Are you BEING WATCHED?

The vagaries of online dating taught Lynne Wallis to go back to basics in the romance department

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When Fiona Pearson* wanted to check that her new house sitter was looking after her dog while she was on holiday, she looked at the video stream from the cameras at her home in the West Country. One day, she checked in to see the house sitter eating from a bag of dog treats on the sofa. A bizarre incident, which led her to decide he wasn't the person to trust with her property, or pet.

But while this sounds like a funny anecdote, it also demonstrates how surveillance culture is infiltrating our lives as some people embrace internal cameras to keep an eye on pets and small children. That's just B the tip of the iceberg, h though smart video doorbells only came on to the market about a decade ago, but one in five Britons now have one, according to Consumer Intelligence.

Video doorbells are undeniably useful -they connect to your home Wi-Fi and a phone app- and sound an alert if there's someone at your door. A tap later, you can talk to the caller via a video link, and if you pay a subscription, that video will be stored in the cloud.

That means it's easy to know your partner's comings and goings, and it's good to know your kids are safely indoors too. While some people won't mind this, others may feel less free and cast you as a snoop. And you may be, inadvertently, being recorded by others using the same tech. So when it comes to personal and home security, how much is too much?

Worries about privacy

Madeleine Stone of the human rights campaign group Big Brother Watch feels that alarm doorbells are too intrusive. 'They are changing our neighbourhoods and our society,' she says. 'Traditionally, we haven't had CCTV cameras spying on our neighbours, people going to work or kids coming home from school, so we are opening up a new area of surveillance.