> In short, the people who "purchased" these cameras do not own them.
They do own the camera. They just don't own the cloud service that makes the camera useful. Or even operable.
Reminds me of Cory Doctorow's story Unauthorized Bread.
They do own the camera. They just don't own the cloud service that makes the camera useful. Or even operable.
Reminds me of Cory Doctorow's story Unauthorized Bread.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
In other words, unless you’re going to take the time to reverse engineer all of it, you’re completely at their mercy.
Even if you opt for local storage you’re still beholden to their black box hub because that’s the only thing the cameras will talk to, and their app because that’s the only thing that will talk to their hub. (HomeKit and other integration exists but it doesn’t provide the full functionality you get from the app, and still requires their hub.)
I don’t know the model, but the article makes it seem as if the cameras work perfectly well without it? I hate online-only products and think they are between scam and trap, but this seems more a case of false advertising than anything like that.
You can use local storage to save recordings by connecting flash storage to the hub, but it’s only really useful a backup. You can’t view it in the app (you have to sneaker-net the storage to a computer), and it can only save triggered recordings.
Basically if you don’t care about storing and saving recordings for future use and only plan to stream from the cameras, then it’ll continue to work (as long as Arlo’s web services work of course).