How video doorbells turned us into a nation of curtain-twitchers

Telegraph

12-05-2025

When Ian Barnes, a councillor in north London, started canvassing during local election campaigns in 2013, doorbells were still dumb. You knocked or rang and either someone opened the door or they didn't. Now… it's not so simple. In the past five years in particular, Barnes has watched as smart doorbell cameras have exploded in popularity. 'I'd say 50 per cent of homes have them now and when we have a large team on a street you can hear that earworm chime cascading down the road,' he says.
After last year's general election, Barnes described doorbell cameras as 'the nemesis of all door-knockers… The all-seeing-eye. The Cyclops guarding the homestead.' They often lead, he wrote, 'to the ultimate humiliation for all canvassers' – the robotic invitation to leave a message. 'You were a once proud creature, the product of 100,000 years of human evolution, but now you're reduced to hunching over a plastic lens as the family inside quietly laugh at your face on a screen in all of its fleshy, fish-eyed glory. You leave a few words using your best message voice but inside you hurt.'
Across the UK, an estimated one in five homes now has a video doorbell from manufacturers including Amazon-owned Ring, as well as Google, Arlo and Aqara. That number is likely to rise further; Apple is reportedly preparing to launch its own doorbell that will pair with a smart lock to allow residents to unlock their homes with their faces, just as they do their iPhones.
As they spread, the devices are changing the game for not just canvassers, but delivery drivers, doorstep preachers, visitors to our homes, and residents themselves. Fans talk up the convenience and peace of mind they offer, but privacy and human rights groups are raising the alarm over the civilian surveillance web of smartphone-enabled peepholes enveloping our neighbourhoods, where they are turning millions of us into digital curtain-twitchers-cum-security guards. I recently acquired a Ring doorbell myself and keep noticing new ones pop up on my street. Ours doesn't record constantly, unlike others (Ring introduced 24/7 recording as a feature in October for £15.99 a month), but it does send me an instant clip of anyone entering or leaving the house. It feels slightly invasive, and my wife Jess has taken to sticking two fingers up at the camera on her way past.
The technology is becoming ever more advanced. Motion detection allows homeowners to receive alerts without anyone needing to ring the bell. Ring cameras can detect parcel shapes, triggering 'package event' alerts. A sunbather on the Costa del Sol can now instruct a courier in Colchester to leave a package behind their recycling bin. Or they can get a celebrity to do it for them; Ring allows users to set up 'quick replies' recorded by Ant and Dec, for example. 'Surprise! Ant and Dec here, and you're live on the telly! Give us a wave,' Ant says. 'Only joking, but you are live on this doorbell, so please leave a message,' adds Dec.
The original Ring doorbell was a more rudimentary device: a live intercom that could work via a resident's smartphone.The American entrepreneur Jamie Siminoff launched it as Doorbot in 2013, pitching it on Shark Tank (the US version of Dragons' Den). He left without a deal, but sales soared on the back of the exposure and Siminoff attracted investors including Richard Branson and Shaquille O'Neal. Rebranded as Ring in 2014, the company arrived in the UK in 2016; two years later, Amazon bought it for a reported $1.1 billion in 2018.
Dave Ward, who joined Ring from Dixons seven years ago, now runs operations outside the US. He won't share sales figures, but confirms demand has grown steeply and steadily in the past decade. There were two pandemic spikes; first people saw the social distancing benefit of an intercom. 'Then we'd become so used to being in control of our homes, that this was a way to keep that going,' he adds. He says they are about more than security: 'It's about connecting you to your most valuable asset, your home.' Each Christmas Eve, he dresses as Santa and calls at his own front door with a 'Ho-ho-ho' before showing the footage to his children the next morning.
Ring's cameras ingeniously film their own adverts. A huge online market exists for clips of wrongdoing and unexpected events, with endless social media posts and online news stories. 'Ring doorbell footage shows gran crashing through front door 'like Del Boy',' is one recent example. The most watched videos at Doorbell News, a US-based YouTube channel with more than a million subscribers, include a clip of a homeowner threatening a parcel thief, or 'porch pirate', with an automatic rifle (7.7 million views) and 'schizophrenic neighbour has a mental health episode' (1.2 million views).
Then there are domestic dilemmas. I have a friend whose wife shares access to their Google Nest doorbell camera. Shame kicked in when, home alone and badly hungover, he ordered McDonald's to be delivered. 'I didn't want my wife to know so I switched the Nest off before the driver arrived,' he says. The same guy once ordered an expensive pizza oven as a surprise for his wife's birthday, only for a clip to pop up on her phone showing a large box labelled 'pizza oven' arriving at their front door.
