[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Visual One (YC W20) - Event recognition f...
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Launch HN: Visual One (YC W20) - Event recognition for security
cameras
Hi HN. My name is Mohammad Rafiee and I am the founder/CEO of
Visual One (https://www.visualone.tech) We are building software
for security cameras enabling them to recognize specific events.
People use security cameras (aka IP cams) for various purposes--to
monitor their properties, their kids, their pets, for elderly care,
as doorbells, etc. But a shortcoming these cameras have is they
rely mainly on motion detection to alert users and that leads to
too many false alarms. What led me to work on this problem
initially was my personal experience with the IP cameras which I
used to watch my dog and also as a doorbell at my house which I
rented out on Airbnb sometimes. After trying some of these cameras
(Ring, Nest and Wyze), I realized motion alerts are pretty much
useless and person detection that some like Nest offer is not
broadly useful. For example, for my dog, I only cared to know
if/when the dog walker picked her up or if she was doing something
bad, like getting into my clothes, chewing my shoes/TV remote,
getting on the bed, etc. The motion alerts were completely useless
as she is moving all the time obviously--person detection was also
not useful for any of these events. For my Airbnb rental use case
(doorbell/outdoor cams), the main things I cared to know about were
if the guests parked their cars in the wrong location which pissed
off my neighbors, or if the garage door was left open, or if there
were a lot more people staying at the house than allowed. Again,
motion alerts or person detection were not useful at all. Having a
background in machine learning & computer vision, I felt this is a
problem that is just starting to become solvable thanks to the
powerful deep learning techniques developed in the the last 3-4
years. Over the last 6 months, we have been building a cloud-based
solution addressing this shortcoming for any IP camera without any
dependency on the hardware. Our software allows users to create
custom alerts for things that matter to them, like their dog
chewing on shoes, their kid playing with the stove or their
packages being stolen by porch pirates. It also allows them to
search for past events after the fact instantly. Currently, we
support four categories of events: - A specific object appeared /
disappeared, e.g. dog appeared, bicycle disappeared, package
disappeared (coming soon.) - A specific object in a specific
location, e.g. a car parked in front of the driveway, elderly
person taking medications, dog in the (neighbor's) lawn, person
getting into the garage. - Two objects interacting, e.g. dog
getting on the couch, kid playing with the stove, dog chewing on a
shoe. - Facial recognition based events, e.g. new person detected,
a specific person appeared, max occupancy violated. Users can
create a new event in any of the above categories by providing a
few simple inputs, e.g. pick the objects involved and the
interaction between them, or specify a zone. Once the event is
created, our software can immediately recognize that event with
good accuracy. The users can also give a thumbs up/down when they
get an alert and their feedback is incorporated back into the
models to improve their accuracy over time. Users can adjust the
sensitivity for each event (precision and recall trade-off) based
on their use case. In addition to the smart alerts described
above, we also index the footage in real time to allow users to
query for past events after the fact and get the results instantly
instead of having to go through all the past footage to find
something they care about. For example: users can query the clips
of when a laptop disappeared or a truck appeared. Our solution can
also alleviate privacy concerns since we only store short video
clips on the cloud for alerts corresponding to user's events of
interest instead of for every motion detected. We currently
support Nest Cams and also offer our own cameras (same as the
cameras sold by Wyze) with indoor and outdoor options. I would
love to hear any feedback/thoughts you have. We are exploring
different niche use cases to focus on initially and would
appreciate any thoughts you may have based on your personal
experience or any insights you may have. Feel free to comment here
or shoot me an email at rafiee@visualone.tech
Author : mrafiee
Score : 63 points
Date : 2020-03-12 18:11 UTC (4 hours ago)
| avip wrote:
| All leading camera brands have on SoC motion detection
| (Honeywell, Motorola...) and they have ML driven detection on
| their on premise stream servers. This is going to be a very tough
| sell.
