For example, I think I’ll need a ladder. I’m looking for any suggestions from tools to security cameras, or whatever else you can think of. What should every new home owner consider getting?
Edit: in Canada btw, somewhere that gets a lot of snow in the winter
So I personally will forever be on the side of “fuck eufy and I hope they fail miserably” for several reasons:
they initial sold their cameras with the guarantee of no cloud integration. When users found that even if you had it set to be local only it still uploaded thumbnails of every persons face with a “name” attached to an aws server and that portions of camera streams could be viewed remotely without encryption, suggesting that all of this data was being transmitted without encryption. When called out on this eufy doubled down and said it was incorrect. When proven wrong they offered 0 recourse for pissed off customers who purchased it specifically because of their promises that it was “no cloud integration”, their only response was to silently remove references to “no cloud integration” and “military grade encryption” from their website and marketing materials.
This led to a 450,000 dollar settlement earlier this year based on an investigation from the NYAG that found “eufy’s Internet-connected security cameras, video doorbells and smart locks did not fully encrypt video data in transit, despite company assurances that consumer footage would remain private and secure.”
Scumbag company. Fuck eufy.
Well. I only have 1 camera so far, so I’m not exactly heavily invested. Is there a brand you like?
I am fairly militant about privacy and data security so I go POE and self hosted. My cameras are all wired and sync to a server in my basement. I trust no corporations.
That said the cameras I have are reolink. They do have options for WiFi cameras that use apps and such but I don’t use this. You can also use the app with the POE camera but I don’t do this.
I have the cameras on an isolated lan with no internet access. All of my smart home stuff is like this. If it doesn’t work on an isolated vlan then it is useless to me and I won’t buy it. I then forward the rtsp stream from the cameras to homeassistant which has tailscale so I can view the cameras remotely.
At one point I used homebridge in homeassistant so I could view everything in homekit but I finally convinced my partner to just use the homeassistant app and leave apple nonsense behind. That said if you’re less paranoid than me this works too and gives you remote access without the bother of tailscale (but the downside of funneling it all through apple).
Of course, if you research and trust reolinks app then using that is the easiest thing. I haven’t done that tho. I believe amcrest cameras are also good but these are also primarily POE