In 2022, a father and son in Florida received notifications from their Ring doorbell camera: someone was knocking on their door. The pair quickly sprang into action, scouring their apartment complex for a possible intruder. The scene they stumbled upon was a woman checking her phone in her car. They fired seven shots at him as he walked away.
The woman, who survived, had never approached his door. The person who was caught on camera turned out to be a neighbor dropping off a package that had been delivered by mistake at his house.
This is an extreme example of paranoia-fueled behavior spurred by home security systems, but it is part of a larger trend. Images of alleged porch pirates are regularly posted to community groups on Facebook and Nextdoor, and any strange or erratic actions can raise suspicion, especially if you are a person of color.
This class of doorbell cameras, which include Ring, Google Nest Doorbell, and Amazon-owned SimpliSafe, are marketed as a convenient means to see who’s at your door, a tool to catch burglars and intruders, and maybe even find your lost dog. In reality, its uses are usually more nefarious. Hundreds of local law enforcement and government agencies across the country have joined Ring’s Neighbors social app, a platform where anyone, regardless of whether they own a Ring camera, can post a crime or safety tip in their neighborhood, and where investigators can request footage from Ring users. And doorbell cameras are popular; 62 percent of respondents in a 2025 US News survey said they installed an outdoor security camera in their home. Americans have turned their yards and porches into their own little surveillance states.
Laura Simonati for Vox
Aside from the obvious legal and privacy concerns, there is little evidence that doorbell cameras actually reduce crime, but there is is reasons to believe that they are having an impact on our neighborly relations. Research has shown that knowing we are being watched makes us subconsciously more aware of others, which, in turn, can make us paranoid. Another article found that “the awareness of being watched can intensify existing distrust, paranoia, and fear.” This suspicion influences how we perceive and interact with each other.
“Being a good neighbor doesn’t mean spying on your neighbors,” Will Owen, communications director for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told Vox. “We need to change the way we think about neighborhood policing and not embrace big technology that is creating fear and distrust among neighbors.”
How cameras undermine trust
Although more and more people are equipping their homes with surveillance technology, Americans ironically hold their neighbors in high regard. A recent report from the American Life Survey Center found that 72 percent of Americans maintain some level of trust in their neighbors, a stark contrast to just 30 percent of Americans who said they trust others more generally, according to last year’s World Happiness Report. These findings suggest that people feel like they belong in their communities, even if they don’t regularly interact with their neighbors, Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Vox.
So if we generally believe that the people around us can be trusted, who exactly are cameras for? “If you already trust your neighbors… you can infer that the camera is there to deter people outside your neighborhood from stealing,” said Peter Kim, professor of management and organization at the USC Marshall School of Business and author of How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken, and Repairedhe told Vox. But if you don’t have current relationships with your neighbors, you may be suspicious of them too. Suddenly, everyone is a potential suspect.
Americans tend to consider their homes their own domain and only they are responsible for protecting them. Instead of relying on community support (Can I give you a spare key in case I ever get locked out? Do you need me to water your plants while you’re out of town? You would let me know if you saw someone stealing my package, right?) we lean towards individualistic forms of protection such as personal security cameras. What this tells the community at large is that without a camera, people can’t be trusted not to steal each other’s packages. And sure, the camera may deter some people from petty theft, but at what cost? “It is no longer about those [good] Behaviors are a result of your neighbors being trustworthy. Instead, the inference is that they’re doing this because of this monitoring system, this real disincentive that exists,” Kim said. “People may behave reliably, but ironically you may have less trust in them because you believe that if it weren’t for that system, they wouldn’t behave reliably.”
In reality, cynicism leads to a cycle of bad behavior. When cameras are focused on other people, people readily admit that they spy on their neighbors and look at images to listen to conversations, according to research. (Two different participants in the study said they regularly eavesdrop, although they don’t typically talk to their neighbors in person.) What’s more, when we suspect that others won’t abide by the standard social contract of neighborliness (don’t vandalize, don’t steal), we’re less likely to abide by those unspoken rules as well, Kim said. “It becomes more of a ‘I’m taking care of myself and to hell with all of you,'” Kim added.
How it makes us feel to be surrounded by cameras
In a 2022 study, participants were asked to set up cameras and film themselves in various scenarios in their homes. Upon learning that they were being recorded, many participants reported feeling self-conscious, which affected how they acted. In fact, they refrained from showing affection to their partner or speaking.
Other research has found that when people know they are being watched, they can detect human faces on a computer faster than people who are not under surveillance. “This suggests that our brain might be in this hyper-alert state when we are being monitored for others in our environment and possibly threats in our environment,” Kiley Seymour, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior at the University of Technology Sydney and senior author of the study, told Vox. And the participants weren’t even aware of how being in front of the camera affected their response time. “They said, ‘Oh no, we forgot the cameras were there.’ … And despite that, it really influences how they respond to the stimuli that are presented to them,” Seymour said.
In a neighborhood setting, constant surveillance could make us more sensitive to what our neighbors say, or we could perceive them as more threatening than they really are, Seymour said. Constantly watching for threats puts everyone on edge, ready to fight.
Laura Simonati for Vox
Home security cameras are often marketed as a form of community connection, but they are ultimately used as a means of isolation and community surveillance, and the negative consequences disproportionately affect minorities, according to Neilly Tan, a doctoral researcher who studies human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington. A study from MIT’s Media Lab analyzed public posts by users in Los Angeles on Ring’s Neighbors social app and found that “users actively frame video subjects as criminals and suspects, that the race of a neighborhood has a significant impact on posting rates, and… that Neighbors can be used as a racial policing tool, particularly in white neighborhoods that border non-white areas in Los Angeles.”
“This idea of whiteness becomes evident with the use of this technology,” Tan said, adding that one study participant talked about how filming someone with a security camera reminded him of the “Karen” archetype.
To be a good neighbor, spy less and talk more
Trusting our neighbors and resisting the temptation to give in to paranoia or spy on them requires vulnerability, Kim said. Letting our guard down, perhaps getting rid of cameras, fosters goodwill when we realize we haven’t been taken advantage of.
To do this, we need to invest time in getting to know our neighbors. In her research, Cox has found that Americans consider a “good” neighbor to be someone who minds their own business and doesn’t get involved in their lives. But the value of being part of a community is knowing each other. “It requires us to be more comfortable with our neighbors being involved in our affairs and us being involved in theirs,” Cox said.
The only way to do this is through genuine conversation. Start by simply saying hello when you pass each other in the hallway or while walking the dog, then move on to small talk. (Some possible conversation topics: the weather, events in your city, recommendations for a plumber.) “Small conversations between neighbors together really are important in instilling trust and understanding in your community,” Cox said. “We underestimate the importance of regular, routine social interactions, whether in the workplace or in our neighborhoods.”
Over time, you will become an established part of each other’s days: a familiar face you see in the neighborhood, someone to ask a favor from, someone to do a favor for. for. Someone who is not a threat or someone to spy on, but rather another person who lives their life close to yours.