| taway555 wrote:
| I'm in the industry and I have to agree here. All of the
| devices we develop and use (third-party) either already have
| this capability built-in to the device or are working on it
| right now.
| mrafiee wrote:
| I agree it is an active area and other people are working on
| the problem, but can you be more specific about the
| capabilities that you have seen in other products?
| taway555 wrote:
| Essentially all of the events you mention plus a good
| amount more are either in an active product development
| pipeline for vendors we work with or are actively being
| worked on internally on devices we are building.
|
| It's a tough space.. margins on these hardware devices are
| thin already, and sometimes negative as they are simply
| loss leaders hooking in users for long-term saas payments,
| so in our case, it's cheaper to build it in-house.
|
| Good luck, however!
| mrafiee wrote:
| I completely agree with you re margin on the hardware
| being low. We are not planning on making any money on the
| hardware. But I also believe it is not possible for
| startups/companies that don't have copious resources
| (like Google and Amazon) to do great at both hardware and
| AI (i.e. build cutting edge AI/CV tech)... Thank you :)
| If you'd be up for discussing this further, may I ask you
| to email me? (rafiee at visualone.tech)
| mrafiee wrote:
| There are various cameras on the market claiming to have smart
| alert features but in reality the only AI features that they
| are currently offering (that we are aware of) are person
| detection, unfamiliar face detection, facial recognition,
| activity zones, some limited object detection... if you know of
| any solutions offering beyond those, we would love to know
| about them... also these features come at a high price both in
| terms of the initial hardware cost and monthly fees (e.g. Nest
| Cam IQ selling for $300-$400)
| gbrown wrote:
| One super annoying thing I've noticed about OpenCV - no
| ability to read relevant metadata from streams. It seems like
| lots of applications of OpenCV would benefit from using the
| motion capture functionality of these cameras (for example,
| streamed over RTSP via OnVIF) as a pre-screening technique,
| but I've had trouble getting access to it.
|
| It seems like it should be straightforward to add, but I
| haven't had a chance to do so.
| mike_d wrote:
| Axis has super advanced AI/ML video stuff. I've seen demos of
| it doing things like "use a network of PTZ cameras to auto
| track the person who left an unattended bag".
|
| They have lots of free applications in their App Gallery, and
| with minimal effort cheap Chinese cameras can be made to work
| with the system (since Axis OEMs their cameras from them
| anyway). https://www.axis.com/en-us/products/camera-
| applications/appl...
| mrafiee wrote:
| Thanks! We will look into it.
| nancycut10 wrote:
| Hire expert professional hackers :
| https://www.hackerslist.co/price-payment/
| [deleted]
| soared wrote:
| Envysion is the b2b version for restaurants/retail if anyone is
| curious.
| mrafiee wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. We will look into what they are doing.
| tyagis wrote:
| > We currently support Nest Cams and also offer our own cameras
| (same as the cameras sold by Wyze) with indoor and outdoor
| options.
|
| How are they your cameras when they are Wyze's? I think you may
| want to correct the language here to eliminate any confusion.
| [deleted]
| mrafiee wrote:
| That is a great feedback. I will change the wording in the post
| to clarify but they are actually white label cameras that Wyze
| is selling and we are using the same white label cameras.
| frankdenbow wrote:
| Seeing a lot of companies doing these for b2b applications. Are
| you fully focused on b2c?
| mrafiee wrote:
| We are looking into various areas and are trying to find the
| best niche to focus on initially--does not have to be b2c
| necessarily. do you have any specific b2b application in mind?
| xmkcof0 wrote:
| Physical security of their premises is their problem.
|
| I refuse to trust someone who is using such a flimsy excuse for
| defaulting to slurping up images of my property.
|
| Here's a thought: enable it to push the data to a different
| backup source?
|
| But no no no let's give in to your pipe dream.
|
| No thanks tech industry.
| dang wrote:
| Substantive, thoughtful critique is welcome on HN, and many
| users have been posting such comments in this thread. That's
| great.
|
| This comment, though, breaks the site guidelines, and that's
| not ok. Please read and follow them when posting here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22560528.
|
| p.s. In addition, could you please stop creating accounts for
| every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that,
| which is also in the site guidelines. You needn't use your real
| name, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity
| for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no
| usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind
| of forum.
