Person Detection Update: A New Experiment for Premium Features

Just being completely honest, person detection for a home doesn’t make that much sense since there are usually only a handful of people coming and going. All I have to do is see the thumbnail of the event to know who it is. Might be helpful for like an office environment. If we had smooth playback and event highlighting in the timeline where we could easily scrub through footage just tagging it as motion would be enough in my book. I’d consider paying a monthly fee at that point.

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I would like to know the sane thing. No one seems to want to answer that question?

What are you talking about? A Wyze employee directly answered his or her question, even addressing @cmartorelli by name, just two posts later.

To be clear, if you have not added CAM+ or Person Detection and do nothing then yes your cameras will continue to function as they have.

Excuse me, but I am new to these forums and did not see the post.

I would like to try person detection so I just signed up, paying $0. If it’s useful, I’ll pay for it, of course. However, I suspect I don’t really need it. If that turns out to be the case, I don’t want to increase Wyze’s costs for no reason. To not be a burden on Wyze, do I then just turn the feature off or is there a way for me to unsubscribe?

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So my question is why is wyze abandoning and pushing a monthly fee. The ONLY and I mean ONLY reason I originally found wyze can way back when with the first generation was because there was no monthly fee. This whole thing is quite disappointing.

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The answer is that it is costing them too much money. The first post (and all the e-mail messages and followups here) go into detail about it. To be clear this is about Person Detection only - Wyze will continue to provide free 12 second regular Motion recording in any case.

@customer can come off a little brash, but means well

Has anyone noticed that PD seems to ignore the detection mask on the camera?
My once perfect-for-me xnor PD worked well now the new PD is pretty poor detecting moving cars in the background and dynamic-light-reflections on my RV. As persons!

I guess my problem with the subscription is that I just joined Wyze this year and the product descriptions when I purchased said free person detection. I never saw anything to indicate that this was a limited offer or may change in the product descriptions. Now that I have the cameras, a subscription is put in place that excludes me because I did not purchase/join before Nov 2019. Was it written somewhere that I missed that the free features would be changing after purchase?

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Just 1.3M users?*

We emailed 1.3M telling them Person Detection would be free, but we are going to make this available to all Wyze users that created an account before Nov 26, 2019, the date the email was sent. If we can successfully cover the costs of Person Detection for these users, we may roll this out to all users and maybe even into other features like Cam Plus. We love the idea of volunteer contributions being our method of service revenue but we have to see if it can work.

What if volunteer contributions don’t cover the cost? What will happen to Person Detection for 12-second Event videos?

We don’t know yet. We are going to evaluate the results of this experiment after a few months and see if we have enough contributions to at least subsidize the cost. If it doesn’t work, we will come up with a new plan, but it is possible that free 12-second person detection will be discontinued.

I am unaware of any manufacturer or company having a crystal ball. IFTTT just changed the terms of their service from free to free for 3 widgets but not the advanced features. This happens all the time.

The terms of service from Wyze and pretty much every company has language that says they reserve the right to change their terms.

Of course they could just go bankrupt and cease operations and render your purchases paperweights but hopefully they will avoid that.

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This is only true to an extent. Here are some historical legal strategies between consumers and corporations:

Court cases have proven that if a normal reasonable person could/would believe something a certain way, then all the legalese and subtext in the terms may not save them from liability for what many customers reasonably understood to be the case. T&C helps but isn’t bulletproof. Courts have overruled them multiple times as irrelevant (but not always).

Then there are “False advertising” precedent cases and bait and switch cases that come into play (including misleading even if not false). And there is an argument for that here too.

Furthermore, even if a class action tort “can’t” actually “win” in the traditional sense… Sometimes that isn’t necessary in order to “win” in other senses and make it not worth the time, effort, financial costs, reputation, and other collateral costs to fight it even when the company knows they would “win” in the end.

Of course, to counter all this, worst case scenario for Wyze, if they take such pressures, they can always agree to provide PD free on older devices as promised, then come out with a V3, and stop “supporting” older devices entirely, forcing people to upgrade and making the old devices worthless and no longer costing thema net loss and not be subject to any liability. Lots of companies do this tactic with phones and such to force upgrades and increased profit, but some do it to avoid liability.

Consumers could punish Wyze and force the issue, but Wyze could always use the loophole to screw people back and make older devices worthless. I’d prefer we all get along instead…

(IANAL)

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I am very familiar with those examples. None apply here. You are welcome to prove me wrong if you think you can. :smiley:

The simplest test of if you have a case is will a reputable attorney or firm take your case. While I am not an attorney we have one in the family. (I know, we are ashamed as well, but he said it’s what he wants to do.)

He himself is a litigation specialist for criminal not civil law, but when all this first started I asked him, he got back to me a week later and said it would not be worth pursuing. His exact words were a snort followed by “good luck”.

But hey, maybe his firm is wrong too? Go for it if you think you can make a case. I have plenty of popcorn while I am waiting. :grin:

Yeah, my dad is a lawyer and I worked for his law firm for a while too (as a legal assistant, not lawyer myself), so I’m familiar… Regardless, I already said at the end I’d rather it not go that route myself, I was just pointing out that it’s not cut and dry, and a group doesn’t actually have to “win” or even have a “winning case”… Not saying I support going that route, but people could. My guess is that if anyone filed a suit, Wyze would just let them return their few devices because there would be few people doing it and cheaper than court/lawyer (the things are only $20 afterall). Could even auction them off or save for refurbished/replacements.

I rather doubt Wyze has any legal worries. This happens frequently in the industry and case law has gotten well and truly set around this set of issues. And no I was not considering that path myself. Just so many people were throwing up examples similar to yours that I wanted an informed opinion.

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Same here but it does show the transaction under accounts even though I elected to pay zero .

There are a multitude of ways to convince Wyze to change course… The strongest of these is public opinion, well dispersed and well read

I am very much aware of that. But I honestly have no need (or desire) to change Wyze’s behavior.