Bon voyage!

I use Amcrest, mostly because the guy who makes frigate recommended them, and has affiliate links on his site. As a software developer myself, I have to say frigate (and HA) are two jewels of open source software and so I’m happy to support them however I can.

That being said, the cameras work well and are easy to integrate with both frigate and HA. They all try to phone home at first, but stop if you tell them to (I’ve confirmed this by monitoring the traffic on my dns servers).

I couldn’t find a privacy friendly wifi camera with a big enough battery to run continuously, so I ended up building my own with a solar panel, an inverter, and a 9ah lithium battery that sits on a fence post at the end of my driveway. It was a fun project, but I wish I could buy it.

Another small gripe is that the PTZ cameras from Amcrest all seem to be crazy expensive or have mixed reviews, so I’ve just held off on those for now.

Yeah, I’d assumed it would respect the —metric=false flag when building with docker run, but docker-compose is ostensibly supported and easier to work with. I was able to successfully change other configuration options (such as setting the db to use MySQL instead of the default SQLite) using the docker-compose ‘command’ block, but the metric flag specifically was ignored. It’s entirely possible that this is a bug and not an intentional attempt to hoover up user data. Either way, data collection should be opt-in by default (by law, imo).

I thought I’d give this a shot, but the metrics/data collection flag was turned on by default and when I added a command to my docker-compose to turn them off, it was ignored. Then, I created an account and looked for a way to turn them off in the settings and there was none. You expect people interested in self-hosting OSS to be cool with sending data out of their network every time the server is started, a memo is created, a comment is created, a webhook is dispatched, a resource or a user is created?! Also, the metrics are collected by a 3rd party with their own ToS that could change at any time?

Holy hell, hard pass. I’d rather use a piece of paper.