Dropcam vs Canary: rival home security camera watchdogs

In Dave Eggers's novel The Circle, a fictional Silicon Valley megacorp launches SeeChange, tiny video cameras that broadcast straight to the internet. The book outlines a dystopian future, but several devices that do exactly this are already available. One, Dropcam, is even owned by real-life megacorp Google. But rather than trying to convince us that "privacy is theft", these cameras are intended to protect us by improving home security.

There are many issues to weigh when buying a home security camera: price, video quality, design and storage. But first you do have to be comfortable with leaving a webcam in your living room, kitchen or (gulp) bedroom.

For the past few weeks I have been comparing the latest Dropcam, whose name is becoming synonymous with these cameras, and a start-up rival, Canary.

The two devices have been sitting next to each other in my living room. Just being able to look in on my home from anywhere, in high-definition video, provides some reassurance that all is well. I could also use the Dropcam Pro's speaker to greet my wife when I saw her arrive home, but it freaked her out, so she asked me to stop.

More than an 'eye'At $250, the Canary costs $50 more than the Dropcam Pro, but that includes access to recorded video, stored in the cloud, from the past 12 hours. Dropcam offers only live viewing unless you pay more for cloud storage.

Canary also offers extra features such as detecting temperature, humidity and air quality, although you cannot use it to adjust a thermostat or air conditioner because it does not plug in to other smarthome systems yet. The air quality sensor took a while to calibrate but was a useful nudge to open a window.

Dropcam lacks these extra sensors but sharing a parent with Nest, the smart thermostat company, means it can communicate a bit with Nest devices, with further integrations likely. For instance, it can hook into the Nest Protect smoke alarm - if you have this $100 device - and start recording (with free cloud storage) when the smoke alarm goes off.

As with Nest's products, Dropcam is well designed, though unmistakably a camera. Canary is bigger - about the size of a pint glass - but its cylindrical design does a better job at concealing its sensors.

False alarmsThey may look good, but both share the same big flaw. Rather than playing fearless guard dog, both tend to jump at their own shadow. Once they have fired off false alarms to their respective smartphone apps several times a day, caused by little more than a change of light, you just want to turn them off, which defeats the point of having them.

The alerts can be turned on and off automatically based on your phone's location, so they disarm the camera when you get home. I found Canary much better at detecting my location on my iPhone 6 than Dropcam, which sometimes took hours to realise it had spied me, not a burglar.

The two companies are taking steps to remedy the problem. Canary allows each security "event" to be tagged "Everything is fine" and flagged as pets, sunlight, shadows or even individual people. In time, Canary promises to be able to recognise and filter these automatically. As for Dropcam, "custom activity zones" allow the change detection to focus just on particular areas of a room or house, such as a doorway or window, though only if you pay extra.

But when a false alarm can even be triggered by the cameras' own night-vision mode kicking in, this feels like a problem that will take both companies some time to solve.

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On the other hand, Canary users will have to hope that the fledgling company's security systems, where it stores their videos, are robust.

The verdict: The people watching the videos will not be evil megacorps but your own family: whether you are comfortable watching each other online is up to you.

Both devices are worth considering, but neither Dropcam nor Canary is quite capable enough to worry me that we are entering The Circle's dystopia just yet.

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