[kwlug-disc] Home assistant: privacy-preserving doorbells

[Chris Irwin]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2026 at 01:56:04PM -0500, Jason wrote:
>Also, I don't believe you can access the RTSP stream of the camera directly
>- you have to go through the proprietary UniFi Protect NVR.  Can you
>confirm if this has changed? If you have too many RTSP streams enabled, it
>will crash the NVR:

The flip-side of this, with Unifi I don't have a need to get RTSP 
streams for each camera, as I'm just using their NVR.

>Basically, if you're buying UniFi Protect you're buying into their
>ecosystem so you may as well go all in or not at all. Choose wisely.

Con: You're buying into an ecosystem, and it's problematic or impossible 
to replaces individual pieces of the software stack.

Pro: You're buying into an ecosystem, and don't need to configure or 
care about individual pieces of the software stack.

I went with Unifi router, wifi, and cameras because I've become tired of 
managing everything manually (and keeping on top of security). Unfi gets 
me a capable router with great throughput, VLANS, easy wireguard, 
multiple wireless access points, and an NVR that didn't need any special 
knowledge.

But yeah, I had to buy *their* router, and *their* WAPs, and *their* 
cameras.

>> On 2026-01-28 12:57, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote:
>>
>> Somebody (whom I won't name, but who I think is on this list) was
>> wondering whether anybody here uses a privacy-preserving video
>> doorbell as an alternative to Ring. Apparently Amazon shares video
>> footage from Ring doorbells with law enforcement or ICE or something,
>> and that makes people unhappy.

The interesting question is *whose* privacy is being preserved.

Sure, unifi are self-hosted, so my recordings can't get automatically 
shared with external parties, which would include coming/going from my 
own home. Unless they came and took it, of course.

On the other hand, they offer facial recognition and are introducing 
external integrations (for example, Shopify). So a store can recognize 
faces as they enter (possibly with alerts on specific faces), and link 
those faces to POS transactions.

If I pointed my camera at the street, I could log license plates with 
the built-in license plate recognition.

All of those could be considered an invasion of other's privacy, it's 
just on-prem instead of cloud.


-- 
Chris Irwin

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