The fact that they are indeed cloud-based is why this story has been blowing up and making quite a few people upset.
The reality is, even if the cameras are not configured to save video to Eufy's cloud service, thumbnails are still transmitted to Eufy for the purpose of facilitating push notifications (confirmed by Eufy), and the researcher who discovered this claims to have found a way to access camera feeds without authentication as well (this is not confirmed, and one of the most questionable claims).
I own several of these cameras but have them configured as HomeKit devices, and while I'm not terribly concerned about the transmission of thumbnails since this is the name of the game if you want a preview in a push notification, I've always felt a little weird about the fact that these cameras require a Eufy account to configure, and you can access the live streams by logging into that account, even after the cameras have been configured as HomeKit cameras.
> If you dont turn on the thumbnail images, or pay for the cloud storage extra option then it just plain doesn't use the cloud.
I wish this were true, but that's not quite right. In order to configure your new Eufy cam, you must:
1. Create a Eufy account
2. Log into that account on your device
3. From that point forward, your Eufy cam is always accessible via the web portal even if you configure it to use HomeKit
Furthermore, the setting that allows screenshots to be sent is enabled by default.
You're correct that you must opt in to send actual video to Eufy's cloud, but right out of the gate, a new Eufy deployment is susceptible to all of the issues described.
> this is the name of the game if you want a preview in a push notification
I’m not sure that’s actually true. iOS has notification service extensions that I think could be used to decrypt an image for display in a notification.
It's possible that this is something that Apple rolled out since the last time I dug deeply into push notifications and my understanding of this part could be out of date.
The reality is, even if the cameras are not configured to save video to Eufy's cloud service, thumbnails are still transmitted to Eufy for the purpose of facilitating push notifications (confirmed by Eufy), and the researcher who discovered this claims to have found a way to access camera feeds without authentication as well (this is not confirmed, and one of the most questionable claims).
I own several of these cameras but have them configured as HomeKit devices, and while I'm not terribly concerned about the transmission of thumbnails since this is the name of the game if you want a preview in a push notification, I've always felt a little weird about the fact that these cameras require a Eufy account to configure, and you can access the live streams by logging into that account, even after the cameras have been configured as HomeKit cameras.