Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I should have read more carefully. This is not a network camera...at least not in the sense that my old Panasonic petcam was, or in the sense that I thought I was buying. That device, almost ten years old now, could upload photos and video to any server I chose, could notify me of movement, and could send pics via email. It also offered some kind of storage service, but I never needed it, as I just had it send email to my email box whenever there was movement. It was a great security camera and a great camera for keeping an eye on my dog while I was traveling (and had a dog walker taking care of her). This Dropcam is a joke. I feel like I bought an anchor attached to a $10/month bill. It's so vastly inferior to my old Panasonic that I'm not sure how someone could have designed something so limited. It literally only works when it can connect to the Dropcam website, and everything seems to be tied to the Dropcam service (it has a free viewing service, but it still requires your camera and your computer or mobile device to have access to that website). From a data freedom perspective, this is awful. When Dropcam goes out of business, as I vaguely hope they do so they'll stop hurting people, every Dropcam simply dies. A Dropcam without Dropcam.com is a useless chunk of plastic and metal. From a flexibility standpoint, this is atrocious. You can only do what the Dropcam engineers decided you should be able to do, and that's extremely limited. You can't connect directly to your device...even if you plug it in, it just takes you to the Dropcam website. There are no drivers, no method of communicating with it or than through the website. So...if you wanted to make use of other tools to make use of your videos, you're out of luck. Dropcam only wants you to use your camera through them. I will never do that. From a data privacy perspective, this is a nightmare. The only way to store videos is via the Dropcam service. They claim encrypted communication, but not encrypted storage. And, if they were to use encrypted storage (which I'm really confident they don't), they have the means to decrypt your data...the implementation can't allow secure encryption that doesn't grant Dropcam access to your stored videos. I don't hate many things. But, I hate this product. The creators of this camera are bad people and they should feel bad. And, they probably don't even know it, just as the many four and five star reviewers don't know it. Just as facebook users don't realize what they're giving up in exchange for the service, I suppose satisfied Dropcam users are willing to trade off everything for ease of use. It was easy to setup, at least. I was appalled when I realized how they'd achieved the ease of use. But, I didn't have any trouble making it work. So, there's that. I will be returning it, immediately.