Ring doorbell hell!

[Biddums]

Hi all,

My neighbors door is right next to mine with only a brick between them. They have just got a ring doorbell (2 days ago) and I hate it!

Not only is the noise bloody annoying but it's covering my door. There is no way they can set it up to not cover both doors, they are just too close.

I don't like the fact whoever comes to my door is now on their bell cam. I also feel uneasy about the fact my kids will be on there, because you know kids leave the house, my house!

I'm pissed off that anything I buy, like a new TV, they will see and be able to have a good nose. Because they can rewatch and bloody pause.

So I need Mumsneters help. How do I go about this? Do I talk to them? How do I word it? How do I tell them that the bell they paid for has got to go? Do I offer to pay for it?

What if they say no? Do I have a leg to stand on here?

Or do I just get a family member with face covered in the night to nick it and smash it? Yes ring do replace nicked bells but not unlimited. I could get it nicked time and again.

AIBU here? Should I just accept that this is the way now? People videoing your door and kids? Idk I just feel they were wrong to get it without asking if I minded.

Funny enough a family member asked me if I wanted one about a year ago and I said no because it would invade my neighbors door.

Isn't it an invasion of privacy and isn't there a law against that?

This is another of those MN threads that make me realise there are only two camps when it comes to personal privacy. There are those of us who care about it, and the others who simply don't understand it.

I'm sure that social media/technology etc has made the latter group much bigger than it used to be. It's also made the former group care even more about their own privacy, because they know they can't trust other people to respect it.

@Biddums Giving up my anonymity here, but as you can see, my neighbour’s front door is directly next to mine (you can tell by the adjacent footpaths leading to our doors on the image. You can also see that the Ring doorbell app enables you to draw a zone in which it records. I highly suspect they will have done just this, purely to avoid constant annoying notifications, every time someone appears at your door! They won’t like it anymore than you will!!

@Weebitawks

And fuck me calling the Op paranoid is a bit much. She's not the one whose has a stupid surveillance camera involved.

@Weebitawks Lol, what’s more paranoid 🤔

1. Getting a door bell that notifies you when someone is at your door, with 402k breaks in a year.

1. Smashing up a ring door bell, plus the replacement & so on if necessary. Because it might be filming your front door.

👀

Stick to your guns, OP. I wouldn't like it either. The world has contracted enough without being videoed on your doorstep.

@saraclara

This is another of those MN threads that make me realise there are only two camps when it comes to personal privacy. There are those of us who care about it, and the others who simply don't understand it.

I'm sure that social media/technology etc has made the latter group much bigger than it used to be. It's also made the former group care even more about their own privacy, because they know they can't trust other people to respect it.

Yes, it’s a big problem

I hope OP doesn’t mind a slight divert

A poster in another thread said she had an app on her phone that recorded all calls. I was really shocked.

Obviously I’ve seen Ring doorbells around and I realised that the data would be used, but I didn’t know Amazon had bought them.

About ten years ago, an American friend said “just assume no privacy outside your front door”. So depressing.

I have never in real life heard anyone use the phrase you/they sound unhinged. It's such a pretentious saying only used by people on here.

You chose to live in a house where your path is that close to your neighbours, deal with it

Great, so in your world we all get to choose to live in detached houses, no matter our income, budgets, local built environment, or other needs or restrictions on our options?

Can you feel a pea under twenty mattresses? Good for you 👍

Op that sounds awful . We have had a fair few doorstep conversations this year for social distancing reasons and whilst we don't have close neighbours I can only imagine how awful it would be to be recorded.

And like posters above, I had understood that CCTV was only allowed to cover your own property.

I'm not keen on CCTV everywhere, but I doubt you can really do anything about it. If it were actually illegal the high street shops would be in trouble.

While I think some people overreact to it I think there's an argument for not having them cover public areas. It is not quite the same as someone watching you from a window since it can be preserved forever.

A door camera should point at the space in front of the door only imo. Either from the side or from above depending on the situation. A shop camera should point at the shop not the whole street.

But you won't get anywhere pestering people who bought a doorbell. It's something you might start a petition on to get MPs to discuss the law in general.

The settings include the distance from the doorbell outwards; as far as I remember, there were three distance ranges and we set ours the smallest (so we didn’t get notifications every time car drives by). There’s a setting for door bell and ring volume. You can set whether you get recordings and notifications for motion and/or actual pressing of the doorbell. The wedge kit is useful for angling the camera, but there’s also a capture zone setting - it’s literally a bunch of dots which you can move to enlarge nor reduce the capture zone. We have our own path, but the distance to the NDN’s path is about 75cm, so we placed our Ring on the left hand side, and used an angle kit so we don’t deliberately capture their comings and going’s
I like our Ring

1. the local kids kept playing knock knock during the summer, and it’s annoying as fuck when I’m leading a meeting or training on Zoom.. a chat to the parents solved that
2. one of the couriers is notorious for claiming failed delivery attempts forcing us to collect from the depot. Drawing his attention to our Ring doorbell has dramatically improved his service
3. last year we tried a new cat sitter as our usual one had moved... we paid for twice daily visits (morning and night), but she only came every second day. We were able to get a friend to step in, and once we got home and got our key back, we let the cat sitter know why we wouldn’t use her again
4. We have had a request to view our footage (by the police) in relation to an incident two doors down and they were disappointed that our recording range was so limited that it was of no use to them - they said we were being overly cautious in complying with GDPR

There’s 4 settings on mine & I can turn all of them off to just cover the front door & that’s it.

