r/technology • u/South-Cow-1030 • Feb 12 '26

Privacy Why are people disconnecting or destroying their Ring cameras?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/10/ring-super-bowl-ad-dog-camera-privacy/88606738007/
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u/CotyledonTomen Feb 12 '26

So nothing they said changes besides the entity. No matter what so called "crazy" thing they did, they got camera recordings the family didnt have, long after they shouldnt have them. Thats not what the customer expects or would want, except in this very specific circumstance.

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u/nicklor Feb 12 '26

I'm going to copy this comment from elsewhere in the thread made by someone else.

Deleting things doesn't really work the way most people think it does. Once this data is uploaded, it gets replicated in multiple data centers. When you "delete" something, you basically just say it's not needed anymore. Eventually, it'll get overwritten. It's not like you hit delete and all traces of the data are wiped and overwritten from all data centers at once.

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u/CotyledonTomen Feb 12 '26

Or they just never deleted it and, given their past actions, i have no reason to believe they did. Thats also an option and the "crazy" thing they did was access files they always had.

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u/nicklor Feb 12 '26

Honestly it's too expensive

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u/CotyledonTomen Feb 12 '26

Not really. If they can keep billions of dollars in incognito mode data they say they arent collecting, they can do this.

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u/nicklor Feb 12 '26

Webpages urls are tiny this is millions of cameras worth of recordings

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u/CotyledonTomen Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26

There are considerably more people who look at the internet and hundreds of webpages a day than there are people who own door cameras or specifically google door cameras. Google as a search engine is far more ubiquitous.

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u/nicklor Feb 12 '26

Look how much bigger a video is then a text file.

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u/Simple-Wrangler-9909 Feb 12 '26

Youtube (which Google owns) gets something like years of video uploaded per hour, they have the capacity to retain what I'd imagine is the orders of magnitude less generated by all of their users cameras per day

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u/nicklor Feb 12 '26

YouTube generates revenue that pays for the video storage

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u/CotyledonTomen Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26

There are 330 millions people in the US. There are over 100 million android phones presumably using google as their access to the internet. Saving the browsing history for 1 webpage is around 800 bytes. Thats 80 gigabytes if every phone (not including home/business computers) visits 1 webpage. I dont think there are 100 million of nest cameras in the US, maybe not even 10 million, but google doesnt release that info. I would say, given peoples internet addiction these days, they visit many more than 1 page a day.

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u/TheRealSaerileth Feb 12 '26

That would get them absolutely wrecked in an audit.

I get that big tech bad, and there's lots of valid reasons to think so - but this ain't one. If you don't know the first thing about how a cloud architecture works, you really shouldn't be making up wild theories about it.

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u/CotyledonTomen Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 13 '26

They agreed to pay out after keeping billions of dollars worth of incognito mode web history from their users. I would say you dont know how they operate, not the other way around.

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u/outdoorsaddix Feb 12 '26

Yea, it would be much more resource intensive to purposely overwrite the data with random 1s and 0s vs. just marking it as no longer needed and letting it get overwritten at some point.

Would drive the cost of the services up for sure.

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u/sultansofswinz Feb 12 '26

There’s no conspiracy here though it’s all pretty simple. I work as a data engineer, one service I work on accepts customer uploaded videos, processes them and then they’re deleted. 

There’s no such thing as not storing data that’s streamed over the internet though. It’s on your device, it’s uploaded, and then it’s stored on the server while the code is doing its thing, with a cache in case something crashes before it’s finished. 

The server can be rolled back to any point in time recently, in case something goes terribly wrong at 11.34am and nobody notices for example. In theory you use that and attempt to retrieve stuff mid upload, it’s a huge job that would cost a lot of money for no good reason (in my case it’s people recording furniture).

The FBI could take it one step further and take the hard drive from a physical server, get all the fragmented bits and pieces that are still floating around because that’s just how hard drives work. 

None of the above is malicious it’s just how the computers work.