Jason Bassler | @JasonBassler1
Big Brother just got an upgrade.
Starting December, Amazon’s Ring cameras will scan and recognize faces. Don’t want to be in their database? Too bad — walk past a Ring and your face can be stored, tagged, & analyzed without consent.
One step closer to total surveillance.
[Image: A Ring doorbell camera mounted on a brick wall. A digital overlay shows facial recognition scanning a person's face with grid lines. Text on the right reads “Amazon's Ring Adds Facial Recognition to Home Security” with additional text below.]
6:00 PM | Oct 4, 2025
Source: https://x.com/JasonBassler1/status/1974640686419857516
Yall gonna stop paying companies so you can’t help build the surveillance state? No? Awesome…
Maybe we should bring back covid masks as a privacy/fashion statement now?
Sorry, that’s illegal now
876.12 Wearing mask, hood, or other device on public way.—No person or persons over 16 years of age shall, while wearing any mask, hood, or device whereby any portion of the face is so hidden, concealed, or covered as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter upon, or be or appear upon any lane, walk, alley, street, road, highway, or other public way in this state.
It’s part of the big campaign to disrupt criminal anarchy, treason, and other crimes against public order
Illegal for you, I guess. I can wear a mask outside. Good luck down there in the US, guys.
I always thought of them as a privacy aid.
Luckily I live somewhere where they will have to hide it
This isn’t legal where I live. It’s not allowed to record public spaces
Same here. All private cameras that record or process data from a public space need to be announced on entrance of a property. Though now that i think about it, idk how ring got passed that law to begin with in 99% of its use cases…
( if its a front door that can only view private property its fine iirc, and if it has public space like roads its a nono )
Same as non-legal ebikes perhaps? Where I live the police don’t seem to care unless the rider happens to be a drug dealer or otherwise wanted by the police.
I’d take a guess that while a ring doorbell might be illegal and not enforced, it probably means the recorded footage might be not accepted in court if ever needed… Perhaps (I’m not a lawyer or even close to being an expert). Unless a doorbell inspector becomes a thing then it probably just slides.
I was gonna say, I’m not sure this would hold up to legal scrutiny, not that that makes it ok in the first place.
We need to normalize spray painting the lenses on these things, as well as painting “big brother” on doorways of those that own them. If you enable fascism, you should expect some minor vandalism.
You could start by sending them a letter that informs them of this occuring and how it impacts the world around them before you skip straight to vandalism. I’m sure a lot of people just never considered the extent of that data that is being shared so much as they figured only they would have access to the footage.
Ugh… Idiots ruin everything. How can people not understand this? Just so fucking ignorant
Sure, but then you’re a suspect.
You can send a letter without a return address. I plan on taking this idea and sending it out to my neighbors who have one. It honestly seems like a fun side activity.
Just go from the side and toss a Molotov at their door.
Americans are fucking weird, they piss and moan about speed and red light cameras, and claim they are unconstitutional. However, the Ring shit is good to go.
I’m losing my mind. Ring cameras everywhere, Flock cameras, ID/face verification, everything Google touches, airports, Tesla car cameras, every modern car actually, Meta glasses, Chat Control every year, the OSA, stores using facial recognition (and other tracking), social media billionaire shenanigans, Samsung installing Israeli spyware and putting ads on the fridges, fuck even the Windows 11+Chrome+iPhone combo I see in public. I could keep going. We could all keep going.
It’s too much. Idk anymore. This post broke me a little.
I am Italian and I have much fewer reasons to feel like you, but I still do and, although loving the friends I made there, I know I will never again set foot in the USA, since this comes from a culture of surveillance dating back more than a century.
I am actually offering temporary accomodation to any of my friends who may want to try his luck in the EU.
The UK has a CCTV facial recognition system that’s quite massive, we’ve resisted such programs for the most part (a few cities have them but they’re not linked together).
So it’s not like Europe is free of this.
Here most of our camera systems are for our own use only, not for the government, with this giant exception.
I have no idea how regulated it is right now within the EU, outside of GDPR, but surely there are different laws locally. I don’t know if after Brexit something has been added to such laws in the UK, but I must say that even before that it was obvious that the UK LOVED their cameras.
Willing to host a small family from the US that absolutely loves your country?
In 52 m2 I can offer a matrimonial bed for a couple visiting to get job interviews for some time, not much more.
I’m rapidly approaching the point where I go completely feral and begin smashing every advertisement and camera I see. Smashing large billboard screens and smearing shit on walls. Just to tear this monstrosity to the ground.
PREACH WTF SERIOUSLY
Ran into this one Halloween a few years ago. Fuckers had Halloween decorations out, seeming welcoming, and when my kid went up to the door they used their ring camera to make fun of him. Once society falls in the next year or two, that’s where I’m going first.
