I will be doing some articles on the many civilian applications of both of these apps soon for both home and business security. -SF
(NOTE: I think the name of the below video should have been “Night of the Living Trans-Vestites” or something along them lines; regardless I think it proves the absolute necessity of having some type of DVR/Cyber video surveillance at your front gate/door. )
ABOUT A MONTH ago, while visiting my family in Oregon, I decided to browse my Nextdoor notifications. I don’t log in every day and I’m not one of the many users who religiously comb the hyper-local social platform for neighborhood news. But if I get a particularly compelling update in my inbox, I’ll click through. Some news about a thwarted break-in caught my eye, and then I saw it: a photo of a stranger sitting on my front porch. I checked the location of the poster; he lives in the same complex. “I found this person trying to break into the back unit,” he wrote (my unit!?). The poster said the female stranger seemed confused, homeless, and maybe under the influence of something. She sat on the porch, insisted she lived there, and eventually left, but not before the Nextdoor poster could get a photo, which he uploaded through the app.
It was disturbing to see an image of someone who tried to break into my house. It would have been less strange if someone had texted me the photo directly. Instead, I encountered it by chance on Nextdoor. But the social app is increasingly the medium of choice for neighborhood news, specifically coupled with images taken by would-be detectives, using consumer-first technologies to run homespun investigation rings.
Earlier this week, a one- to two-man crime spree in San Francisco was thwarted thanks to Nextdoor and the smart home product du jour, a Nest Cam. A wig-wearing thief was caught on camera trying to break into cars and homes—and thankfully apprehended, according to an ABC news affiliate. But what the report failed to mention was that thesurveillance videos that helped police arrest the intruder were handed over to authorities by citizens using Nest Cam. The videos were originally posted to YouTube and Nextdoor.
Read he Remainder at Wired
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