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20community%20identity...
| mattlondon wrote:
| Please consider making this work without the cloud (but still
| accessible from the cloud if wanted of course).
|
| You say you are selling camera hardware, so could selling a RPi
| or Google Coral board with pre-trained models be feasible? Nicely
| packaged up with a nice case etc - people don't need to know it
| is a RPi in a box etc. Store images/video locally with optional
| "cloud backup" as an paid-for add on?
|
| I have had basically everything in my house shutdown before when
| my ISP had a "maintenance event" - could not turn lights on,
| could not use a baby monitor, could not turn the heating on etc
| etc because everything wanted to talk to the cloud even though my
| lights and heating are physical things inside my house.
|
| Apart from that, some nice online integration would be good -
| IFTTT, MQTT (bonus points for local broker support to avoid
| cloud), and a public API etc so people can wire it up to their
| home if they want (e.g. unrecognised face at door? => turn on
| lights, dog on lawn? => turn on sprinklers etc etc)
| mrafiee wrote:
| Are you suggesting not using cloud for privacy concerns? Based
| on the feedback from people's comments here, I realize we
| should do more to alleviate the privacy concerns. Curious on to
| know your thoughts about the following aspect: As I mentioned,
| we only store short video clips corresponding to events that
| the user created (we already discard the other motion clips
| that are deemed as irrelevant by our models.) We also allow
| users to delete the the alerts they have received and when they
| delete each alert, we permanently delete the corresponding
| video clips from our dbs... would that alleviate your privacy
| concerns?
|
| We actually built our first prototype using RPi, we tried 3-4
| different RPi cams, the image quality of all of them was very
| poor. Also the final cost would much higher than the cameras we
| are using right now...
|
| Supporting IFTTT is in our near term road map. Appreciate the
| suggestions!
| SirYandi wrote:
| It was my understanding that GP's main concern was the
| service shutting down should his internet fail, and not one
| of privacy.
| mrafiee wrote:
| I see. That is actually a great point and we have heard
| that concern from others as well. The cameras we are
| offering now come with local storage. We have been thinking
| of adding some capabilities when camera is offline but
| since we do the inference on the cloud, the smart alert and
| video indexing features (our main value props) would not
| work offline.
| pletsch wrote:
| Not OP, but if you want privacy conscious users to use your
| business, they will want to be able to host it themselves.
| mrafiee wrote:
| Ya I see your point. We have tried to take the privacy
| seriously from the beginning (and now realize we need to do
| more) but as far as not using the cloud at all, that would
| be a significant limitation on the type of inference that
| can be done locally and I think the benefits may outweigh
| the associated risks for many users/use cases...
| king_magic wrote:
| Even storing short video clips in the cloud is simply __not
| good enough __.
| mattlondon wrote:
| It was more that if my internet connection goes down, are the
| cameras useless? What if the internet/AWS is just "slow" one
| day - will the notifications be delayed significantly making
| any "reactive" integrations pointless/ludicrously delayed? If
| things can run locally (doing inference for multiple cameras
| via a single "box" you plug in to your WiFi router etc) then
| you can be super-fast with IFTTT integrations.
|
| My main line if thought was that I built basically your
| product for spotting when a cat climbed into my plant pots
| using ML and a RPi3 - the idea was that when it saw the cat,
| it would squirt a water pistol at it to scare it away -
| inference on the RPi 3 was too slow (if I was doing this now
| I'd use a coral accelerator maybe) and by the time it
| realised a cat had got into the plant pots, the cat had
| already taken a shit and left. I worry that your product
| might suffer from similar end to end latency. Niche use-case?
