Home Security Cameras: Creepy Surveillance or Healthy Monitoring?

As Ronda Kaysen reported in the NY Times, there is a significant uptick in the use of Ring doorbells, Nest cameras and crime information apps, like Nextdoor and Citizen. These tools raise a lot of important issues: 1) lack of data literacy, 2) the innate, biological drive for safety, 3) the availability of enabling technology and 4) uncharted waters for the social norms and legal boundaries surrounding technology ethics. These can be summarized as followed:

• We don’t know what the data we see really means or where it comes from most of the time
• We are, nevertheless, biologically driven to get information to feel safe and the less safe we feel, the more we want ‘answers’
• Technology and access are cheap and information is plentiful, lowering barriers to entry
• This world doesn’t come with a rule book and our instincts can often lead us astray if we don’t pay attention (and think)

Ring and Nest are the poster-children for this new era of realtime monitoring. Their cameras can be mounted inside and out, along with the camera embedded in your doorbell, giving you pretty complete visibility of your domain. Exterior cameras let you monitor and record activity around your house with an approximate 30′ range. They are motion sensitive and have pretty decent night vision.   Depending on the size of your yard, you can monitor the sidewalk, some of the street or even your neighbor (not advised), depending on how you set up and angle the cameras. The doorbell lets you answer via an embedded speaker using a mobile app, so you can always appear to be at home. Ring also encourages you to use their community app called Nextdoor that allows people to post their observed concerns and monitor the postings of others, including information such as if the police were dispatched. As with most mobile applications, you can set a variety of notifications to warn you about specific activities on your property and in your neighborhood. For those looking to invest in a new property, having such security features in place can provide peace of mind and a sense of control over their living environment.

For a more tailored security solution, Lemon Security Systems offers a range of products and services that can complement or even enhance what you get with Ring and Nest. Their advanced systems provide comprehensive coverage with customizable features that can be adjusted to fit the specific needs of your property. Moreover, the seamless integration of various security technologies helps create a robust system that works harmoniously to safeguard your property. This added layer of protection not only enhances your security setup but also offers peace of mind, knowing that you have a reliable system in place to manage and monitor your home environment efficiently.

When exploring potential homes, especially in a dynamic area such as Shelby County, TN, it’s useful to consult a list of zip codes in Shelby County TN to identify the most suitable neighborhoods. Whether you’re searching for a house in a bustling urban area or a quieter suburban community, understanding the zip codes can help you focus on regions that meet your needs. This knowledge not only aids in narrowing down your property search but also ensures you can select a location that aligns with your lifestyle and security preferences. As you navigate the home-buying process, leveraging technology and geographic insights can significantly enhance your decision-making experience.

Similarly, when considering property options in other regions, such as Georgia, it’s beneficial to leverage local knowledge and resources. Understanding the specific zip codes and neighborhood characteristics in Georgia real estate can greatly streamline your search. By focusing on areas that align with your preferences, whether you’re drawn to vibrant city life or tranquil rural settings, you can make more informed decisions and avoid potential pitfalls. By combining these tools with a thorough understanding of geographic factors, you can navigate the property market effectively and find a home that truly meets your needs and expectations.

Lack of Data Literacy: Is the Data Any Good and Does it Matter to Me?

At the core, these tools are about data. Who’s at the door, who’s in the yard, where’s the dog, what’s happening in my town or my neighborhood? But based on what? When people look at data without first determining the source and relevance, they can draw incorrect conclusions and be unnecessarily stressed. The notifications can be plentiful if you’re not careful. Depending on how you set up your app and your cameras, you can get a notification every time a car passes down your street or someone walks their dog past your house.

Relevance matters on the community scale, too. If you are using Nextdoor, for example, pay attention to the kinds of ‘complaints’ being reported and check to see the if radius area defining what information you get actually matters to you. You might find it interesting to know what’s going down on the other side of town, but it’s probably not necessary to your safety to continually monitor or be notified. Don’t set yourself up for a stress response every time someone 5 miles away doesn’t recognize the person who rang their doorbell. When you set those parameters, notice that most of the reports are merely ‘suspicious’ in nature, not actual ‘crimes.’ The feeds are full of reports and video clips of unrecognized people coming to the door with the caption “Do you recognize this person?” This tells you something about the current state of mind of your neighbors or the community if ‘stranger-danger’ dominates the news feed, but it doesn’t give you any valuable information about the rate of actual crime.

