One of my many guilty pleasures is lurking on my former home’s Facebook group. The New York apartment complex, which houses the population of a small town, is classified as a naturally occurring retirement community, which means there are a lot of people in the group with time and energy to devote to petty feuds. The gossip is unrivalled and often a little unhinged. At one point there was a heated debate about birth control for pigeons that resulted in at least one person getting banned.
Recently, a mania of sorts has swept the group. An influential neighbour rather belatedly learned about video doorbells. When he bought one it set off a spate of other people buying the devices – and obsessively monitoring them to check for package thieves. Every other Facebook post now seems to be a photo of some hapless stranger taken by a video doorbell with a panicked caption along the lines of “stranger danger”.
“This person with an enormous bag stood outside my door for several minutes!!!” one post read. “WATCH OUT!!!” Hours later, someone interjected to explain that the suspicious intruder didn’t have nefarious intentions; it was just a delivery person who’d got lost. Crisis averted.
“Keep a lookout for this man!” another post advised, alongside a closeup of someone’s face. “He was checking all the doors on my floor!” Later, the person in question – an embarrassed building resident – clarified that they weren’t trying to rob anyone: they were just trying to figure out where an annoying noise was coming from. Another crisis averted.
I’m not judging anyone. Not only are video doorbells an ethical minefield and a surveillance nightmare, they can quickly drive you mad. Video doorbell derangement syndrome – the symptoms of which include paranoia, anxiety and a compulsion to snoop on your neighbours – is an alarmingly easy condition to develop. I’ve had a brush with it myself. I once found myself conducting a forensic analysis of my video files to see which neighbour was putting their rubbish outside my house on bin day. So, while video doorbells are useful for avoiding Jehovah’s Witnesses, I reckon they’re for the birds. Who, by the way, probably shouldn’t be on birth control.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
