this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
136 points (95.3% liked)
Privacy
31913 readers
583 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Reolink is a Chinese company. Not known for their privacy. My experience with their cameras is the quality is meh and their software is even more meh. It amazes me how often they get recommended. I guess it's due to their cheapness.
Their quality is adequate for the price and they are open enough to be used with any NVR.
If you are worried about privacy you should segment the cameras onto their own network (VLAN) or at the very least block them on the firewall from accessing the internet, which you should do anyway.
It's more because they provide an ONVIF interface or an RTSP stream that makes them self-hosting darlings. Them being Chinese white-labels and cheap is mainly a side-bonus.
What are your recommendations if not them?
You're not wrong about reolinks, amcrest, hikvision, etc but their price:quality can't be beat and they work well with many different NVR software suites, which makes them popular.
If you're concerned about how they call home (they do, I've sniffed packets on my network to test the rumors and seen it on every one of them), you need to isolate the cameras off of the internet so they are blocked from the outside connection. This can end up being mildly tricky to very complicated depending on your network equipment, the way your LAN is set up at home, whether you want to view your cameras remotely, etc, but it's the most cost effective long term option that is not subscription/cloud based.
I use blue iris on an old computer. It works great. I have unifi network gear, and I tried some of their cameras out but they're not really ONVIF compliant and they're extremely expensive for an equivalent Chinese brand. That's the made in USA price, and tbh Unifi cameras aren't even that expensive, they're more "prosumer" for small business deployments or nerds at home. They have a walled garden ecosystem that I dipped my toe into and didn't care for some of it, but I still use their access points, routers, and switches because they're great quality and really easy to config.
But, if you have never done any of that, you might just want to go with an off the shelf solution or be willing to spend a lot of time reading. You DON'T want to mess up your network security trying to install local cameras if you're not sure what you're doing.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is an RF/analogue camera kit. It's not as easy to set up as POE (two cords to each camera and they're way bigger so running them through walls will do more damage that you have to patch later) you can get an all-in-one NVR+4/8/12/16 etc camera kit with as many bells and whistles as you want. It will be cheaper as well and you don't have to worry about network bandwidth issues because it's analog. The feeds are super nice.