So many posters here just assuming that everyone who has a Ring doorbell is using it to deliberately record everything that goes on outside their house like cctv.

We have a video doorbell, similar to Ring but more secure. We’ve bought it primarily because DH works from home at the back of the house and gets lots of deliveries, and he can’t always get to the door in time (he also missed deliveries while popping out to the shops). It only pings when someone rings the doorbell and he can use the intercom function to quickly ask to the delivery guy to leave the package by the door etc. Same with the app if he’s out and about.

Most people we know use them like this, very few are actually using the recording function as it’s a paid extra and the notifications do your head in after a while.

Many posters on here have explained this but many others are ignoring it...

We have a ring door bell, share a path with our neighbour, but our front doors are at least 20m apart. We never really look at our notifications or snoop on our neighbours as there really is no need or care to do that... It’s really handy if we are not in or are unavailable to accept packages — the only notifications we have checked in the past is when we had our dog walker come pick our dog up.

@Beautifulbonnie

Ha. Mumsnet adverts works well then!

More people will buy them now

I’ve just purchased one 😂

It won’t be pointing on my neighbours path though

@JamieLeeCurtains

You chose to live in a house where your path is that close to your neighbours, deal with it

Great, so in your world we all get to choose to live in detached houses, no matter our income, budgets, local built environment, or other needs or restrictions on our options?

Can you feel a pea under twenty mattresses? Good for you 👍

Who said that?

She chose to live in a house where the door is that close to her neighbours, despite clearly being someone who is (in my opinion) unnecessarily concerned with how much her neighbours are watching / spying on her. There are PLENTY of other options, not all "detached houses", she could've chosen to live in a flat. Or a terraced house, or a semi detached house. All of which can have front doors that are not directly next to your neighbours front door.

Don't sit there and suggest that budget constraints mean you had to get a house like that. Maybe the OP should've considered the fact that her neighbours are so close to her if she's someone who's that concerned about her privacy.

What's ridiculous is the idea that you shouldn't buy or live in a particular kind of house if you want to live privately. There are PLENTY of other options besides filming your neighbours' entrance of they are not happy with it, and options that are way easier than ruling out a whole class of housing. Round here for example nearly all the houses are laid out as the OP describes.

Wanting the freedom to arrive and leave your house, receive parcels and visitors as you wish without being observed or recorded is not 'precious'.

Yeah, pea.

I'm telling them it has to go.

It will be gone one way or another.

Honestly you sound like a lunatic

I think the first thing the OP needs to do is speak to her neighbours about it. It could be a total fuss over nothing depending on the way their doorbell is set

If they've got zones blocked or it set for doorbell rings only then there's nothing to get stressed about. If they have it set for everything you might find theyre quite happy to change them to something that suits everyone.

That has to be a better option than getting someone to smash it

I don’t understand why you chose the house tbh.

I am quite anti social and very much like my privacy, never in a million years would I opt for a house with front doors that close together.

In fact, I don’t ever recall seeing a house in my life with a neighbouring front door as close as you describe, that sounds quite unusual to me and not the ‘norm’ for any kind of house.

I have CCTV and will be getting a ring type doorbell at some point because it makes me feel safer/more secure.
I imagine your neighbours bought theirs for exactly the same reason.

If you were to ask me to remove my CCTV/Ring I would refuse and the smashing suggestion is beyond ridiculous and woukd land you in a great deal of trouble if you weren’t neighbour...

‘If you were my neighbour’ that last line should read.

I am quite anti social and very much like my privacy

Would you be happy with a neighbour's CCTV covering your property then?

never in a million years would I opt for a house with front doors that close together.

You realise that some people won't have the luxury of that level of choice?

Ring cameras only record when motion is detected, Ring stores videos for 60 days before deleting them to make room for new recordings.

@Hotchocolatewithcream

I don’t understand why you chose the house tbh.

I am quite anti social and very much like my privacy, never in a million years would I opt for a house with front doors that close together.

In fact, I don’t ever recall seeing a house in my life with a neighbouring front door as close as you describe, that sounds quite unusual to me and not the ‘norm’ for any kind of house.

I have CCTV and will be getting a ring type doorbell at some point because it makes me feel safer/more secure.
I imagine your neighbours bought theirs for exactly the same reason.

If you were to ask me to remove my CCTV/Ring I would refuse and the smashing suggestion is beyond ridiculous and woukd land you in a great deal of trouble if you weren’t neighbour...

Quite common in the UK I'd say.