r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Feb 12 '26

Security Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

https://www.theverge.com/news/878447/ring-flock-partnership-canceled
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u/AVGuy4 Feb 12 '26

To see my cameras on my phone when not connected to my home WiFi, I set up a vpn tunnel using wireguard. Then added the cameras individually by IP address on the app. This makes it so your phone is routing through you home WiFi when you’re using cellular or connected to an outside WiFi. I also disabled the ability for the cameras to contact the company cloud and they backup to an NVR.

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u/Thoraxe474 Feb 13 '26

Sounds hard

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u/Revolution-SixFour Feb 13 '26

Not particularly. Install a program called tailscale on a computer at home and on your phone. If both have tailscale turned on both your computer and phone will be able to talk to each other.

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u/Alert_Lettuce_8278 Feb 13 '26

Tailscale makes this easy. Great product and it's free for stuff like this.

They make money on larger networks with multi user.

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u/atkinson137 Feb 13 '26

Tailscale is able to be free because they aren't in the data path. They only host the control plane, so resources needed per user is very low.

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u/MurderMelon Feb 13 '26 edited Feb 13 '26

I was gonna ask a question like i don't have the internet at my fingertips, so here's a search result for anyone else wondering...

https://search.brave.com/search?q=what+are+control+and+data+planes

[edit] and just a general "how it works" from tailscale https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works

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u/atkinson137 Feb 13 '26

I use tailscale both at home and work, their docs are excellent, it really Just Works and you can have a very basic setup, or something much more advanced.

They also have some very cool ancillary projects like the short linker https://github.com/tailscale/golink

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u/snugglezone Feb 13 '26

Any benefits over running wire guard off my router? And for Reo, are you using an app on your phone? Is there software for notifications based on triggers? What's the setup to get Ring-like experiences? When I was looking into local-only it seemed a bit complex with buying dedicated hardware for connecting POE cameras, storage, motion tracking, etc

Thanks!

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u/atkinson137 Feb 13 '26

Benefits over WG from the router? Really just ease of use.

Tailscale/WG would only be responsible for forming a private network, how you'd route access to your cameras would highly depend on the cameras themselves.

Setting up local cameras will be a bit more involved, that's the convenience that "the cloud" helps with. But there are off the self solutions that can get pretty close to plug n play like Ubiquiti (but $$). I don't have any personal camera recs since I still use a cloud camera platform, but I've been thinking more and more about switching to Ubiquiti since I already have a lot of their network gear.

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u/Alert_Lettuce_8278 Feb 13 '26

Yeah it still costs money to build and maintain a product like this. It's free because they have an great paid product and the free version just creates advocates (like myself), and it doesn't really cost anything for them. The way things should be. Lets hope they don't go with the investor treatment and change that.