I can't quite wrap my head around this. Apparently they advertised a consumer device with remote access over the WWW as "No Clouds"? And the advertisement actually worked, as in, many "privacy-minded security camera buyers" believed that obvious bullshit?
"No clouds" is supposed to imply "this device isn't dependent upon a cloud-hosted service of some kind". i.e. data is either stored locally or sent to another device configured by the owner, and any remote access is direct over the internet instead of being mediated by a service like a lot of IoT devices use. It's not supposed to imply "no internet".
It's a solid niche IMO. I don't like buying devices that will effectively stop working if the manufacturer goes out of business or shuts down the services they're dependent upon. OTOH, there's generally a lot more effort required by the end user to get it working, so I completely understand why most manufacturers go with a service-mediated design.
Yep. I have a few of them, that I bought specifically because I fell for it. In fairness, they can be configured that way (as an RTSP streaming host that you can directly connect a client to to watch), but the rest of the cloud bullshit stays on unless you firewall it off manually.
