Home security has come a long way from a guard dog, locked gate and a yard light. Nowadays, homes and properties can be secured with internet-connected cameras that monitor activity 24 hours a day and relay it to any location. "For a few hundred dollars, you can buy these battery-powered cameras and install them yourself fairly easily," says High Tech Texan Michael Garfield.
These home surveillance systems allow you to instantly monitor your home or communicate with someone there even while away. But as with most big tech advancements of recent years, this raises privacy concerns. "It's the good with the bad," says Garfield. "These systems are very simple to do and can save you money, but the downside...you really have to think, is this worth it?"
"Hackers, other people can potentially steal your passwords, or maybe your neighbor gets on your wi-fi, and can get into some of your accounts and see what's inside your home," he continues. "So you have to be careful, because security is still not 100 percent."
Perhaps the hottest home security item these days is a doorbell camera, like Amazon's Ring, which monitors your front door and allows you to remotely interact with visitors. But it also comes with major questions. "In the past, law enforcement agencies---if they suspect something---they have gone to Ring and asked for that video surveillance, without a warrant," says Garfield. Indeed, so far federal law allows security companies to share your footage with police, even without your consent.
Garfield tells KTRH the law is still murky on whether companies can be liable for breaches of your surveillance cameras. "This is a big issue and we don't know, because with everything we're talking about in these high tech home security products, we're still in the infancy stage," he says.
It all comes back to the classic conflict of convenience vs. privacy. "This is just typical of what we're going through with all of our new technology, that our data may not all be 100 percent secured," says Garfield.
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