Ring Doorbell Camera Dynamics

Ring and Nest doorbell cameras both solve the problem of knowing who's at your door without getting up. But they do it with different approaches to notification, video quality, and privacy that reveal different assumptions about what a doorbell should be in 2022. Ring sends aggressive push notifications for every motion event. Your phone buzzes when a car drives past, a leaf blows by, or a neighbor walks their dog. The volume of false alerts trains you to ignore notifications, which defeats the purpose of having a camera. Nest Hello is better at filtering relevant events. Google's machine learning distinguishes between a person, a package, and a car. You only get notified for categories you care about. Privacy concern with both devices: your front door camera is feeding video to a cloud server owned by Amazon or Google. Both companies have faced questions about sharing footage with law enforcement without the owner's consent. Video quality is good enough to identify faces and read license plates at about 15 feet. Useful for package theft. Concerning for everyone else. I don't own one, but my parents installed a Ring last year. The footage has become a source of entertainment rather than security. They watch the delivery drivers, the mail carrier, and the neighborhood cat more than they watch for actual threats. Whether constant surveillance of your own front door makes you feel safer or more anxious is an interesting design question. My parents' experience suggests the answer depends on how well the notification filtering works.