👍 Ring doorbell
 

I installed this last week and really like it.
This smart doorbell is really cool .
It sends alerts and videos to my phone and I can talk to the person in real time like “it’s ok just leave the package there and I can even act like I’m there when I’m not.
My kids don’t have a curfew but it’s nice to know that they came home safely.
It is a motion,bell or remote activated with pretty clear night vision.
Spans my driveway pretty good and is range programmable so sidewalk traffic doesn’t set it off.
I now know when a package has been delivered .
I can see if workers are honest on their hours.
Lots of positives with this unit.
Only negative is it costs $3 per month.
Unit off Amazon cost $199 added a $48 remote bell total cost was $260 with tax.

I find little video doodads like this pretty interesting. I've been using game trail cams on my property for years, but having something that would be real time video at unlimited distances would be a lot more handy. Of course this device you are referring to is not the same thing I'm waiting for, but with the technology leaps, I figure it is just a matter of time. Things we have available now were unthinkable 20 years ago. And that gap between "unthinkable" and "here it is on Amazon" is shrinking rapidly.

Of course, the dark side of this is that it is pretty safe to assume that no matter where you go it is a very good chance YOU can be under surveillance by someone if they want to check on you. Heck, I taped over the little cameras that come on my laptop computers long ago. And as for the smart phones the wife and I have, if they can see through the places we have them stored, then technology is WAY ahead of what I believe it might be. Talk of the "smart home" run by Google, Amazon, Apple, or whoever, just makes my skin crawl.

But I guess surveillance always seems like a better idea to the serveillors than to the surveilled. I've seen this with the topic of flying drones, whereby a lot of people just get actively hostile even of the mere idea that a drone up on the sky might be spying on them. Regardless of the fact that most people just don't have or do anything that would be of interest to another soul. The fact that their neighbor now CAN put an eye in the sky above their house invokes a pronounced defensive mechanism.

One thing for certain, though, it's likely to get worse and likely never better. BIG BROTHER is watching you.

I expect before too long technology will exist that will be able to blur a person or area so that remote surveillance would be difficult.
As soon as someone builds a better mouse trap, the next guy figures out how to create an escape hatch for said mouse.

Yeah, likely so. But the government will always have the upper hand by simply making all devices and efforts to defeat their goals illegal with increasingly severe penalties attached. Depends on how badly they want whatever it is they are trying to do. But of course such efforts will be heavily padded with good sounding intentions. "If it saves just one child's life..." sort of thing.

I'm actually surprised that ski masks haven't been outright outlawed. Everyone KNOWS that only criminals wear those things to keep from being identified.... :rofl:

The government is I believe attempting to control guns, I believe for their purposes and not for the welfare of the general public but it is not getting very far.

I have to say that the skull ski mask I saw on a motorcyclist a few weeks gave me a bit of a start, I guess it was unexpected. But I was thinking more in terms of an electronic blur to avoid surveillance. A force field, as the Trekkies might say.

I agree with what both of you are saying.
I feel that brother and big business are wolves to be wary of and that’s not even to mention the asswipes that like to steal from us.
The monitoring of us from here on out is concerning.

oops double tap

neat. how to do you power the doorbell? battery? or is it wired into the house?

It has a lithium rechargeable battery that is supposed to last 6 months.
Uses an android type charger.
I have it wired into my existing bell so I really shouldn’t have spent the extra $48 on a remote chime.
Oh well🙄.

My concern would be someone stealing it off the door? I assume they made installation easy, so wouldn't removal be quite easy as well? I'm quite intrigued as it's quite a bummer having packages stolen from the door step.