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Comment by anant90 | Hacker News Reader

We use one dropcam pointed at the valuables in the house (the living room with all the monitors and computers etc.) Dropcam offers a lot of sensible features like camera schedules and location sensitive activity alerts that make the experience of buying the $200 device worth it. There's also night vision and a microphone + speaker. Needless to say, everything works seamlessly across devices, and you can buy 7-day cloud storage for an additional $99 a year.

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Keep in mind, the Dropcam only helps if you know the thief. We had a theft in our old office and caught the thief on Dropcam. The police saw the video and noted that they had seen the guy at other thefts as well. My obvious question: "anything that you can do about it?" And unless ubiquitous CCTV with face recognition is widely deployed, the answer is basically no.

I agree. But activity alerts are pretty good. You can set Dropcam up so that if someone enters the area when you're not home or the camera loses network connectivity, you get an alert - and if you do, you can alert the neighbors or the cops.

And how does that stop or even deter break-ins?

If someone enters the area when you're not at home, you get an activity alert on your phone and you can check out the live stream to find out what's up. If the first thing the robbers do is to take out your home wifi, you still get an alert for camera getting disconnected. You can alert the neighbors or the cops in either case.

There's a reason why alarms do not use your main phone / DSL / data line. False positives could destroy the purpose of your system.

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