My wife and I recently moved to a home with ring cameras preinstalled, but no subscription of course. We can only access a live feed via the cloud service. I told my wife, I don’t think it matters whether we have a subscription or not… if they want to use the footage from our home cameras for any reason at all, it’s in their power to do so. They can save it, scan it, watch it, … they don’t even need to save the video, they can save results from a scan to get out the important details more efficiently.

My wife didn’t want to hear it. She said we aren’t paying them, so there’s nothing they can do. Then this news story dropped about Google Nest. I showed my wife. We no longer have the ring cameras.

It was a NEST camera from Google, which is only a meaningful distinction because it means they ALL do this shit.

I think the majority of people don’t even have tech conversations with their friends and coworkers, they just talk about sports or gambling or whatever else normal people do.

Lol, you sound like an incel

People still love Chrome, even though tech reviewers told us exactly how creepy that browser is. That info has been publicly available since day one.

Same story with Facebook, but somehow that syphilis of the web is still alive. I have no idea what these people are thinking.

Question is why they bought a Ring camera in the first place?

Probably because of marketing.

There is no way they can have been unaware that these gadgets can be accessed from outside.

(1) Clearly you’ve not talked to enough people outside the privacy-aware community. Absolutely they can have been unaware of that.

(2) They may well have known, but not known the scope, or not cared. If you’re having trouble with (for instance) porch pirates, you might not care about the privacy ramifications.

But it was only when the evidence was put right in their face they finally connected the dots?

Yes. When you don’t live and breathe this stuff, a lot of times that’s what it takes.

My mom used to use the same password for every service. It was a ten-letter password that she came up with in 1999, and she essentially never deviated from it; until I typed it in for her on haveibeenpwned and showed how many times it had been leaked. People who don’t care about privacy won’t care until they’re shown how it actually affects them.

So my answer is quite simple: Because they are stupid,

Profoundly uncharitable read on the situation. Are you “stupid” if you don’t know what you don’t know? We don’t have classes about this sort of thing in high school or anything. There are billions of dollars going toward telling people that sleazy products are actually great and companies actually care about their well-being, and only neckbeards like us on Lemmy spending $0 to tell them the opposite. If they’re not watching tech news because the regular news is too much, or because they have jobs and families and hobbies, or because they don’t know how to process or parse it, or just because they’re not interested and have never been convinced that they should be, they aren’t stupid, just propagandized.

and bought a sleazy product from a known sleazy company,

First of all, “sleazy” is a perfect word for this, and thank you for using it.

But second, keep in mind that for a lot of people, most companies are still responsible members of society; “pillars of the community,” and generally worthy of trust. It’s not because they’re dumb, it’s because they’ve been propagandized into believing it.

and when they found out it was in fact as sleazy as could be expected, they figured that maybe they didn’t want to to be voluntarily surveilled anyway.

People are waking up to the reality of big tech “convenience.” That’s a good thing. Don’t shoot at them for coming to their senses.