> I still can't believe something like Dropcam is such a huge success. The level of security awareness the general public has is terrifyingly small I think you

> I still can't believe something like Dropcam is such a huge success. The level of security awareness the general public has is terrifyingly small I think you are totally misjudging this market. To the average person, a Dropcam is empirically far more secure in practice than many alternatives have proven to be. It's certainly what I'd recommend to a friend. A few years ago, Foscam Wifi cameras were popular with parents. You could buy one for <$100 and they worked over wifi and had no service you had to buy. But then they were hacked by the thousands[1] with repeated major security issues over multiple years[2]. There were numerous news reports of parents finding strangers yelling obscenities at their babies in the middle of the night using the camera's talk-back function. This happened to multiple people I knew in real life. This led to numerous articles like this one[3] telling parents to update passwords, disable UPnP, tweak router settings, update firmware, etc, to prevent future hacks. But to a parent who's baby was woken up in the middle of the night by a hacker, they are probably just going to throw the hacked camera in the trash. By comparison, Dropcam is a totally integrated solution that requires no user-initiated updates, no network configuration and is backed by the reputation of Google. To the average parent that doesn't want to spend their life reading Foscam forums, that's a much more attractive solution and much less likely to get hacked due to not being updated or properly configured and secured. Dropcam/Nest/Google produces a product that works really well right out of the box with almost zero configuration and is relatively secure. The non-cloud alternatives do not. Until someone offers a solution that "just works" like Dropcam, consumers will keep opting for the cloud-based solution. Yes, it sucks for electronic freedom. But that's not the main feature that matters to the market. [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/13/how-a-creep-hacked-a-baby-monitor-to-say-lewd-things-to-a-2-year-old/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/08/13/how-a-cre... [2] http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/01/bug-exposes-ip-cameras-baby-monitors/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/01/bug-exposes-ip-cameras-ba... [3] http://www.brockthompson.com/blog/3-ways-protect-foscam-hackers http://www.brockthompson.com/blog/3-ways-protect-foscam-hack...