He hesitated. Then he nodded.

He tried the backyard camera. Same thing. A gap of silence, a missing chunk of time. It was 2:00 PM on a Tuesday. He wasn’t missing much, but the perfectionist in him, the IT consultant who spent his days debugging servers, bristled at the error.

In the United States, surveillance is governed by both federal standards and a patchwork of state laws.

Home security camera systems can provide numerous benefits, including:

An indoor camera in a common area captures everything: your morning routine, sensitive conversations, children playing, and even your state of dress after a shower. If that footage is stored in the cloud, it exists on someone else’s server. Even if the company is trustworthy, a data breach could expose intimate moments.