Going on a Quest

Every delivery worker can hear these words in their molars. The slightly smarmy voice of GLaDOS jumps out from an indeterminate point on the porch, or out of the bushes, or from across the street, just to remind you that They’re Watching.

To me, it seems like half of everybody has one of these godawful camera doorbell systems. A few years ago, it was almost all Rings, with a smattering of off-brand crappy ones here and there. Now there’s Nest, Eufy, Simpli…you get the idea. All the brands figured out the main features people want and came up with their own minor variants on how to generate profits for it. If I’m being honest about it, probably only 1/4 to 1/3 of households have one. Stats from a quick gooble agree. I just hate these fuckin’ things.

When I moved into my house, the sellers had taken off their doorbell camera, leaving the nonfunctional normal bell (pro tip: if your doorbell doesn’t work, take that sucker off or your friendly delivery workers will push it instead of knocking, which defeats the purpose), but they’d left behind little Ring doohickeys on all the ground-level windows. The neighborhood is NOT that bad. I guess if you never open the windows for a nice breeze, you don’t have to fool around with the settings on your heavy-duty alarm system before you do it.

Ring has been in the news plenty for giving their data up to law enforcement, and I’d wager that’s why the other brands have gained a foothold in the ecosystem. But…why the hell would I trust a slightly different cop doorbell brand to act right? Do you think I’m stupid?

As a delivery person, my face is stored in all of these brands’ cloud storage, forever, in all seasons and variations of hair length and expression and hats and scarves and whatnot. There’s no way to opt out of that, even if I quit and stopped feeding the panopticon my latest face data. Of course the government already has all of my information, but in exchange I get to drive on paved roads and shit like that. These are private companies run by creeps and bozos. I don’t know what I can really do about this, or how it could be dragged back into something sensible at a regulatory level.

Suffice to say, I am never going to get one of these. I hate all of the bloops and tootles that go off when you get in range. I don’t order that much stuff and I work close enough to home that I can do a little time theft to go throw a box inside if something comes during the day. Maybe I’m an emotionless ghoul, but anything in my house that’s irreplaceable is going to be worthless to a theoretical burglar. I’ve got insurance for the other stuff and a baseball bat the owners left me by the front door. That’s gonna have to be good enough.

This isn’t exactly relevant to my rant, but it is about a doorbell cam, and I don’t know how else I could include it: yesterday I had a woman pop out of her house and ask if I had a thing that I’d left a pickup notice for, because she didn’t come to the door the previous day. I had rung her weirdly-high (above head level; most people put theirs around chest height) Ring bell and waited a bit, no response, shrugged and went on my way. She asked why I hadn’t knocked, so I told her I rang the bell.

“That’s not a doorbell, it’s just a camera.”

HUH? Your Ring doorbell system? That everybody else on the planet uses as a doorbell? I just don’t know. So, again: if your doorbell doesn’t do the traditional doorbell thing, either take it down or stick a note on it to that effect because otherwise I’m hitting the damn button and assuming it goes ding-dong on your end.

Okay, this has been…fun? Some closing thoughts/riddles/prompts:

Do you really need to see what’s happening on your doorstep all the time? Isn’t there a certain something about there being a little mystery in your life?

What’s the worst that could happen—with your current setup, and with a more loosely-held option? Put another way, are you working harder than you need to for the results you find desirable? This could be asked about your home security, but also anything: your social life, finances, cleaning routine, etc.

The big social media platforms are free for users because the actual product is advertising space sold to marketers. Who’s winning when homeowners pay a subscription to record their comings and goings 24/7? Where else might you be paying for the honor of giving up your own privacy/time/data/sanity?