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
I’m very happy with my ubiquiti doorbell. It records to a local NVR on my network. No cloud for this guy!
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.
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.