Gimmicks opening the door to paranoia
OH FOR a simple ding dong. At this stage, I might even settle for a ding. But no. If you want a doorbell in 2018 you need an inexhaustible bank account, a blatant disregard for privacy laws and very possibly an advanced degree in molecular engineering.
A case in point: a few weeks ago, a friend proudly wheeled out his latest bit of kit. ‘Wait here,’ he said, handing us his mobile on which we could see a fuzzy live feed of his front porch.
A few moments later he appeared on the screen, triggering a buzzing and beeping while the words ‘HUMAN DETECTED’ flashed up in such a disturbing manner I started wondering if this wasn’t, in fact, the first five minutes of a horror movie.
Welcome to the world of modern doorbell technology. Where your front door will alert you if a leaf falls on the welcome mat, text you when the postman arrives, and phone you to let you know your mother-in-law is on the doorstep.
The latest in this dazzling, profoundly confusing area of technology is the irritatingly named Hello, a device made by a subsidiary of Google (who else?) which not only streams live footage to your phone, but can be programmed to recognise the faces of your friends and family (why, it doesn’t specify, although you have to suspect that at least some customers will use it to ignore the aforementioned mother-in-law).
IT even talks, barking out instructions such as ‘You can leave it, thanks’ or ‘We’ll be right there.’ In fact, the only thing the Hello doesn’t seem to say is goodbye. Pity. The facial recognition element of the Hello is, unsurprisingly, causing some concerns.
‘Just because I walk up to your door does not mean that Google should assume I have agreed to be surveilled by them or added to a database of facial images,’ remarked Jim Killock, of the Open Rights Group.
He’s not wrong. Indeed, it all sounds a little too Orwellian for my tastes. Yet technology like this is becoming increasingly prevalent.
From Amazon Echos that record what you’re saying to indoor security cameras that send motion alerts to your Apple watch, we are becoming weirdly, creepily obsessed with keeping an eye on each other. In one US television advert, a girl rings the doorbell in a prom dress and is escorted to her car by a boy, only for a disembodied voice to start instructing the young man to behave like a gentleman.
It turns out – oh the hilarity – that it’s actually the boy’s father, sitting in his office and watching the whole scenario from afar. Even Philip K Dick might have baulked at that one.
I understand that everyone today has security concerns, but this sort of micro-management seems little more than fuel for paranoia.
If I received a text message declaring ‘HUMAN DETECTED’ while sitting in the office, I’d no doubt hare back home to find nothing more sinister than the remains of last night’s quiche dropped off by a thoughtful friend.
And the more I see of this sort of technology, the more I feel it is isolating us, not bringing us closer together. Social media has become, more often than not, an excuse to avoid communication in real life. FaceTime and Skype are increasingly used as face-to-face substitutes. We are all watching each other – whether it be on social media or on some fuzzy live feed – but do we actually know each other any more?
Just this week we learned that more than half of Britons describe their neighbours as ‘strangers’, and 73 per cent of us don’t know their names. What use is facial recognition technology when we can’t even recognise those who live closest to us in the flesh?
So in a curious way it was heartening to read in the Office for National Statistics’ latest publication that one in ten Scots have never used the internet, preferring instead to bob along in life unaided by the bells and whistles of modern technology. There is simple, un-recorded joy in the analogue world.
We should embrace it. Along with an old fashioned ding dong.