| Perhaps. I have Amazon Blink cameras here and the IFTTT
| integration is delayed by about 30 seconds so by the time you
| get a notification there is someone at your door it is to
| late to do anything as they will.have already left/kicked the
| door in by then etc. Doing all this locally would be super
| fast
|
| My main concern was not really about privacy - you'll need to
| cover GRPR if someone from the EU happens to walk into frame
| of one of your customers' cameras one day in the future
| anyway (Good luck)
| mc32 wrote:
| There will be many kinds of customers, but among them those
| who value privacy and those who want convenience. One of them
| will drive the bulk of sales, the other maybe not. On the
| other hand, if this is a value prop that excites people
| you'll surely have the incumbents consider the economic
| threat and may add that feature as needed.
| mrafiee wrote:
| Ya I think finding the right balance between privacy
| related risks and cost/convenience/features is a an
| important aspect of this space.
| 01100011 wrote:
| If you want people like me to buy it, you've got to cut the cloud
| out of the picture. Give me something that does inference on the
| device. Sure, give me an easy way to send selected videos back to
| you for training data, and feel free to push optional updates to
| the camera with updated models, but I'm not giving you a raw
| video feed of my home or business.
| mrafiee wrote:
| The reason we went with the cloud is not just to use the data
| for training data. 1- we wanted to be hardware agnostic so our
| solution works with any hardware without any dependency on
| hardware specifications. 2- Doing deep learning on the device
| would require GPU which would significantly add to the initial
| cost for consumers. 3- as I mentioned in my response to another
| comment, regardless of where the inference is done, the
| recorded clips will have to be stored on the cloud so if a bad
| actor comes in and take the camera with them, the user can
| still access the recorded video clips after the fact to know
| what happened. Even though we do inference in the cloud, we do
| not store the video clips unless they correspond to an event
| that the user is interested in--we discard the other clips. So
| I'm not clear on how doing inference on the device would have
| any advantage from a privacy stand point.
| 01100011 wrote:
| I get it. Moving things to the cloud keeps the devices cheap
| and keeps them from becoming out of date. It also makes you
| identical to other large players and makes me think you don't
| have much of an advantage. Make the devices expensive. Put
| privacy first. It might just pay off with higher sales. Your
| alternative is racing to the bottom in a competition with
| Amazon, Ring, etc. You will lose.
|
| Sure, you can push the video to the cloud, but encrypt it on
| the device. Let me control my data.
| mrafiee wrote:
| Based on the feedback from people's comments here, I
| realize we should do more to alleviate the privacy
| concerns. Curious on to know your thoughts about the
| following aspect: As I mentioned, we only store short video
| clips corresponding to events that the user created (we
| already discard the other motion clips that are deemed as
| irrelevant by our models.) We also allow users to delete
| the the alerts they have received and when they delete each
| alert, we permanently delete the corresponding video clips
| from our dbs... does that help alleviate your concerns?
| frequentnapper wrote:
| I just want to say that it's good that you're listening
| to people here, but at the end of the day you have to go
| with what's pragmatic for your business.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Not really. Having a device send video frames to the
| cloud basically kills the deal for me. If you did
| something to the video first... maybe. Let's say you
| train a model to process video. You come up with a
| network where the first few layers are fixed and they
| perform a non-reversible transform of the video into some
| sort of symbolic representation. I might sign up for
| that. I want to know that my video/audio feed isn't being
| used by a 3rd party, and that it isn't being used by you
| for something other than the intended purpose(i.e. to
| model my behavior to sell me things, to create profiles
| of my activity, etc). I understand that my first proposal
| doesn't actually address all of those concerns, but I am
| willing to trade privacy for convenience to a very
| limited degree.
|
| I'm basically working on something like this for myself.
| I have a Nvidia Jetson Nano that I'm trying to train to
| tell me when my garage door is open without my wife or I
| present, when my laundry is done, and whether or not the
| lights are on.
