Facial recognition without Cam Plus

My trial of Cam Plus has expired on my doorbell but it seems to still be sending video off for facial recognition. I’m going to block that DNS entry and see what happens (and it’s still trying to reach Google every thirty seconds).

Is this expected behavior?

Huh, I had been under the impression that CamPlus handed off clips to a single location and then the servers decided how to parse/slice/analyze/redistribute the files, based on your account features and settings. But your log implies that the camera itself might be responsible for deciding where to distribute the data.

It’s clearly sending the clip to an S3 bucket for storage before Wyze looks at it (presumably also with Amazon elastic compute).

So I don’t understand why they would do this .(incur transit, storage, and compute cost) unless it were either beneficial to them or they are just sloppy.

Given past history, they are sloppy.

But hold on. They have to send clips to S3 storage anyway, even for the basic 12 second free service. The only part that makes it “AI” is whether and how much the clips get analyzed. Th fact that “face” is in the name doesn’t necessarily mean that host serves only CamPlus customers. (Just as resolving the name doesn’t necessarily mean it’s sending any data to that host.) But I agree with you that it’s most likely “simple” coding…

Nope. Kinesis (see screen cap) is the ingestion route for stored/streamed video.

Alarm Face stuff is the AI bucket.

There is no reason for them to be taking in anything there when all I have set up are on-camera motion triggers.

So that’s the question, are your motion clips really going to BOTH? Or are they just heading to Kinesis but the same code is resolving and perhaps pinging the other hosts while at it.

I need to throw Wireshark and see but I think you and I are both realistic about what their code looks like.

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Sounds like they’re sending clips regardless of your camera settings and just deciding whether or not to process them server side.

Do you have an option in your settings to disable AI? Maybe that will help.

If not, send a log and open a ticket because that’s definitely a privacy issue IMO

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I’d be very curious about a few other things here.

  1. Does this only happen for the doorbell?

  2. If clips are still being sent to the “AI” bucket (and presumably orphaned and later purged), are they full length no-cooldown CamPlus clips or just 12 second clips?

  3. Are they still being pointlessly analyzed, negating the cost savings for Wyze?

  4. Does it stop if the camera is rebooted / reset?