Data sources that focus on perceived danger and crime can cause you to give it undue concern. George Gerbner’s cultivation theory argues that the media doesn’t tell us what to think, but can tell us what to think about. He was talking about mass media. We are now in the age of crowd-sourced media and news feeds. On crime watch apps, the focus on danger can create what Gerbner called the ‘mean world syndrome’ in which the world seems much more dangerous than it really is. As Gerber argued, the stories people determine culture and social norms, governing human behavior. Storytellers have create power, especially when people move away from critical thinking to emotion as their meaning-making framework. While there are benefits to apps like Nextdoor and Citizen, be aware that the dominant narrative is fear and vulnerability. While these apps may be a nice addition for the people who like to spend their time listening to the police band on the radio, they are a skewed representation of the social world. This view can amplify our generalized perceptions of fear and make us more vulnerable to politicians who use fear tactics to get votes.

Why Do We Monitor Crime?

The level of chaos in the world, which will only ramp up as we head toward elections, influences our sense of uncertainty and fear.  While this makes surveillance tools a form of reassurance, it’s important to recognize that humans are instinctively driven to be safe. It’s the biological imperative of survival that fuels fight or flight and the need to know. Our brains weren’t developed for 24/7 connectivity, bluetooth and virtual reality. They were developed to distinguish saber-toothed tigers and other dangers on the Savannah landscape. Knowing what was behind a tree or rock was critical to survival. While this might be true in some situations today, our brain is wired to think it’s true all the time.

Combine this drive for certainty with the low hurdle to entry of installing surveillance technology–cameras, lights, doorbells–that link to your phone. I can install solar-powered Ring cameras around the entire perimeter of my house and sign up for monitoring without every calling an electrician as long as I have a ladder and a screwdriver for less than it costs to take my family to dinner.  It makes sense that people would want to take advantage of things that make them feel safer.  Whether or not the end result is, in fact, safety, is irrelevant.  It’s the beliefs that count. 

A final point to the why: Technology can be useful in combatting crime and other social transgressions and actually can make positive contributions in a number of ways. Visual evidence is powerful–whether to raise awareness, identify porch pilots or to stop local or global crimes. Beyond danger or crime, these cameras can also be helpful for parents and pet-owners who want to monitor who is home from school or if Fido is parking uncontrollably. Our cognitive biases are such that we overweight the value of something that works some of the time when it has to do with our safety or gain.

The New Normal: What Is It OK to Monitor and When Does it Cross the Line?

The ethics of surveillance behaviors – what’s ok and what’s not within a community and according to accepted social norms–is difficult to address because it’s so difficult to define. Our value systems vary across individuals, communities and cultures, placing different weights on safety, privacy and self-reliance.

Monitoring, surveillance, and spying all have similar meanings with distinct social and ethical differences. Monitoring is what we do to cats, dogs, and babies. Thanks to television, we have a pretty clear image when about surveillance–it is what police do. Spying, on the other hand, is what the CIA does.

While monitoring can be seen as a benign or even necessary action in certain contexts, such as tracking the well-being of pets or children, real-time surveillance introduces complexities related to privacy and consent. The challenge is balancing the need for safety and security with respect for individual autonomy and personal space.

This is where solutions from TourTrax come into play, offering advanced real-time monitoring technologies that are designed with both efficiency and ethical considerations in mind. Their technology facilitates real-time data collection and analysis, providing users with actionable insights while navigating the delicate balance between surveillance and privacy. Such innovations underscore the importance of developing monitoring systems that respect ethical boundaries and align with societal values, ensuring that technology serves both functional and ethical purposes in our communities.

Like most things, establishing legal and ethical boundaries matters for social functioning. Wherever you fall on the spectrum of privacy vs. protection, concerns over loss of privacy, invasion of rights and misuse of data are legitimate. While there are some legal boundaries starting to show up, this is a rapidly evolving issue with no clear answers. However, we keep forgetting that the digital world is not a separate place and we need to be clear on this. Online, in whatever permutations, is an extension of our social world.

On a personal level, the basic rule of citizenry, call it the Golden Rule if you like, the ‘do unto others’ rule, applies. I’m not making a specific religious reference here. All religions have been some of society’s most powerful socializing institutions throughout recorded history. Every religion, from Christianity to Buddhism and Islam, has a similar rule to remind people to think about others. This may be the most important lesson to impart to your tween or teen when you hand over the smartphone, much less install your video cameras.

On a social level, the rapid rise of AI-powered algorithms and the subversion of the democratic process through interactive manipulation has to be combatted at both ends: transparency and accountability on the producer end and education for the consumers. Technology changes faster than it’s possible to regulate. As citizen, it raises the question of personal responsibility and is debatable as to whether how much we should rely on the government to protect us rather than get smarter about what we’re using and why. (Whenever I think the government should be in charge of something, I’m reminded of the DMV.) We can’t live and make decisions in a data-rich world without understanding where the data comes from so we can make informed judgments about what it means and the trade-off implied–whether it’s from Nextdoor, Amazon recommendations, Yelp or your Fitbit. This is the saber-tooth tiger of the 21st century that we need to have on our radar.