| castis wrote:
| Not to say you shouldn't move forward with your grand plans,
| but there are lot of people, myself included, who won't touch
| any of this for those reasons.
|
| I don't need more of my life stored on someone elses network.
| mrafiee wrote:
| I hear you and understand the concern and appreciate the
| feedback. What do you use the cameras for if you don't mind
| me asking?
| 12xo wrote:
| Is this ONVIF compatible?
| mrafiee wrote:
| Not yet but that is in our roadmap. Please feel free to email
| me at rafiee at visualone.tech and I will keep you posted as we
| add the support.
| frequentnapper wrote:
| can the model be trained for something more complex like
| shoplifting?
| mrafiee wrote:
| We have heard that specific use case quite a bit. Detecting
| shoplifting is very hard as there is not much visual
| distinction between a customer picking up an item to buy and
| someone shoplifting, at the moment they pick up the item. It
| would require tracking the person and verifying that they paid
| for the item which can have a lot of complexities...
| bsenftner wrote:
| If you have any hopes of selling your software to fortune 500
| enterprise class customers, it needs to be software, not software
| as a service, able to operate self-contained, as in capable of
| running on an air gapped network without any Internet connection.
| It should also integrate with Genetec, the VMS industry leader.
| mrafiee wrote:
| I agree with that. We have not been looking into enterprise
| applications much yet. The main limitation of using self-
| contained software is it would be dependent on hardware
| specifications (especially GPU) and can pose significant
| limitations and a lot of complexity.
| [deleted]
| frequentnapper wrote:
| can you put up an "about" page on the site? I would like to know
| a bit about the team and the founders before I purchase home
| cameras from them.
| mrafiee wrote:
| Absolutely. We have been heads down working mostly on the
| product to get it out before the demo day but we will make that
| a high priority. thanks for the feedback!
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Our solution can also alleviate privacy concerns since we only
| store short video clips on the cloud for alerts corresponding to
| user's events of interest instead of for every motion detected._
|
| Do better: allow the owner to store everything locally instead of
| in the cloud.
| mrafiee wrote:
| Well the problem with that is many people use the cameras for
| security also. So if a bad actor comes and takes the camera
| with them/breaks it, there would be no way for the users to get
| access to the footage after the fact to know what happened.
| nkrisc wrote:
| The video wouldn't be stored on the camera, but an NVR or
| something similar. But "locally" could also include a cloud
| storage solution of the end user's choosing in addition to
| actually on prem.
|
| If someone manages to steal one of my cameras I'll have some
| close-up, HD video of them stored on my hard drive.
| mrafiee wrote:
| I see. So you mean for the VMS solutions, not the stand
| alone IP cams (such as Nest, Ring, Wyze, doorbells, etc)?
| inetknght wrote:
| I don't know what @nkrisc, but I definitely mean: camera
| should be able to store data on any standard sftp server.
| Or on a CIFS server for the Windows dudes. Or WebDAV.
|
| Want to store it in some proprietary cloud? That's fine,
| but it should only be done as an afterthought. SFTP,
| CIFS, and WebDAV would enable any power user to build and
| use their own home storage or cloud storage.
| mrafiee wrote:
| I see the value of what you are proposing but that would
| be useful only for tech savvy users (vs mainstream)...
| inetknght wrote:
| I 100% disagree. Mainstream people ask tech savvy people
| to help _all the time_. And, importantly, paid-for cloud
| services should IMO also make their services available
| over sftp. Not doing so is a large contributing reason I
| don 't use those services.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| It's an interesting space, it strikes me immediately as the video
| version of Minut[1] I got one their first-gen units and was
| pretty disappointed, but the principle has a lot of potential.
