4MP Mini POE IP Pinhole Security Camera - HD Indoor CCTV with 3.7mm Lens, H.265/H.264, P2P Remote Viewing | Perfect for Home, Office & Retail Surveillance

I'm a CCTV camera expert. My company installs and services CCTV systems I have installed thousands of cameras, and the system at my house has about 40 cameras.I bought this camera to install inside a birdhouse so my wife and I can watch the baby birds this spring. I have several similar cameras in other birdhouses, so installing this should have been a piece of cake for me. It wasn't. If you don't care about the details, just know that it's impossible to use this camera without installing a spyware app that gives a server in China access to your network. Details below...When I first hooked up the camera I did it on an old PC that's not connected to the internet. There were three things on this network; the camera, a POE switch/router, and my old PC. The camera would not register on the network. I used Fing to try to find the IP, and when Fing couldn't find anything I used Angry IP Scanner to scan every possible IP address (that took a while). The camera simply didn't have an IP address.The instructions in the box said that I need to install a program called "Large Video Management Platform", but it didn't provide a web address from which it can be downloaded. I googled it but found nothing. Another part of the instructions said I needed to install CMS 2.0. I located that, but I didn't want to infect my PC so I started up a virtual machine, connected to the internet, downloaded the software to the VM, disconnected from the internet, and installed CMS 2.0 on the VM.Once CMS 2.0 was loaded, the camera somehow was assigned an IP address. I find that VERY weird because how was CMS 2.0 able to see the camera if my router hadn't assigned it an IP? The camera had to communicate with CMS 2.0 in order to allow the router to assign it an IP, but how did it communicate with CMS 2.0 in order to get an IP?Once I had an IP I thought I'd be able to use the camera. I needed to log into the camera to assign a fixed IP address and block it from the WAN by giving it a bogus gateway, but in order to log into the camera you have to install yet another app onto your computer. And that app is SUPER SKETCHY. See the image I posted. Basically, the instructions tell me that I have give set Google Chrome to ALLOW insecure private network requests.Uh... NO. I'm not going to do that.So if you don't mind giving Chinese hackers access to your network, go ahead and buy one of these cameras. Just realize that no legitimate CCTV camera company is going to require the type of access that this camera requires. I'm sending mine back. Hopefully someone from Amazon reads my review and disposes of these cameras.