Perch: CCTV your home with old smartphones

by singold • 11 years ago

31 23 11 years ago

mark_ellul• 11 years ago

wow, did you read the privacy statement....

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like videos (“IP Content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to the limitations set forth in our Privacy Policy: you grant us a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty- free, worldwide license to use any IP Content that you post on or in connection with Perch.

So anything you record using their service will be theirs!

codemac• 11 years ago

Yeah, this is an insane TOS. Not sure what they were thinking with that, probably boilerplate they didn't think through.

gohrt2• 11 years ago

This is standard boilerplate for all content-hosting services. It gives them permission to handle the video in the product. And also to use it however else they want.

YouTube, for example: https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms """ By submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and YouTube's (and its successors' and affiliates') business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. """

userbinator3• 11 years ago

YouTube is a different situation because content you put there is usually intended to be broadcast anyway; security camera recordings are not.

Asbostos3• 11 years ago

That text doesn't seem to be there anymore. But still scary, the first paragraph says:

"We won’t share or store any personal information unless required for the operation of Perch"

Then later on:

"We receive and store any Personal Information and IP Content you enter or upload to our Service."

Making the 1st one redundant.

Kristine1975• 11 years ago

See What’s Happening At Home

Nothing. There. Didn't need your service.

gohrt2• 11 years ago

When scrolling down the page didn't scroll down the page, I gave up and closed the window.

msravi• 11 years ago

Perch is a division of Samsung Research America, Inc. (“SRA”). The Personal Information collected by Perch may be shared within SRA or with entities that are controlled by, under common control with, or control SRA. This Privacy Policy is further subject to the terms and conditions of the then-current Samsung Privacy Policy, which you can access . In the event of any express conflict between the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy and the terms and conditions of the then-current Samsung Privacy Policy, the terms and conditions of the then-current Samsung Privacy Policy shall govern solely with respect to that conflict.

I just really don't trust Samsung - especially when their privacy policy overrides whatever privacy policy Perch has.

Asbostos3• 11 years ago

What I find a bit of a shame is how dependent on the cloud it is. I live in a country where the internet isn't reliable, fast or secure so any cloud services are a barely worth the hassle or simply no-go if the government blocks them. I know that small US startups won't spend resources making their service work in "backward" markets like mine. I'm hoping to find a local set of applications that can just store video on a computer hidden in a closet with internet notifications being optional rather than essential.

The basic idea sounds great - nearly everyone has an old smartphone, maybe with a bad battery that can still work fine powered by USB.

soylentcola2• 11 years ago

https://www.ispyconnect.com/

I've used this with cheap ($100-150) IP cameras and I believe there are mobile applications that can make a smartphone act as an IP camera as well, although I'd imagine they may not always be ideal since they're not meant to be running/recording like that all the time.

Still, I've done exactly what you describe before getting a NAS with surveillance/IPCam monitoring software. Run iSpy on an old computer in a closet, set it up so the recordings go in your Drive/Dropbox/etc. folder and set the max archive size depending on your available storage or how much you want to eat up. That way your stuff if stored locally and you can still access recent recordings elsewhere via your online storage. You can skip the online storage part if you want, or I believe there is a "pro" service with iSpy that gives online options but I never used them.

On its own, it's a great bit of software and once you tweak the settings a bit (recording quality/format, motion detection sensitivity, etc) it's pretty flexible and you should be able to get it working reasonably well on even older hardware. I've run it on old Core2Duo laptops as well as my more modern desktop. Encoding lots of streams can get demanding on the old gear but for a cam or two it's not too bad.

userbinator3• 11 years ago

So the traffic goes from the smartphone to Perch's servers, then from their servers to your client? Even setting the privacy implications aside, that seems a terribly roundabout way of doing it, as I'm pretty sure any Android-capable device is more than powerful enough to act as a standalone network camera itself.

pokoleo• 11 years ago

Closed-circuit television (CCTV), is the use of video cameras to transmit a signal to a specific place, on a limited set of monitors.

_sigh_

retrogradeorbit• 11 years ago

Who has multiple spare smart phones just lying around? And with working Internet access? Surely it's cheaper (and more private and secure) to just use cheap IP cameras?

Asbostos3• 11 years ago

Anyone who's upgraded their phone or replaced it because the battery stopped holding charge. Internet access would be free via wifi which most people have in their homes.

So I'd doubt that an IP camera is cheaper. If anything, a phone sounds like an ideal low cost IP camera just due to the enormously bigger size of the market and the piles of unused ones lying around.

bryanrasmussen• 11 years ago

I have three.

andygates• 11 years ago

It's a nice use for that obsolete, too-crappy-to-sell but too-good-to-throw-away old phone in the Stuff drawer. You may not have one, but a lot of people do.

soylentcola2• 11 years ago

Well, I do for one. At least a Nexus 5 and an iPhone 4s (and I think some low end Windows phone I picked up for $60 when I was getting the N5 repaired one time).

As someone below mentioned, a lot of us have the "too old to use/still too good to toss" pile that we keep for repurposing. My other project is to build a charging wall mount for one of these to use as a controller for Hue lights, Nest, and stuff like that.

lmontrieux• 11 years ago

Oh, what a fantastic idea. Just take an old smartphone that the manufacturer stopped shipping security updates for ages ago (if they ever did it at all), and get it to record what goes on inside your home. What could possibly go wrong?

You might want to look at http://androidvulnerabilities.org/ to see the sorry state of security on Android phones. The older they get, of course, the worse it is.

userbinator3• 11 years ago

All I see are tons of local privilege escalation, which is concerning if you like to download and run random not-very-trustworthy apps, but it's actually not of much significance if all you're using the phone for is as a network camera. IMHO these are the good exploits, since they let you get root and have full control over the device so you can repurpose it more easily for other things... like network cameras.

Remote exploits that require no user action are the only thing to worry about here, and Stagefright is AFAIK the only one I've heard about so far (simple solution: take the SIM card out - what do you need it for in this application anyway?)

SunboX• 11 years ago

You can do this with a few lines of code in Firefox OS. For example, I did a SMS gateway server lately: https://github.com/SunboX/fxos-HTTP-SMS-Gateway A WiFi enabled camera wouldn't be much different.

finnn• 11 years ago

I use IP Webcam[0] which can do motion detection and capture. I've recently been experimenting with combining it with FolderSync[1] to sync to my OwnCloud instance. For real time monitoring I can of course connect directly to IP Webcam's web interface and watch the feed, toggle the flash, etc. It'd be nice if someone made a unified solution to do this that doesn't include uploading all of your data to someone else.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pas.webcam...

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.andro...

not_throwaway• 11 years ago

When I saw the headline, I assumed it was the latest incarnation of Vancouver startup Perch -- https://perch.co/. Same name, same idea.

The "Perch is a division of Samsung Research America" line in their privacy policy makes me think they were acquired by Samsung and their product ported from iOS to Android.

Anyone have any more information? I can't find any announcements of an acquisition or acqui-hire at all.

Perch had been pretty quiet for the last few months, so a fire sale to Samsung wouldn't surprise me.

TeMPOraL• 11 years ago

Oh, another cloud IoT thingie.

Seriously, this is ridiculous. Privacy aside, once again, this data should not be streamed all around the world just like that, not to mention being saved on third party servers.

We need to have a serious conversation about IoT and the cloud. We need a brain-dead simple protocol for setting up direct connections between devices in the same network and turning some of them into servers. Something that will not require technical expertise to set up if properly coded on devices. And after that, we should start expecting startups to use it. Dependence on third-party cloud services should not be an acceptable business model.

Perch: CCTV your home with old smartphones

Related Stories