| What I have really wanted to see from any of these IoT devices is
| a workflow that goes - tell app you are going to teach it to look
| for something (or listen), stage an occurrence, confirm the
| device registered, then stage it again, and expect a
| notification. So for example, "this is what its sounds like when
| the clothes dryer is done" - dryer plays a little song - app says
| 'got it' - dryer plays its little song - notification is
| delivered saying "your dryer says it's done". I don't think
| that's beyond the capability of the hw and sw, yet I haven't seen
| a good implementation yet...
|
| 1: https://www.minut.com/product/features/
| mrafiee wrote:
| That was actually my vision initially when I started working on
| the problem. I wanted to allow users to train their cameras for
| things they care about. But later decided to start with events
| that we can detect without requiring a lot of input from the
| users initially...
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I can see advantages to both, I am sure plenty of users want
| plug-and-play and would be annoyed by the idea of having to
| work through manually training. Maybe there can be an
| "advanced" or "developer" mode... Even just having a feed of
| events that I could go into and add tags or other info to
| might work.
| mrafiee wrote:
| I like the idea of having a different tier for people who
| are more tech savvy/patient. We currently allow users to
| provide feedback on alerts (thumbs up/down) which we use to
| make the models more accurate over time but training from
| scratch would require a lot more input from users...
| krosaen wrote:
| I've been waiting for something like this (and daydreamed about
| doing something similar as a hobby) - what's holding me back from
| ordering immediately:
|
| - How do I hook up an outdoor camera? Mounting instructions? Does
| it need power? Wifi based? (guessing it will be: "straightfoward
| instructions", yes, yes, but would still like details)
|
| - A privacy statement at the very least - and ideally privacy
| from the ground up - perhaps via differential privacy, or maybe
| you allow users to pay less if they make their unencrypted photos
| available to your training models. IMHO privacy concerns are what
| are really holding back smart home tech and keeps me from
| adopting it.
| mrafiee wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Valid points and very interesting! We have
| been mostly focused on building the technology before the demo
| and have been deferring tasks like adding more details to the
| website, finalizing privacy policy, etc. I expected that the
| focus on HN would be mostly on the technical aspects of the
| product, but I am realizing that HN actually cares most about
| the privacy aspects. We will make these a higher priority going
| forward.
|
| To answer your first question, the installation/requirements
| for our cameras are pretty much the same as the other stand
| alone security cams in the market (Nest, Ring, Wyze, etc.)
| Basically, they require power (plug into outlets) and require
| wifi connection.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| z-cam wrote:
| Can I hook up my existing Wyze cams or install your firmware on
| them?
| mrafiee wrote:
| Technically that is possible but it is a very involved process
| (and does not always work), also you would not be able to use
| Wyze's service anymore...
| llarsson wrote:
| Smart of you to target Nest cameras, since those customers don't
| care about privacy as much as HN readers that comment on threads
| like these do.
|
| There is plenty of academic research done on this stuff (I know,
| because a group at my department did these things for elderly
| care). Have you looked into this, or are you making your entirely
| own thing from scratch?
| mrafiee wrote:
| Thanks :) we are definitely trying not to re-invent the wheel.
| We have been using various open source tools that are available
| and have been building on top of those... if you know of
| something that you think would be particularly useful for us to
| look into, I would love to know about it.
| cloin wrote:
| Unfortunately, you have to make your Nest streams public to be
| able to use it. I'm unwilling to do so.
| maz1b wrote:
| Best of luck Mohammad Rafiee! This is really neat. Is there a
| reason you guys are pricing so low?
| mrafiee wrote:
| Thanks :) we need to figure out the right pricing but we did
| not want to lose some potential users as a result of pricing
| too high. what do you think would be a reasonable price?
| notduncansmith wrote:
| No "About" page, no privacy policy. Maybe I'm being too
| cynical, but there's probably a lot more to be made off
| collecting data from the cameras than you could expect to
| charge consumers.
| pletsch wrote:
| The lack of an About page is weird.. I don't think you are
| being too cynical, the lack of information about this company
| on their site is concerning. Especially considering they are
| selling cameras you put in your house.
