Video doorbells have quickly become one of the most popular smart home devices on the market. From suburbs to city apartment complexes, it seems like almost every front door now sports a rectangle containing a camera. After all, they promise peace of mind, allowing you to screen visitors from the comfort of your couch or keep a watchful eye on your porch when you’re away from home. But while these devices offer a level of convenience and security that’s hard to say no to, they’re far from perfect and actually have several drawbacks.
To clarify, these doorbells aren’t inherently a bad investment, especially if you’re opting for a nicer 2K video doorbell. For many homeowners, they quickly pay for themselves by making it easier to catch a package thief or see when the kids come home from school. But as these devices have evolved, so have the unforeseen complications that can arise when installing a permanent camera on the front of your home.
While video doorbells offer a simple and fairly straightforward upgrade to your home security, they come with some concerns that manufacturers don’t exactly advertise, like creeping privacy issues and annoying technical hurdles. Ultimately, relying on a smart doorbell means making some notable compromises. So, if you’re considering adding one to your smart home ecosystem, here are the top downsides of using video doorbells that deserve your attention.
Privacy Concerns Extend Far Beyond the Boundaries of Your Property
At the start of the smart home technology boom, no one really thought about the ethical implications of smart doorbells. Everyone was convinced they could see who was at the door, and that was that. Unfortunately, the reality of attaching a permanent high-definition camera to your front door is that it inevitably captures much more than just your own property.
Depending on where you live and the orientation of your porch, video doorbells can likely record the daily movements of your neighbors, pedestrians walking their dogs, and every car driving down the street. This seemingly casual surveillance network has raised huge privacy concerns in recent years. Even if you feel safer, your neighbors may not appreciate being unknowingly recorded every time they go out to check the mail. However, beyond neighborhood dynamics, there are much bigger concerns about how the companies that make these doorbells handle your video data.
Large companies like Ring have faced enormous backlash for sharing user images with law enforcement without obtaining explicit consent from the user or a warrant from the owners of these video doorbells. Additionally, because these devices are connected to the Internet, they will always carry the ongoing risk of being hacked. A compromised video doorbell can give bad actors direct access to the audio and video feeds of your family’s daily routine, turning what was intended to be a private security device for your family into a powerful surveillance tool against you.
Reliability largely depends on the quality of your Wi-Fi
A traditional, old-fashioned doorbell is delightfully simple: you press the button, the circuit closes and the chime rings to alert you to the presence of a visitor. Best of all, it works every time, without fail, for decades. If you look at some of the best smart home gadgets on the market, many attempt (and often fail) to match this fundamental reliability, and video doorbells are no exception. The major problem here is that these devices rely on the strength and stability of your home’s Wi-Fi network.
This may not seem like a huge obstacle at first glance, but your front door is one of the hardest areas of your home for wireless signals to pass through. Thick exterior walls, metal doors, brick facades, etc. can all combine to create a dead zone where you need connectivity the most. So when the Wi-Fi signal drops or fluctuates, your video doorbell performance also drops. You might get a notification that someone is at the door, but when you open the app, all you can see is a spinning loading wheel or a heavily pixelated (and therefore useless) feed. And by the time the video finally resolves, the person is already gone.
While this is great for door-to-door sellers, it’s beyond annoying when dealing with a friendly neighbor or repairman. Additionally, battery-powered models suffer significantly from extreme weather conditions; Freezing temperatures in winter and scorching temperatures in summer can reduce a doorbell’s battery capacity, leaving you completely blind until you take it apart, recharge it, and reassemble it.
Camera and hardware limitations leave blind spots
As camera lenses and sensors have improved, manufacturers have boasted ultra-wide viewing angles and crisp 4K resolutions for their video doorbells. While these devices can effortlessly capture a panoramic view of your front yard, physics still gets in the way of complete security. A major disadvantage of these devices is their fixed position, which can create blind spots. Regardless of how far forward the lens is, a camera mounted at standard doorbell height will have these blind spots. This is something that can make them less than effective at the one thing they’re supposed to do: let you see what’s going on around your front door and in your yard.
The most common casualty of this shortcoming is packages delivered to your porch. Delivery drivers have been known to place boxes on the ground just below the camera’s line of sight or tuck them behind a nearby planter to hide them from the street. Since the camera on these doorbells faces outward rather than downward, package thieves can potentially sneak in and steal your deliveries without ever actually showing their face on camera.
Some newer models have even added secondary, downward-facing cameras to combat this exact problem. The only remaining problem concerns the night, because the visibility is less; Even infrared sensors used for night vision can potentially erase an image and make it difficult to see many details, let alone faces more than a few meters away. This is a frustrating hardware limitation that leaves obvious gaps in your home security.
The hidden costs of often mandatory usage subscriptions
While there are several security cameras that don’t require a subscription, video doorbells definitely fall into the realm of software-as-a-service models that do. Whether you’re staying economical with a video doorbell under $100 or splurging on a high-end $250 model, it’s reasonable to expect it to be fully functional right out of the box. However, that initial hardware purchase ends up feeling more like a down payment for your video doorbell: for most, unlocking their full usefulness almost always ends up forcing you to pay a monthly or annual subscription.
While there are subscription-free doorbells, they often have limited functionality in comparison. They can still send you a live alert when someone rings, but they don’t let you do anything like save or review recorded video clips. So if your motion sensor goes off in the middle of the night and you sleep through the notification, you can’t check the app the next morning to see what happened; These images disappear instantly, unless you pay the company to store them in the cloud so you can view them later.
Beyond that, some brands lock their most useful smart features (like the ability to tell a human from a passing car) behind these paywalls, because they typically need cloud computing to work. Over the life of the device, you’ll easily end up spending more money on the subscription that comes with it than on the video doorbell hardware itself.
Notification fatigue and false alerts reduce usefulness
Normally, a security device is supposed to help you feel safe and calm, but an overly sensitive video doorbell can quickly become a source of anxiety and annoyance all day long. The last major downside to installing one of these devices is the large number of notifications they can send you. Even if you absolutely want to know when someone is at your door, it’s possible to adjust the sensitivity and zones of the motion sensor alerts, but dialing them in correctly can be difficult, as a video doorbell’s default alert sensitivity can be too high and end up sending you a bunch of false alerts.
This might mean your phone rings every time a car passes your neighborhood or your tree moves in the wind on a sunny but windy day. The constant stream of pings makes it easy to find yourself tired of notifications. After checking your phone for the billionth time just to see a stray cat running across your lawn, you might start to ignore the alerts altogether. And once you stop paying attention to notifications, the device loses almost all of its preventive security value.
While you can spend hours tweaking sensitivity sliders and drawing activity zones in your smart doorbell’s companion app, finding the perfect balance between missing real events and being spammed by fake ones can seem impossible. Deleting incoming alerts due to fatigue can practically make your doorbell an expensive and useless gadget. And since video doorbells can last for several years, you may end up losing a lot of money out of pocket.
