It’s not stranger danger you should be afraid of, it’s video doorbell derangement syndrome | Arwa Mahdawi

Symptoms include paranoia, anxiety and a compulsion to snoop on your neighbours. I’m not judging – I’ve had a brush with it myself

One of my many guilty pleasures is lurking on my former home’s Facebook group. The New York apartment complex, which houses the population of a small town, is classified as a naturally occurring retirement community, which means there are a lot of people in the group with time and energy to devote to petty feuds. The gossip is unrivalled and often a little unhinged. At one point there was a heated debate about birth control for pigeons that resulted in at least one person getting banned.

Recently, a mania of sorts has swept the group. An influential neighbour rather belatedly learned about video doorbells. When he bought one it set off a spate of other people buying the devices – and obsessively monitoring them to check for package thieves. Every other Facebook post now seems to be a photo of some hapless stranger taken by a video doorbell with a panicked caption along the lines of “stranger danger”.

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