A homeowner wearing a Batman T-shirt was automatically locked out of his house when his security system detected the superhero’s face and thought it was an intruder.
BJ May was at home in Georgia, where he uses a Nest smart doorbell coupled with Yale locks.
The security system “automatically locks the front door when it sees a face it doesn’t recognise”, he wrote on Twitter.
But he couldn’t figure out what was wrong because it was himself at the door when the system locked so he checked the app to work it out.
My @nest doorbell automatically locks the front door when it sees a face it doesn’t recognize. Today it didn’t recognize me, so I went into the app to investigate and… pic.twitter.com/qcgE4Ii1pn
— B.J. May (@bjmay) September 17, 2018
That’s right. Nest mistook the Batman face on May’s T-shirt for a visitor, and not recognising it, took action.
“When I saw the facial recognition, I laughed and showed my wife, then posted it to Twitter and started working on some chores around the house, installing new shelves,” the 39-year-old web developer told the Press Association
“A few hours later I looked at my phone and had many hundreds of notifications.”
In subsequent tweets, May explained that the door had been unlocked because he and his family were at home and passing in and out.
With the door locked, he used a pin code to enter. Had the door been unlocked it wouldn’t have opened automatically.
No, the door will not unlock if it sees a friendly face. That’s not a feature. It just reacts to an unknown face by locking the door just in case you forgot to lock it and a stranger approaches. It didn’t recognize Batman.
— B.J. May (@bjmay) September 18, 2018
For anyone super curious about the tech on display, here goes.
This is the Nest Hello paired with the Nest x Yale lock. I like it quite a lot. Yes, regular old keys are great. We just like the ability to remotely allow our kids into the house via the app without issuing them physical keys that can be lost/stolen.
— B.J. May (@bjmay) September 18, 2018
