SAN ANTONIO — Many homeowners use surveillance cameras to curb crime, but now some neighborhoods are using more advanced technology that can not only record footage but can also bank that footage into searchable software.
Helen Cronenberger, president of her local Homeowner's Association, says her neighborhood started looking into surveillance cameras, hoping to curb crime.
"We had some problems in our neighborhood with small robberies and break-ins in homes," Cronenberger said.
She says they discovered a model that does more than record.
"It's wireless, so it sends all the information via the internet to their cloud server," Cronenberger said.
The solar-powered, wi-fi enabled cameras send data, including plate numbers, into a software program, allowing the owner to search through the images it has collected.
"You can look for any date and certain periods of time and you can look for a vehicle, a bicycle, an animal or a person," Cronenberger said.
Flock, which produces the model Cronenberger's neighborhood purchased, says hundreds of HOAs, schools, apartment complexes and more have installed them.
The American Civil Liberties Union has raised questions about the privacy issues involved and the safety of data collected. Flock says customers own the data and police or the company has to ask for access. It says all footage is deleted after 30 days and residents in a neighborhood can choose to have footage of their own cars deleted before it hits the cloud.
As for Cronenberger's neighborhood, the cameras are still fairly new, but she says they've worked so far and hopes they will continue to do so
"If I were a robber, and I saw that this was video surveillance on this side of the street, on the other side of the street I saw there’s no cameras, there’s no nothing, if I was a robber, I’d go to where there was lesser chance I was caught," Cronenberger said.