The Current State of Smart Locks

Having recently purchased a home, and piled rocks, loose stones, bricks and the like next to my window laden front entryway door, what lock do you recommend I purchase?

Bear in mind, I don't want anything that my neighbors will understand, or industry experts will look down on. As a technophile, I want to walk only the bleedingiest of edges, employ the most futuristic of tech, and employ the bare minimum of common sense.

In fact, if it could be expensive enough be the target of break-in, so much the better!

love, shmoo

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29817520

I'm quite conservative when it comes to locks for the home and prefer the traditional mechanical lock and key. I like the Lockitron feature of recording when a lock is opened/closed but that could be integrated into a mechanical lock without requiring the lock itself to operate electronically.

I think this quote from the BBC article above sums up how I feel:

...what about wear and tear, asks Brian Morland of the History of Locks Museum in Bournemouth. He cannot foresee a time when mechanical locks won't be part of our daily life. "You drop a key in water and it's okay. If you drop an electronic key (or smartphone) it will cause endless problems."

Your front door lock should not talk on the network. It should not have "social features". It should not rely on electricity.

Your smoke detector should not be connecting to google servers. Your thermostat should not be connected to facebook.

Those are facts.

Either you instinctively understand those facts or you will learn them accompanied by much pain.

* Auto-unlock is great when and if it works, and is the only reason to own the August. Unfortunately it's currently iOS only.

* Everlock is currently in "beta" (it's the feature that auto-locks your door after 30 seconds), but one night after my friends left the house, it didn't re-lock itself, so now we can't trust one of the few features of the lock anymore.

* Opening the door with your phone itself is a slow and painful process. It takes anywhere from 5-10 seconds for the phone to connect to the lock before you can control it (this doesn't include unlocking your phone, opening the app, and selecting which lock to connect to). It's absolutely unusable for day-to-day users. There's no point in using this when your keys work faster. However, I can say this is useful for people that do not live in the home, i.e. friends, cleaners, pet sitters, etc.

That said, I have an extra August coming in that I'm not sure what to do with. Christmas is coming up and I absolutely do not want to give it out as a present because it's just not ready.

To do this idea justice I should give you a thousands words on the great lock controversy of 1851, but suffice it to say that there was a watershed moment in the 19th century when England, and by extension Europe & the colonies, learned that the idea of perfect security was dead. While technological innovation temporarily boomed, it ultimately fell into a century-long decline. This was punctuated by the criminalization of the exploration of security, and a bunch of other bad stuff.

In general, we saw a decline of technological methods of ensuring security and a dramatic increase in political methods of ensuring security. Whether or not this worked, in the past decade in the US we have developed pockets of this country that, despite reasonably high population density, could completely eschew locks without much worry. Locks have become as much a symbol of social order as a mechanical construct.

OK, all of that said - for those people who are enjoying this level of safety and security, locks take on a different idea. Keys often seem burdensome, and when trying to sell new products to this market, you can't rely on scare tactics anymore. Instead we see a big shift toward convenience (this is mirrored in the early 19th century, by the way) and now, the addition of social features, which shouldn't be misunderstood to mean twitter, facebook, etc. But the ability to share keys easily, to security semi-private spaces in easy, convenient ways.

As a whole, we aren't living in a post-lock world, but there is a vibrant market of people who are living in something close. To them the lock needs to do more than act as a bulwark to roving malice.

EDIT: For the record, I didn't downvote you, and I'm a little bummed to see that others did. I think you brought something up that a LOT of people think, and I don't think it's invalid. It also provided me the opportunity to inject some nuance, so I was glad you commented!