|
| I'm also surprised by the name they chose, as Visual One is
| already a software product by Agilysys. I would be surprised
| if it's not already copyrighted?
| [deleted]
| mrafiee wrote:
| You're absolutely right. We have been mostly focused on the
| technology side and have been trying to move fast and learn
| from our users. I agree we need to invest more in providing
| more details especially on our website. Appreciate your
| feedback.
|
| Re your point about user data, we are not planning on
| monetizing on users data--we currently only store 10-second
| clips corresponding to the alerts for each users events of
| interest (not even every detected motion) when they happen so
| the users can view later.
| fudgy73 wrote:
| This is something I've been thinking about doing for a while. How
| soon after the event occurs does the user get a notification?
| mrafiee wrote:
| Our end-to-end latency is about 3-4 seconds now but we know we
| can bring that down to less than 2 seconds in the near future
| and maybe even less than 1 second in longer term.
| sarora27 wrote:
| I see huge opportunities for this type of technology to be used
| for Security operations at Houses of Worship, Sports Arenas, and
| Large Buildings if you're thinking of a B2B angle.
|
| FWIW, I've seen a few other companies pop up offering a similar
| service to that market and are doing well. Lots of security
| operations centers are still manually run w/ 100s if not 1000s of
| cameras being monitored by a team of humans (to the best of their
| ability).
|
| Good luck! This is an awesome idea!
| mrafiee wrote:
| Thanks. Appreciate the feedback and the kind words! We will
| look into the use cases you mentioned.
| maartn wrote:
| Great work. If you can make the service GDPR compliant and get
| certification you are probably 2 steps ahead on any big brand
| where it concerns Europeans. Distrust towards built-in AI on
| devices like Ring and Nest is growing. Is offering a white label
| version on your roadmap?
| mrafiee wrote:
| Thank you! Great feedback. We are actually GDPR compliant but
| don't have the certification yet. The cameras we are offering
| are indeed white label cameras. They are the same cameras as
| the ones sold by Wyze...
| mjul wrote:
| Congratulations on launching. It is a very fascinating tech
| space.
|
| Could you elaborate how the system as a whole is compliant
| with GDPR and other European privacy laws?
|
| I ask because I explored and eventually decided not launch a
| computer vision product (in 2014) due to compliance aspects.
|
| Looking at it from the whole system perspective, with a
| camera pointed at your neighbour's garden or the street in
| front of your home it is quite difficult to make a compliant
| system:
|
| First, there are the hurdles of the GDPR (it has to be a
| legitimate purpose, the subject has rights and must be
| informed etc....).
|
| Second, there are the broader privacy laws for public spaces,
| where it is mostly illegal with exceptions for government and
| some specific use cases for banks etc. (I am familiar with
| Danish rules, not those of every EU member state).
|
| I did meet a startup some years ago that claimed that their
| computer vision was not video surveillance since they did the
| video stream processing on-device and only emitted events
| (not video) to the network, so perhaps there is a way to do
| it nowadays.
|
| I would love to hear your perspective on the current
| compliance concerns for this type of computer vision systems.
| mrafiee wrote:
| Thank you! I guess I should not have said that as we have
| not looked into all the nuances yet (some of which you
| mentioned), but we have taken many extra steps to design
| the product/architecture with the main principles in mind
| from the beginning. For example, what we store, how we
| store them, allowing users to have control of their data
| (as an example, as I mentioned in another response, we
| allow users to delete the alerts and when they delete an
| alert, we permanently delete the corresponding video clip),
| and of course if a users decides to delete their account,
| we permanently delete all of their data.
| detaro wrote:
| Then I'd expect at least a link to a privacy policy somewhere
| on the site?
| mrafiee wrote:
| You're absolutely right. We have been finalizing the
| details. we will add to the website asap. If you have
| additional specific concerns/thoughts, I would definitely
| like to know what they are.
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