Police advise smart camera doorbell, do you already have one and is it aimed at the public road? (AW Poll)

The holiday is currently in full swing and according to the police, this is causing a (slight) increase in burglaries. The police has made a list of tips for holidaymakers, which includes the purchase of a smart doorbell. Do you already have one hanging next to your front door? And what is your video doorbell aimed at?

Smart doorbells

You will find them in all shapes and sizes, the video doorbells or smart camera doorbells. Often there are many differences between manufacturers and models. For example, some brands choose to store video images of visitors at your front door in the cloud and link them to a paid subscription. Other doorbells work with local storage via microSD or a separate base station in your home.

Last year we asked if you have such a smart doorbell hanging next to the (front) door. What did the result show? About 34 percent already had a smart doorbell at the time, and another 32 percent of voters considered buying it. 25 percent of readers did not want a smart camera doorbell and that may have to do with privacy. Finally, 6 percent of the readers indicated that it is not possible to install such a doorbell at their home.

There are several reasons why video doorbells are becoming increasingly commonplace. One of the reasons is the declining cost of the equipment. Action even has one for less than 40 euros. Security expert Dave Maasland of ESET Netherlands is not very pleased with these cheap smart home products, he indicated in our interview.

Police advice

The Dutch police now advises holidaymakers to hang one at the front door. She gives the following reason for this:

More and more people are protecting their property with cameras. The police often use camera images in their daily work to solve crimes. To know where cameras are installed and what they ‘see’, the police uses a database called ‘Camera in Beeld’. With this database, the police can see even faster where in the vicinity of a crime (for example a house burglary) there are cameras that may have images of the perpetrator. This allows perpetrators to be caught faster.

That the police recommend this is special. Day and night streaming (recording images) of the public road is prohibited under privacy legislation. The Camera in Picture database, where you can register your camera doorbell, uses images from the public road, and the police therefore ask holidaymakers to violate privacy legislation.

According to the Dutch Data Protection Authority, it is your own responsibility to adjust the camera in such a way that it only films your belongings. So you are not allowed to film the property of others, such as the house or garden of your neighbors. In principle, you are also not allowed to film the public road, such as the sidewalk or parking lots. So take a good look at what the camera is aimed at, what you do with the camera images and whether you violate privacy in any way. The Dutch Data Protection Authority has an extensive description of camera surveillance in and around homes.

AW Poll

We are curious if you have a smart camera doorbell and have included the same answers as last year. In addition, we included the position of the camera doorbell. Is the doorbell aimed at the public road or at your own belongings? So the doorbell is at the last one privacy proof. Leave additional information in the comments below this article.

Don’t have a smart doorbell yet? On AW Smart you will find a nice overview with the best smart doorbells without a cloud storage subscription. So those are video doorbells that store images locally.