this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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Or just use one of the hundreds of other brands that provide smart doorbells.
Honest question: what is the reason to have a doorbell of this kind?
Tells you when a package arrived and when the neighbor stole it off your porch. Tells you someone rang the bell when not home and lets you remotely yell ant the door to door sales people.
I mean they’re useful, but I sure wouldn’t ever trust one connected to any sort of cloud.
I do have a UniFi door cam that records to a local hard drive. I like it. Ties in with my other cameras to watch my vehicle in my driveway.
If you can see it’s a salesperson you can ignore them but answer if it’s the mailman/UPS. Get notified that a package was dropped off… or that shortly thereafter some rando walks up to said package.
Think of it as a door-peephole-at-range.
Many.
If you get deliveries and they're mishandled, you have a recording of it.
If someone comes to your door when you're not home, you can talk to them.
You can also set up local AI alerts (AI here is mostly used for facial recognition) e.g. to alert you if your MIL comes around uninvited, or if your kids sneak out at 2am, and so on.
Once you begin appreciating a home CCTV camera setup (fully local mind you), you'll see the benefit of having your doorbell video-ed up as well.
That sounds awful. I'd rather just not, and avoid that mindset altogether.
Do tell, which part of that sounds awful?
Avoid the mindset that your kid might sneak out, or an unwanted guest might have shown up?
Ignorance may be bliss, but it certainly doesn’t stop shenanigans from happening.
In the context of parenting there are certainly better things you can do to prevent "shennanigans" other than subjecting them to surveillance. Like you know... raising them?
Terrifying with a generation of peole grown up under total control and expected to be perfectly obedient. They will be shitty adults. But hey, at least they won't have memories of that time they snuck out at night to watch the stars.
Look, I’ve had a random person walk into my house uninvited before, and having a recording of it was useful. Just because you don’t like the idea of one of the examples given, doesn’t mean these devices have no use.
The idea of going back to a blind simple lock protecting my house, pets, and stuff is crazy to me - smart CCTV and an internet connected alarm system are so much better, plus there's no "monitoring" cost like some folks pay. $40 so you can call the cops for me? No.
In addition to "normal" uses, my kids got into the habit of leaving me messages on the camera when I'm in the office and they are leaving for school. I grew to love these messages.
Using Eufy with local storage. Don't know whether anything gets stored to the cloud, but I guess data still passes through Eufy servers when I view the videos.
How else can you have the pleasure of telling Jehovah’s Witnesses to go away when you’re not at home?
I was waiting for this reply!
I love those guys! Trolling them always makes my day. Asking if they are willing to help clean the house never fails to get them off my door.
What if they agree to clean if you just listen to them?
Never happened and I seriously doubt it ever will. But! I have a couple of maid outfits laying around if it ever does. I'll listen if they comply with my request.