Technology

I chose Reolink. AFAICT it's not leaking anything outside my network and it's fairly inexpensive. Not as cheap as the subsidized Ring brand but hey, at least I own them.

the other day I heard someone make the point that Amazon is just a more successful Palinteer

For anyone who has a Ring camera, wants to get rid of it, but still wants a doorbell camera for security/convenience reasons, I'll point out that Ecobee has a fairly good rating on Mozilla's Privacy Not Included page where they review products for their privacy.

E2EE transmission of video from the camera to your phone when streaming, on-device processing of video feeds, auto-deletes any cloud footage when people uninstall the app (so non-technical users who think uninstalling an app deletes their data will actually get that benefit), only saves clips when actual motion is detected, first line of their privacy policy is "Your personal information and data belong to you", and their subscription is 100% optional.

Only real privacy concern is that if you choose to integrate yours with Alexa, it might get some data from that, but that's optional. The main downside is just that they only have a wired option for outdoor setups, but they do have an indoor one that doesn't require any kind of hookup directly into wires in your wall.

As always though, if you have the technical ability to set something up yourself that runs only on your local network, do it.

ten years too late

It would be good if they had a way to limit range so it couldn't focus on anything that isn't within 10 ft of the door.