I'm pondering replacing our current home security system (an old-school Honeywell thing that uses the phone line to call up an old-school monitoring company) with a new Internet-of-Things sort of thing. The top contenders seem to be DropCam (which might play nice with the Nest thermostats we have already) and ScoutAlarm (which doesn't do cameras, yet, but does traditional motion sensors, door alarms, and even has keyfobs that you touch to a sensor you put near the door). ScoutAlarm also offers traditional "24/7 monitoring" wherein a human will call the local police, and has cellular backup built-in, if a thief were to cut your traditional Internet connection.

Questions:
- Anybody have either of these things or something else?

- What's the minimum bar to get the appropriate discount rate from your home insurance company? Do they grok these new things?

- I'm attracted by the idea of video cameras, like DropCam, where I can resolve a "false alarm" by pulling up an app on my phone and looking through the camera. I could even then call the police myself rather than having a monitoring service. On the other hand, there's the Orwellian creepy factor of having cameras inside my house.

- These IoT devices always raise the issue of "what if they're hacked?". Since DropCam is associated with Google, I have at least modest confidence that their internal security people are doing audits. With any other vendor, it's hard to say.

- If I did go with DropCam, then I'd presumably want to set up a cellular backup for my wired Internet. I could then just buy another line on our T-Mobile family plan and get a MiFi-like device of some sort, but then I'll need a more interesting home router than the Apple Airport Extreme I'm using now. (Plus, more monthly fees!) Anybody done anything like this?

I installed an old school alarm in my house about a year ago and went with a Texecom Premier Elite 24 (a well known brand in the UK). It has some of the features you describe such as a keyfob reader on the keypad at the door and an IP Module that you can use to program the panel with some Windows software, or use a keypad app on your phone.

Anyway, a nice feature it has is 8 'digicom programmable outputs' which can be set to notify certain states of the alarm such as whether it is armed, whether it has gone off, confirmed alarm (> 1 zone activated), and literally hundreds of other states.

So, I programmed these outputs and hooked them up via some breadboard circuitry to a $19 Particle Photon (https://www.particle.io). This is basically an Arduino with built in WiFi and a web based IDE. It even has an API for IFTTT. Particle now make a unit called the Electron which has a built-in 2G GSM or 3G UMTS radio instead of WiFi and this would be pretty ideal for alarm monitoring. I may get one of those one day.

So far I have everything hooked up and it is working great via some demo code, but haven't got around to writing some meaningful sketches for it yet.

I knew very little about electronics, nothing at all about microcontrollers and it is all a learning curve for me. Of course I don't think your Insurance Company would be interested, and it is some time investment. But it is also quite satisfying and fun.