I've heard stories of break ins where the crooks destroyed all the local hard drives. Cloud is the only way to avoid that, but a solution is to encrypt before uploading.
Even shitty ipcams will upload images to FTP (old school, right) upon motion detection, or can upload whole videos. In fact I'm syncing my ipcam's video stor on my vps. A dumb lftp script that just works.
If you buy cloud-enabled ipcamera and then complain your ass is online, you're a prick.
Ideally the camera would cover that as well. Or you could use cell towers.
In the story I read (I think on reddit but I can't find it now) they destroyed all his hard drives but he had one camera that uploaded to the cloud so he still got some footage from that.
Having written stuff to manage cameras, it can be a relief to buy something that just uploads stuff and you don't need to manage squat besides a credit card.
Of most IP cameras, Dropcam's form factor is enviable. The lack of local storage is not. I've been on the search for something inconspicuous and similarly-priced for a while.
I've been down this road a bit. There are many ip video cameras made in Asia that are locally controllable. The Dericam H502W is particularly hackable, but the content is not encrypted unless you add that at the internet router via stunnel or a VPN. But if you do that you have an encrypted 720p video feed that records on motion in the dark that you can fully control for less than $100 per camera.
You can choose to use the other camera features like email, ftp or http photo alerts just realize that all that data will be "in the clear" as they travel past your router unless you encrypt them.
NOTE: Simply using an SMTPS to Gmail SMTP server is not protecting your content. That's just wrapping your content up in a pretty box for direct delivery to Google.
The automated analysis is pretty useful. How would you know if someone is robbing you until it's after the fact? I would like it as a stand alone program too.
