How Ring doorbell cameras breed paranoia in neighborhoods

In 2022, a father and son in Florida received notifications from their Ring doorbell camera: Someone was at their door. The pair quickly jumped into action, scouring their apartment complex for a would-be intruder. The scene they happened upon was a woman checking her phone in her car. They fired seven shots at her as she drove away.

The woman, who survived, had never approached their door. The person who was captured on camera turned out to be a neighbor dropping off a package that had been mistakenly delivered to his home.

This is an extreme example of paranoia-fueled behavior spurred by home security systems, but it’s part of a larger trend. Footage of alleged porch pirates is regularly posted to community Facebook and Nextdoor groups, and any odd-seeming or erratic action can raise suspicion, especially if you’re a person of color.

This class of doorbell cameras, which includes Amazon-owned Ring, Google Nest Doorbell, and SimpliSafe, is marketed as a convenient means of seeing who’s at your door, a tool to catch burglars and trespassers and maybe even find your lost dog. In actuality, its uses are often more nefarious. Hundreds of local law enforcement and government agencies nationwide have joined Ring’s social app Neighbors, a platform where anyone, regardless of whether they own a Ring camera, can post a tip about crime or safety 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 at home. Americans have turned their yards and porches into their own tiny surveillance states.

In addition to the obvious legal and privacy concerns, there is scant evidence that doorbell cameras actually reduce crime — but there is reason to believe they are having an impact on our neighborly relationships. Research has shown that knowing we’re being watched makes us subconsciously more aware of others, which, in turn, may make us paranoid. Another paper found “the awareness of being watched can intensify existing distrust, paranoia, and fear.” This suspicion colors how we perceive and interact with each other.

“Being a good neighbor does not mean spying on your neighbors,” Will Owen, the communications director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told Vox. “We do need to change our thinking around neighborhood surveillance and not buy into the big tech that is creating fear and distrust among neighbors.”

How cameras undermine trust

Even as more people outfit their homes with surveillance technology, ironically, Americans hold their neighbors in high regard. A recent report from the Survey Center on American Life found that 72 percent of Americans maintain some level of trust in their neighbors, a stark contrast to the just 30 percent of Americans who said they trusted others more broadly, according to last year’s World Happiness Report. These findings suggest people feel like they belong in their communities, even if they don’t regularly interact with their neighbors, Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Vox.

So, if we generally believe the people who surround us can be trusted, then who exactly are the cameras for? “If you already trust your neighbors…you can infer that the camera is there to deter people from outside your neighborhood from stealing,” Peter Kim, a 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 Repaired, told Vox. But if you don’t have actual relationships with your neighbors, you may become suspicious of them, too. Suddenly, everyone is a potential suspect.

Americans tend to consider their homes as their own domain that they alone are responsible for protecting. Instead of relying on communal 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’d let me know if you saw someone stealing my package, right?) we lean into individualistic forms of protection like personal security cameras. What this signals to the wider community is that, absent a camera, people cannot be trusted to not steal each other’s packages. And, sure, the camera maybe deters a few people from petty theft, but at what cost? “It’s no longer about those [good] behaviors being the result of your neighbors being trustworthy. Instead the inference becomes, they’re doing this because of this monitoring system, this real disincentive that’s in place,” Kim said. “People can behave in a trustworthy manner, but ironically, you can have less trust in them because you believe that if it were not for that system, they wouldn’t behave in a trustworthy way.”

The cynicism actually leads to a cycle of bad behavior. When cameras are turned onto others, people readily admit to spying on their neighbors, watching back footage to overhear conversations, research found. (Two different participants in the study said they eavesdropped semi-regularly, even though they don’t typically talk to their neighbors in person.) What’s more, when we suspect others won’t abide by the standard neighborly social contract — don’t vandalize, don’t steal — we are less likely to abide by those unspoken rules, too, Kim said. “It becomes more of a, ‘I’m looking out for myself and to hell with all of you,’” Kim added.

How being surrounded by cameras makes us feel

In a 2022 study, participants were instructed to set up cameras and film themselves in various scenarios in their homes. Knowing they were being recorded, many participants reported feeling self-conscious, which impacted how they acted. They actually held back from showing affection to their partner, or from talking.

Other research has found that when people know they’re being watched, they’re able to detect human faces on a computer quicker than people who aren’t under surveillance. “It suggests that our brain might be in this hyper-alert state when we’re being surveilled to detect others in our environment and possibly threat in our environment,” Kiley Seymour, an associate professor of neuroscience and behavior at the University of Technology Sydney and the study’s lead author, told Vox. And participants weren’t even aware of how being on camera affected their response time. “They were like, ‘Oh no, we forgot the cameras were even there.’ … And, despite that, it’s really influencing how they respond to the stimuli that are put in front of 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 actually are, Seymour said. Being perpetually on the lookout for threats puts everyone on edge, ready for a fight.

Home security cameras are often marketed as a form of community connection, but they are ultimately used as a means of isolation and community policing — and the negative consequences disproportionately impact minorities, according to Neilly Tan, a PhD researcher studying human centered design and engineering at the University of Washington. One study from MIT’s Media Lab analyzed public posts from users in Los Angeles on Ring’s social app Neighbors and found that “users actively frame video subjects as criminal and suspicious, that the race of a neighborhood has a significant impact on posting rates, and…that Neighbors may be used as a racial gatekeeping tool, particularly by white neighborhoods that border non-white areas in Los Angeles.”

“This idea of whiteness is apparent with using this technology,” Tan said, adding that one study participant talked about how filming someone with a security camera reminded them of the “Karen” archetype.

To be a good neighbor, spy less and talk more

Trusting our neighbors and resisting the urge to give in to paranoia or spy on them requires vulnerability, Kim said. Letting our guards down, perhaps by ditching the cameras, fosters goodwill when we realize we haven’t been taken advantage of.

To do so, we need to invest time in getting to know our neighbors. In his research, Cox has found that Americans consider a “good” neighbor someone who minds their own business and doesn’t get involved in your life. But the value in being part of a community is knowing each other. “It requires us to be more comfortable with our neighbors getting involved in our affairs and us getting involved in theirs,” Cox said.

The only way to do that is through genuine conversation. Start by simply saying hello when you cross paths in the hallway or while walking the dog, then transition to small talk. (Some possible conversation topics: the weather, events in your town, recommendations for a plumber.) “Neighborly small talk collectively really matters in instilling trust and understanding of your community,” Cox said. “We under-appreciate how important regular, routinized social interactions are either in the workplace or in our neighborhoods.”

With time, you’ll become an established part of each other’s days — a familiar face you see around the neighborhood, someone to ask a favor of, someone to do a favor for. Someone who isn’t a threat or someone to spy on, but another person living their lives in proximity to yours.