Another friend with two young children and a Nest device had to disconnect it from his Apple Music account when it started to play his 'entry' song as he left the house instead. 'I got sent to the shops for milk at the kids' bedtime and Real American [Hulk Hogan's wrestling theme] started blasting through the house at a hundred decibels,' he says.
Not even royals are immune to the reach of the smart doorbell – an image recently emerged of Prince Harry seemingly lost and going door-to-door in a bid to find a friend's house.
But security remains central to smart doorbell marketing. Just in the past few weeks as I write, the devices have captured attempted car thefts in Oldham and garage break-ins in Gloucestershire. Some of the last images of Sarah Everard were captured on a doorbell camera before her murder in 2021. In a few weeks, BBC One is due to air Doorbell Detectives, a series set in a mocked-up incident room for crimes caught on the devices.
When a former colleague learnt that his friend had been groped near his house, he alerted the neighbourhood WhatsApp group and discovered the man had done it before. Witnesses described the same distinctive outfit, which prompted several neighbours to check their doorbell footage and spot him. 'We sent the pictures to the police and they were able to make an arrest,' my friend says.
Denise MacDonnell, a retired teacher who lives alone in a small town in Hampshire, was offered a free Ring camera a year ago by Ageas, her home insurer, as part of a scheme for vulnerable customers. 'I'd seen all these videos on Facebook, you know, 'Have you seen this man who came to my door?'' MacDonnell, who is 71, tells me. 'They put the fear of God into you, so that you think you need something.'
Two of MacDonnell's children, who live nearby, are also connected to her bell. 'If someone comes to the door and I don't answer it, my daughter phones me,' she says. She wasn't convinced at first, but now loves the device. After the 30-day trial new customers get, she decided to pay the minimum £5 a month Amazon charges users who want to review footage (non-subscribers can only use the cameras as a live intercom). 'It's opened a whole new way of me feeling safe,' she adds.
Jon Brushneen, a detective inspector at Surrey Police, supports the use of doorbell cameras, which several other police forces have promoted. 'The more footage we're able to access, the more likely we are to be able to solve crime,' he says. When he started noticing how much footage was ending up on social media, he saw it as a missed opportunity to gather intelligence. In 2023, Surrey Police launched an online suspicious activity portal, where people can submit clips of concern that don't depict crime. 'It could be people interfering with cars or doing possible occupancy checks on addresses as a prelude to burglary,' Brushneen says.
From May 2023 to January this year, the portal received 1,260 submissions, a significant number of them doorbell clips. Police were able to identify 32 suspects. 'And a number of those have gone on to be arrested and charged,' the detective adds. He says that if officers can't identify suspects, they can feed footage into facial recognition software to flag possible matches.
The use of doorbell cameras in fighting crime, or identifying suspects, has been controversial. In the US last year, Ring stopped allowing police to request footage from users via its Neighbors app, where customers can post clips and receive alerts of suspected incidents. Privacy campaigners have criticised the app, which is only available in the US, as well as the relationship between Ring and police forces. They say the devices stoke suburban paranoia, turning neighbourhoods into residential panopticons, where everyone is watching everyone else, potentially misconstruing behaviour or making assumptions based on clothing or ethnicity.
'When will we say, 'ok, we have enough cameras now'?,' asks Nuno Guerreiro de Sousa, a technologist at Privacy International, a UK-based charity. He also questions the common assumption that if one has nothing to hide, then one has nothing to fear. Most doorbell footage is stored in the cloud rather than in the home, he points out, where technically it can be accessed or hacked. In 2023, Amazon settled a case with the Federal Trade Commission in the US after a former Ring employee had been fired for spying on female customers in 2017. The company said it changed its policies in 2019 to limit employee access to videos. The devices themselves can be compromised. In 2019, a man accessed a Ring camera that was being used in the US as a baby monitor in a children's bedroom and started talking to a young girl. Their parents had no idea how long he had been watching.
'Whatever precedent we open now is within the rules of the game we have now, but we never know who or what is coming next, and how they may turn those rules around,' de Sousa adds. In 2020, one of Amazon's own engineers said in a public letter to management that Ring devices, which also include indoor and outdoor CCTV cameras, were 'simply not compatible with a free society'.
'Safety and security is fundamental to everything we do,' Dave Ward tells me. He says customer data is encrypted and secure, and that Ring has no partnerships with UK police forces. The firm, which does not offer facial recognition technology, recommends users secure their wi-fi networks and enable two-factor authentication in the Ring app to guard against hackers. Ring must comply with police warrants for footage, but Ward says such measures are rare because residents typically share footage with the authorities. Surrey Police tells me domestic CCTV footage is 'almost always provided on a voluntary basis'. Brushneen says officers have learnt to filter out spurious reports of suspicious activity.
