With Ring facing fierce backlash over its Search Party feature, a new program is challenging developers to move Ring doorbell footage off of Amazon’s cloud — and into users’ own devices. The Fulu Foundation, the consumer advocacy group cofounded by YouTuber Louis Rossmann, is offering an initial bounty of $10,000 to anyone who can integrate Ring doorbells with a local PC or server, while cutting off access to Amazon’s servers.
Ring users currently have to pay a subscription fee to store recordings in Amazon’s cloud. While the company has a local storage option through Ring Edge, it’s only available with the Ring Alarm Pro, and it still requires a subscription. There’s also an option to secure your videos with end-to-end encryption, meaning neither Ring nor third parties can see your footage, but it’s stored on Amazon’s servers.
“In an ideal world, device owners would be able to modify that software to instead push that footage to their own computer or server, should they so choose,” O’Reilly writes. However, he warns that bounty solutions will be limited by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which “means distributing a tool or mechanism for other security-minded Ring owners to circumvent those locks and assert their ownership over their video remains a copyright crime.”
The first person or team to submit a solution that meets Fulu’s eligibility requirements will win the bounty. To qualify, developers must integrate Ring doorbells released in 2021 or later with a local computer or server, and ensure it “no longer sends data to Amazon servers or requires connection to Amazon hardware to function.” The initial bounty starts at $10,000, and Fulu will match any additional donations made by supporters up to $10,000.
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