I had the creepiest conversation with a cop a few months ago.My neighborhood is seemingly getting rougher by the day. I do have a video doorbell, but it’s not one of the major U.S. brands.

Anyway, it was trash day. Garbage had been collected. I had noticed several police cars around, but didn’t see any police. I went to collect my bins, and one of them popped out of nowhere to chat at me.

He was light on details, but needed to track the comings and goings of a parking lot across the street from my house. Didn’t need super clear images, just said he needed timestamps for a timeline. Said my camera angle was ‘perfect’.And it is! I get so many alerts that I disabled it unless motion is detected within the area of my yard. (Which was not helpful to them.)

But he was explaining this to me, and said that he needed me to send them the video (before I told him that it was unlikely I had video, and then confirmed that I did not with him). A moment later, he did a quick scan of my various neighbors houses, and said (to himself) “Okay, that’s a Ring, that won’t be a problem.”

A problem?!? Just casually warrentlessly seizing footage from people’s homes is not a problem?

For those curious, the system I currently have is by Eufy and I cannot recommend the brand. Anker as a brand has been great (Eufy’s parent company), but I find the Eufy app to be riddled with spam, the offered features to be mediocre, and generally, customer service to be poor. They even had an amazon review removed once. (I called their app a piece of crap, and they hit it with a community standards warning to get it removed.)