A separate question is how effective video doorbells are as a deterrent to burglars or porch pirates. They are not smart enough to see through balaclavas, for example, and Amazon itself sells cheap, legal 'de-auther' devices that can jam wi-fi networks, disabling connected devices. Security experts have even suggested doorbell cameras may function as 'affluence cues' for burglars. Aviva, Britain's largest home insurer, tells me they have no impact on premiums.
Doorbell cameras are now increasingly being cited in coercive control cases. The domestic-violence charity Refuge has said that more than 70 per cent of the victims it supports report tech-related abuse in their homes, which can also include the use of location trackers, and the remote control of smart locks, thermostats and speakers. 'They are yet another way abusers can monitor adults in their household without consent,' says Eva PenzeyMoog, a software designer whose book Design for Safety explores how such tech is weaponised.
'Unfortunately, technology can be abused by bad actors,' says Ward at Ring, which prompts primary users to add other householders to its devices so that they can also access footage via the app (Jess declines the offer). The firm tells me it works with Refuge to improve its security and to provide devices to support abuse survivors 'as they build their lives and seek peace of mind'.
Another friend of mine who lives in a flat was furious when her upstairs neighbour stuck a Ring on their shared front door. 'I hate the thought that they can see my family coming and going,' she says. 'It feels like a total invasion of privacy.' The neighbour was unsympathetic and my friend ended up backing down.
'We're getting a lot more of these disputes,' says Melanie Saunders, a housing specialist at law firm Ward Hadaway. She says people with shared doors or hallways should consult neighbours before installing a device. The Information Commissioner's Office, a public body that deals with data protection issues, says consent isn't required, but that a device owner must be able to demonstrate that their security concerns outweigh any privacy concerns. That clearly leaves a grey area, and getting the balance wrong can be costly; In 2021, a judge in Oxford fined a man whose Ring doorbell and separate camera on a shed was capturing so much of his neighbour's home and garden that he had 'unjustifiably invaded' her privacy.
Ring encourages users only to train their cameras on their own property. That still keeps canvassers, posties and preachers in the frame. The devices often capture misdemeanours such as parcels being flung over fences. But Zamir Dreni, an Uber driver and general secretary of the App Drivers and Couriers Union, is fed up with the way footage of low-paid drivers is frequently posted to social media, sometimes for laughs.
'I saw a Ring clip the other day of a driver picking his nose and I'm like, 'Why is this funny?'' Dreni says. 'He's just doing his job, and you could clearly see his ID with his name on. People are misusing data for their five minutes of viral fame.' His members increasingly wear their own cameras. 'The internet would break,' he adds, if drivers posted clips of bad customer behaviour, from rudeness to false claims of theft or missed deliveries.
A 2022 research paper on doorbell cameras and couriers by Data & Society, an independent, non-profit research institute, describes an 'ingenious' workplace dynamic in which Amazon sells the devices that are being used to monitor its drivers, recruiting Ring customers as unpaid supervisors. 'Amazon has managed to transform what was once a labour cost into a revenue stream,' the report read.
Perhaps spare a thought also for preachers. TikTok and other social media are full of doorbell clips of people typically pranking or being rude to Jehovah's Witnesses. Andrew Basoo, who works at the church's HQ, tells me congregations are trained not to stand too close to lenses, and to be alert to the fact their voices are being recorded. 'We're conscious of not tripping over something in the garden and it becoming a meme, but what an individual chooses to do with the footage I guess is down to them,' he says.
Ward points out that Ring cameras have a blue light that shows when they are active. The devices also come with a warning sticker to be applied near a front door. I've never seen one and confess mine goes straight in the bin. I ask two delivery workers at my own door what they think. 'The more Rings the better, because it means I've got evidence I'm doing my job,' a postman says. A supermarket driver, who has a Ring himself, says it's helpful when a customer can shout through the doorbell that they're five minutes away.
My own free trial ends in a few days. I'm not sure if I'll cough up for yet another subscription, or keep the camera at all. It has been convenient at times but, as my wife points out, we already have enough reasons to look at our phones – enough apps and notifications. My old brass lion knocker had always done a good job and, unlike my Ring, it doesn't stop working in direct sunlight on warm days.
Soon after I speak to Barnes, he hits the campaign trail before this May's local elections. In a comic demonstration of how widespread the cameras now are, he recently had to interrupt two neighbours whose adjacent Ring doorbells he had rung in quick succession. 'Can I help you?' one resident said, after hearing the 'hello' coming out of her neighbour's Ring. 'Wait, you rang my bell!' the neighbour shot back. Caught in the middle of this bizarre exchange, Barnes stuck some leaflets through the door and moved on.