So what happens to images of your face when they’re stored? Who tf really knows. We do know these oligarchs will literally try to exploit and profit from literally anything and everything they get access to.
Some countries that aren’t treated like a state run corporation are actually letting citizens copyright their own faces for their protection.
Uploaded to a database. Linked to your meta data full of wrong think. Face blown off by a AI built and operated kamakazi drone.
Sucks to be anyone that looks like you, but that is a price the 1% are willing to pay for complete control. Because what’s left after you own all the wealth and assets?
Great, my downstairs neighbor has one of these things that everyone has to walk by when going in or out of the main building. Why she needs one in an apartment building with a locked main door that you have to unlock yourself for guests is a mystery to me.
Not in Illinois it won’t. The states attorney will have Amazon for lunch.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_Act
In EU this is also illegal
And you’re always seen as a “weirdo” or “crazy” or maybe even a thief if you want to opt out with a mask.
Given any large database this is going to be a massive problem.
Did someone steal your package?
Do you want to know who did it?
Will you settle for knowing which of the 385 people in the country look like your villain? Some of them may even be close enough to be falsely accused!
Would the police do anything about it even if you had 100% irrefutable proof of who did it? Would you settle for Amazon displaying to those 385 people in your town that sort of look like the thief ads for tools that would make it easier to break into your home?
There are factual existing cases of someone being tried and losing months of their life due to facial recognition wherein the accused wasn’t in the same town as the crime. When the authorities are handled sufficiently gift wrapped cases here is bob bob did wrong here’s the video they often DO pursue them because 95% of such cases are a charging document arrest and plea bargain. In this phase we regularly ask people to choose between probation or a short sentence and being threatened with being punished with 20 years for defending themselves. Sometimes innocent people actually cop a please to avoid their life being destroyed.
Whilst in theory people may be entitled to a lawyer they may either not qualify because they aren’t poor enough or may not get actual representation without spending thousands of dollars people simply don’t have.
Creating a whole host of such cases could be a disaster.
I’m very happy with my ubiquiti doorbell. It records to a local NVR on my network. No cloud for this guy!
I’ve been telling anyone that will listen about my ubiquiti setup. Storing the video data locally is the only scenario that I’m comfortable with. I can still remotely log into my network and check camera footage, but no one else has access to it.
Ubiquity has been awesome. I’m running a cloud gateway max and a single U7 pro wall AP. It was $400 all the networking stuff, and $300 for the doorbell. The doorbell was a little steep, but you gotta remember there’s no subscription. And after trying a bunch of AP/routers, $400 is honestly a great value for the quality of the networking gear. And I have a ton of headroom for upgrades in the future.
I’ve heard ubiquiti support isn’t the best for professional installments, but in the home, it’s been fantastic.
I’m a certified network engineer so I wasn’t too fussed with their support. I have a Dream Machine, a 24 port PoE switch, two APs (one U6 Lite, and one U7 Lite that I added later), and three cameras. We mostly just use the cameras to check on the cats when we’re out of town, but it’s nice to have the extra security just in case.
Is the setup a little excessive: absolutely. Is it awesome to know within seconds if there’s an issue with my network or if it’s just another ISP outage: also yes.
In the five years that I’ve had this setup, I’ve had exactly one issue with the network and it was just that one of the APs died after four years of continuous use.
Considering how much money I spent on crappy router/WiFi solutions, I think the UniFi stuff is very reasonably priced. From a software standpoint, it’s definitely overkill. The only wall I hit so far is I don’t think you can send IPv6 traffic over a VPN. I use a network level VPN to Mullvad via Wireshark. I whitelist devices to VPN but blacklist some domains that don’t play nice with a VPN. If I turn on IPv6, it leaks my location via IPv6 address. But if I turn it off, Mullvad reports my location is hidden. 🤷
That sounds like an issue with Mullvad to me. I haven’t used it personally, but a quick search pulled up some issues with Mullvad leaking location over ipv6 and even disabling it by default.
You have my attention… Does it have a good / comparable app that you can use to view recordings?
The iOS app is decent, and the web interface is excellent imo. Web has better search. I think the AI computer vision stuff performs slightly worse than Ring. E.g. package detection is pretty good but not great. However, pretty impressive considering everything is running locally. I think they have some dedicated hardware now for running local computer vision stuff that likely performs better.
Need to normalise IR and UV LED strobe flares, blind those CCDs.
UV??? That’ll just damage our eyes, please don’t encourage that. IR, 100%
“In other news, the Trump administration has expanded the powers of the FCC. No more will antifa terrorists be allowed to assault private businesses with radiation.”
THEY WANT TO TRANS YOUR DOORBELL
