> Cloud connected doorbells must die as well as dragnet surveillance.

I'd disagree and restate that cloud services willing to make these kinds of deals must die, painfully, in a fire after being stung by a million killer bees, after receiving a million paper cuts and having lemon juice poured all over them.

It is possible for a company to charge a monthly fee to provide a service and only that service without attempting to leverage their users and their data for any other form of income. Companies used to do it all of the time. It just takes a C-suite/board/founder to have the moral fortitude to not sell out their users.

I worked in large union data centers, decades ago.

Cannot even imagine what is going on these days, inside & out.

Agreed, but this would then inconvenience millions of non-techies.

Could a solution be forcing Amazon (and Google and Flock and...) to open their backend software either for self-hosting or for running on somebody else's "cloud"? So subscribing to such a device isn't that different from getting web hosting from Dreamhost or Hetzner?

Maybe there's a host or IP field in the settings that users can easily change?