera for monitoring your house was a good idea after all.<p>It&#x27;s a good idea but you probably shouldn&#x27;t buy the fancy &quot;cloud&quot; version. Just set up your own FTP server ...

I may have to spend the weekend messing with my raspberry pi to make a local dropcam. Just found a link to a guide:<p><a href="http://www.sonsoftone.com/?page_id=287" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sonsoftone.com&#x2F;?page_id=287</a>

Assuming you <i>do</i> want off-site backups of your security footage, but only accessible to you (i.e. strongly encrypted), what are your options?<p>What if you want a remote live stream?<p>Linux or OS X, please.

What would bother me about this is that picture is far too small and blurry to identify a criminal. Is that the best this product can do? If so, are there any competing products that do better?

What do you mean by &quot;web accessible&quot;? Did Google decide to publicly publish all dropcam&#x27;s customer pictures?

This certainly gives me pause about buying a Dropcam, even if the only place its going to observe is near my front door.

Of all ipcams in the world why the hell did he buy the one in 0.1% of them that uploads shit to the &quot;cloud&quot;?

1. Visit google.com<p>2. Search for [erase dropcam video]<p>3. Click first result

To paraphrase: &quot;The device functioned as intended so now I hate It&quot;.<p>The developers of this product don&#x27;t deserve this blog post, especial when the feature in question is a paid extra that requires setup.

The blog&#x27;s subtitle is &quot;doing it wrong&quot;. Naked in front of a camera and pondering implications of Internet of Things backed by private corporations?<p>Yes, you are doing it wrong.

Ultimately though, what are the negative consequences of some random stranger, or even the general public, seeing your naked ass? Pretty much nothing.

Much as I care about privacy and the exploitation of people&#x27;s data for commercial gain, I find this a bit histrionic. If you put the automated camera inside your house and you are the sort of person who sometimes wanders around naked, then the two are eventually bound to collide (which is why I don&#x27;t have automated cameras inside the house).<p>On the plus side, everybody has an ass and this one is so far into the background of the picture that the only conclusions I can reach about the subject are &#x27;Mathowie is quite pale&#x27; and &#x27;he has an ass like every other member of the human race.&#x27; In other words, this isn&#x27;t really awkward enough to serve as a cautionary tale to anyone else. Now if he had been dressed up as a lobster that would be quite a different kettle of fish.

Except that image isn&#x27;t accessible to anyone except the owner, or MAYBE the NSA.<p>But I&#x27;m pretty sure the NSA doesn&#x27;t care about looking at some random guy&#x27;s ass.<p>In the unlikely case that they do need to investigate the ass for national security reasons, they aren&#x27;t going to disseminate the picture to the world, similar to how they don&#x27;t disseminate intelligence data.<p>Which means the ONLY way the public will see the ass-picture is if: a) The ass is of interest to national security AND b) The ass is of such concern to national security it is stored in the NSA&#x27;s internal ass-database AND c) There exists some kind of ass-Snowden that leaks all the asses in the NSA arsenal.<p>...why does anyone care about this?