Hey everyone,
We’ve built an open-source, privacy-preserving alternative to Ring cameras using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (called Secluso). It uses end-to-end encryption to send videos from the camera to a mobile app, which is available both in Google Play Store and Apple App Store. We also support Obtainium for people that do not wish to use Google Play.
We’ve put in a lot of effort to make it easy to set up! You can set up our camera on your own Pi in less than 5 minutes with minimal technical expertise using our easy-to-use GUI deploy tool. Here are our setup guide and open source release.
The image shows a Pi in an official Raspberry Pi enclosure that you can use for your camera. We’ve also been working on a HAT for the Pi to add night vision, audio, temperature monitoring for safety, all in a compact form factor. You can see the HAT and an enclosure for the whole camera in the photo.
We’ve been working on this for almost 2 years now, and we look forward to we look forward to seeing what you all think!
Matrix. Bitwarden. Nextcloud. There are many examples of open-source, self-hosted applications that have for-profit companies that offer to host them for you as a service. Now if you use one of those Nextcloud providers to store your notes, can that providers read all your data? Of course. But for people who don’t want to self-host, it’s often a more trusted option than Google.
And… people are now wondering just how fast Bitwarden can speedrun late stage capitalism with recent changes. And realizing just how much data Bitwarden Corp actually has.
We go through cycles of this. Company A is bad but Company B is good… and it is almost always based on marketing. Google used to be AMAZING because “do no evil” and “they gave me a bunch of gigs of email storage!”.
Hell, some of us might be old enough to remember when Spideroak was the bee’s knees and totally secure… until people started realizing there were issues with what they were saying. They have no copies of your encryption key… but you can recover your password. And then there was the brief debacle where people realized they could download any file they had the hash for. But hey, they weren’t Dropbox!
I don’t think a company being involved inherently makes it bad. I don’t even think a company that keeps keys on their servers are inherently bad. Data… gets murky but that is more because of the logistics of what that means for hosting and operating costs.
But it IS important to actually assess a product before using it and to understand the risks. Every year or so people lose their shit at Protonmail when they find out that, contrary to widespread belief, Proton Corp isn’t going to serve a century in a black site for their customers. And every single time, people point out that Proton never said they would. They are VERY upfront about what they do and don’t provide and… the reality is that most of the privacy oriented benefits of that service are in that they don’t require any kind of authentication to create an account. Which… is akward when you realize it is better to NOT pay if privacy is your concern.
But what makes a random start-up with no meaningful (professional) footprint “a more trusted option than Google”?
You’re not listening.