re: General security camera discussion (was "Unifi Protect security cameras")

quote:

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I just had a motherfricker walk up my driveway and check if my vehicles were unlocked. I'll tell you one thing, you can never have too many cameras.

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That sucks. Do you have push notifications to your phone after hours? I do, but I also keep my phone in "do not disturb" mode so they're silent. Two of my front cameras are set to alarm when they detect people between 11 PM and 5 AM. (it used to be people and vehicles, but that's another story...)

I used to check my cams every AM for activity like this. Nothing ever happens so I got "camera checking fatigue" and stopped. About a week ago, I was checking them for another reason (I'd lost my sunglasses and I was trying to see if I had them on in the car). About 2:45 that day, we had someone drive thru our entire neighborhood and check every mailbox. My various cams tracked him as he turned on to our street, check the boxes from North to South, turn on the cul-de-sac check all those, and head back out. Unfortunately, he didn't have a front plate (as required by UT law) or I'd have nailed him when he stopped at our box (Our box is under a street light and when color night vision kicked on it was a pretty clean image). I still downloaded the footage and took it to the police. The car was pretty distinctive and recognizable, but the officer I spoke with suspected it was stolen. FWIW, the vehicle alarm detection was going off, the dude didn't seem to care at all.

So the reason I turned off my cams vehicle detection alarm(s) was this. When the cameras detected motion, they look for anything in the frame that the on-board AI recognizes and a person, pet or vehicle. It doesn't matter if that object is moving or not, just if it's in the frame. So on the weekends, when my neighbors GF parks her car in their driveway a moth will fly thru the frame and set the alarm off. I always keep the volume off on the monitor when I review footage so I've never noticed this before. However when I downloaded the video for the cops a few weeks ago, I noticed the alarm. Then I started reviewing more of the footage and found it pretty obnoxious. My neighbors who live decently far away have never said anything about it, and we've never heard it even sleeping on the same side of the house as our garage/driveway. I still felt it was a bit too much.