I discovered while configuring a new Amcrest IP3M-HX2W camera that I'm able to add the camera to an Amcrest Cloud account even without having configured UPnP or port forwarding of any kind. This means the camera must be maintaining a connection to the Amcrest Cloud servers just in case someone tries to add it to an account.
I do not want any kind of remote access on this camera, either directly or through Amcrest Cloud. Short of adding firewall rules on my router to block the connection (which isn't really a reasonable solution, and would also block potentially useful features such as the firmware version check and automatic time setting), how do I disable this? There doesn't seem to be any setting under the network configuration pages.
To be clear, yes, you need to provide Amcrest Cloud the local username and password of the camera to connect, but that's just one step away from allowing connections directly to the camera over the internet. For a camera that does not need to be managed remotely (short of a VPN connection directly to my network, anyway), that's an unacceptable risk.