Support for on-premise functionality and local storage

Ring doorbell cameras have been in the news lately, showing us their risks and benefits. If you own a Ring camera or other home camera surveillance system, it is important to understand the risks. A Super Bowl commercial featuring the Ring doorbell camera detailed a new feature called "Search Party" that could search for lost pets by harvesting Ring doorbell camera data. Many privacy advocates pointed out that the same technology could be used for mass physical tracking of people, silent home surveillance, face tracking, etc. These fears were compounded by a growing relationship between Ring and Flock Safety, a technology company that specializes in AI-powered surveillance systems. The backlash to the commercial led to Ring terminating its controversial partnership with Flock Safety. What can home camera vendors do with your data (in the U.S.)? If you live in a state without strong privacy laws, likely anything. And if your service provider doesn't observe privacy laws or gets hacked, anything can be done with your data. Typically, the vendor can see what the camera sees at any time. The only thing preventing your service provider from observing, analyzing, or sharing your data is institutional will. I've posted in the past about home surveillance systems and how they need to adopt privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). PETs are technologies that lean into advanced hardware and cryptography. PETs prevent service providers from seeing the data they are processing, and thus, service providers don't get to choose what they can do with your data; instead, you give them explicit permission, beyond which they run up against impermeable cryptographic protections. PETs like fully homomorphic encryption (from Duality Technologies or Zama) or TrustForge (from Agita Labs), or my Mojo-V extensions for RISC-V (https://lnkd.in/dVx2aBG7) all provide these cryptographic protections. But PETs are not free; hardware vendors need to provide efficient support for them, and consumers need to reward service providers that deploy them. I look forward to a day when these technologies are widely available! And PETs don't prevent the good uses of home surveillance. Often, law enforcement and IT forensics experts will recover home camera data to help solve a crime or find a missing person, and this is still possible with PETs. The only difference is that law enforcement first needs to perform key extraction from the physical home camera, something the victims and neighbors would certainly enable. 📺 You can see the Ring commercial here: https://lnkd.in/gcq5st4Q 📰 You can read about the Ring/Flock relationship here: https://lnkd.in/gjVxduXD 📺 You can watch a video I made about making private surveillance here: https://lnkd.in/g6EqkMDn #privacy #privacyrisks #fhe #pets