Door Cam gives peekhole power amid privacy concerns
“I’m a strong believer in security cameras. Even if it’s an artificial one, it still scares you. You think ‘they’ve got me now’,” reformed burglar Adrian Pritchard told the Herald in August this year.
Cameras deter bad people more than security lights, Pritchard reckons. They work better than burglar alarms, judging by a total lack of response from neighbours and a police car passing by a friend’s house where I desperately mashed a keypad to turn off the deafeningly loud sound I had accidentally triggered.
Security aspect aside, door cams work great for when you’re not at home and need to speak to, for example, couriers dropping stuff off at your place.
However, they are networked surveillance devices that connect to computing clouds overseas as is the case with Ring’s $349 Door View Cam.
This fits into existing 12mm-14mm peepholes in doors so there’s need to mount it with screws and worry about holes and marks. Since the Door View Cam is powered with a USB-rechargeable battery and runs over WiFi, no wiring is needed and it has a lens so the peephole is retained.
It’s a very tenant and apartmentowner friendly concept from that point of view; when you up sticks, just take the Door View Cam with you.
Putting up a Door View Cam is relatively easy. I didn’t have a peephole viewer to disassemble and used Ring’s handy little midget demonstration door to set up the Door View Cam.
Some caveats: doors have to be between 34mm and 55 mm thick or the bulky device won’t fit.
The Door View Cam is weatherresistant but is rated to work only between zero and 40 degrees, which might be an issue down south.
Other than a bug in the Ring smartphone app that had it trying to connect to a non-existing Door View Cam WiFi access point which in turn caused the software set-up to fail and requiring manual setting, the device was up and running in just a few minutes.
The field of vision for the Door View Cam is 155 degrees horizontally, and 90 degrees vertically. You peep at visitors in 1080p high-definition video, and talk to them with noisecancelling, two-way audio.
It wouldn’t be an Amazon gadget without Alexa integration and the Door View Cam works with Echos and Fire TVs. These let you hear notifications, answer the door via the smart speaker and turn on the Live View video on the Ring.
You don’t have to subscribe to a pricey per-device $4.50 monthly or $45 annually (no contract) Protect Basic plan as the Door View Cam works without it but no cloud storage plan means no shareable video recordings that are kept for 60 days.
A Protect Plus plan covers unlimited Ring devices and offers “professional monitoring” of them for $15 a month, or $150 a year. Monitoring is only available in continental North America however.
Surveillance cameras are controversial and guaranteed to creep out some people. You can exclude certain views with the privacy zones feature, turn off audio recording and limit motion detection to avoid shooting door vids of your neighbours.
Even then you could run into privacy problems in apartment buildings and townhouses where there’s plenty of foot traffic. Others have to be made aware that there’s a camera recording them but you might not be allowed to slap the supplied warning sticker from Ring on your door.
Privacy concerns making it difficult to install the cameras apart, Amazon being the Lord of the Ring company is arguably the biggest problem with the otherwise slick and easy to use Video Door Cam: what might the giant retailer do with the uniquely identifiable data it can potentially collect from the camera?
For example, in August controversy blew up around the Ring collaborative crime-stopper Neighbours app that could share video footage with police in the United States. New Zealand doesn’t get the Neighbours app but local police can still get Ring footage with a warrant.
Taking the concept further, voluntarily video and audio snooping for the cops using Ring devices that send data to Amazon’s Rekognition system that turns on Live View feeds for police if a “familiar face” is spotted may be tempting to implement.
Given how error-prone facial recognition with artificial intelligence is here’s hoping Amazon doesn’t go there with the Ring devices.