"Pastor Troy Randall, who lives in northwest Baltimore, said that his neighborhood has been “held hostage” by drug sales and associated violence."

This is people taking a trade off. Security for Privacy slider.

No, it's convenience for privacy. There are plenty of ways to surveil your own home without networking the footage into police databases. It's just that you have to put a little effort in or pay someone else to set it up.

For some people (dual income), it's more than convenience. As iPhone/AppStore proved, the trade off is time/skills.

If you don't have the time or skills, and you wouldn't trust a local installer to set everything up right, you really don't have that option.

I think this is indeed a key point often missed in the conversations here. Just because there's a better (privacy) alternative, it still requires a time investment to find one. The alternative will likely require another time/skill investment over the marketed product to actually install it.

When you're in a situation where time is scarce, like dual income, kid, etc, you clearly are optimising for other things than privacy or even money spent.

I have a theory that as we build more apartments vs condos and home ownership goes down we will have more of these issues. Home ownership seems like a hedge to live in a city you enjoy long term. I could see in the future a Comcast of the world coming in and consolidating apartments under one banner for efficiency and rent becoming a much worse problem.

What I cannot tell is how much of this is me just being pessimistic. I know it would take a long time and a lot of capital to own enough to make a large dent in housing.