I find a security system that only lets me know when it’s been triggered useless. My wife set off our alarm the other day. I used an external webcam to verify that it was my wife, and disabled the alarm before she could put her things down and disable it herself. You can’t do that with a system that isn’t connected externally.
Although with home security services, it's one of the areas where I think external control is advantageous because the best cameras don't help you when the thieves take the device that keeps the recordings with them.
Exactly this. Even in security contexts, my Home Assistant-based security system is running fully-local object detection and runs automations when "Person" shows up in an unexpected place at an unexpected time. It emails me the offending image (thereby offloading from the camera) and records video locally. If it happens at night while I'm asleep it runs a sequence of turning lights on to scare them off and then wakes me up if it didn't work.
This is kind of a combo of local-only with a few pings to the outer world.
Is there any reason the manufacturer couldn't have simply supplied an additional box you put in your home, that has all the storage and processing to do all that? The only thing the manufacturer would have to do is provide a dyndns-like service.
