I don't get it.. What's the point? How hard is opening a classic lock with a key? It's like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.. You can easily imagine things going wrong like unreliability, dead phone or abuse of the "give access via email or SMS" feature
There are many use cases for these technologies that are difficult or impossible to achieve with a traditional key lock.
For example, you can remotely grant 2 hours of access to a tradesman to enter your property and fix something.
You can grant access to realtors to enter your property that is for sale, and you can track how many times they were there and how much time they spent on each visit.
You can grant the cleaning person access between 9am and 1pm on Wednesdays.
You can get into your house with any BLE-enabled device. Even if you lose your phone, you could borrow the neighbor's phone, run the appropriate app, enter the correct PIN, and gain entry. Then give them back their phone and they have no more access to your home than they did before you used it.
Of course, you can argue - a physical key or a keycard doesn't require batteries. But, a keycard can be erased or scrambled or lost. Then you need to quickly reprogram the lock so whoever finds it can't use it. Impossible with a traditional lock, and varying degrees of difficulty with a keycard system.
Its certainly a more complete solution but probably costs too much for the average person to use on their own home. Even $99 for a lockitron is too expensive to interest me at all.
> You can also use email or SMS to give access to a particular lock, so your friends and family can always get in without needing a key. Have a babysitter or a cleaner who comes by regularly? You’ll soon be able to give permission to individuals for specific portions of the day.
From the article. Particularly useful for: AirBnB hosts, people with roommates, friends/family visiting, etc.
I had a bluetooth deadbolt. I was able to give my friend a virtual key when he came to visit as I didn't have a spare for the deadbolt.
The key was encrypted based on a username and password and I could revoke it at will. It filled a need for the time he stayed at my place and worked great.
I used to work in a factory that had a reasonable quality push button mechanical lock in combination with insurance grade cylinder lock on a sturdy door. That cylinder lock was sometimes left "on the latch" when people were working there.
One night (they worked night shifts) a guy got access by brute-forcing the pin-combination lock. It took him (there was CCTV) about 7 minutes to get in.
Just to put a number on "tiny": if there are 10 buttons and the code is 5 digits long, there are 252 possible combinations. If it takes you four seconds to try a combination then your expected time to brute force the code would be about 8 minutes.
In addition to the other use cases that folks have replied: You are young now, but you will find there are older people whose hands do not work quite so well. Keys, bottles, and a host of other items that you take for granted with well-working hands become serious obstacles to daily living.
[I should add that arthritis can hit even young people.]
Think about what you know about computer access models (usernames, passwords, OAuth tokens, etc.)
If you were to design a new access system today from scratch, would you set it up so that A) you give everyone the same 2 character password B) you don't give anyone a username and C) anyone can give anyone else admin credentials with no authentication?
Probably not, but this is the way regular house keys work. Lockitron represents a step in fixing that. Keys worked fine in the 20th century when matter was difficult to work with. This won't be the case for the 21st century.
In addition to the problems with your concept of the security model of locks that other commenters have addressed, I'd like to point out that while requiring unique per-person authentication tokens aids in per-user access revocation, it also leaks information, meaning that whoever can view the access logs can effectively track your comings and goings (or at least your comings) through that door. Keys which simply authenticate "I am in the group of people who are allowed to access this" are generally preferable to ones that say, "I am John Smith, check that name against the list of people allowed to access this."
Also, keep in mind that Lockitron is obviously shooting for the consumer market, where concerns about sharing keys are basically non-existent. Commercial users who actually have to frequently deal with key revocations have been using RFID and other per-user access management technologies for ages.
Concerns about sharing keys in the consumer market are pretty common. You might hand out spare keys to a cleaner, pet sitter, neighbor who's watching the house while you're away, etc. and it's not necessarily comfortable knowing that they potentially have access to your house forever afterwards, if they decided to copy the key. The problem is largely ignored just because it's inconvenient to solve. Give people a realistic option for logging access and revoking keys and lots will go for it.
Unless you put huge bars over your windows and have a reinforced door frame/door/lock, it takes all of 30 seconds to break your way into a home anyway. Deadbolts are false security, even if electronic.
And a system where A) you give everyone the same 2 character password B) you don't give anyone a username and C) anyone can give anyone else admin credentials with no authentication?
It's funny you say that, because 5 minutes ago I literally locked my door from half-way across the country. The cleaners forgot to lock it when they left. I don't have this lock, I have the schlage z-wave deadbolt sync'd to a wink hub.
Before this lock, my wife would leave the front door unlocked in the morning until the cleaners showed up hours and hours later. I'm not a fan of having my house unlocked, and I wasn't really interested in giving the cleaners a key that they could use anytime they wanted.
What is my alternative other than having my house sit unlocked until my wife gets home in the evening?
Presumably you can revoke the phone's access to the door as soon as you get home, though, because the two need not be permanently bound to one another.
I was to understand from the article that it falls back to being a keyed lock, so you'd just use your keys. It'd be pretty dumb to restrict your only method of ingress to something that you can only access when you have your (charged up) phone with you.
It's virtualizing the key, which lets you do some more fancy stuff than a physical key. Namely revoking and adding access without requiring key duplication or changing the locks.
I've been grousing about how much I really want something like this for cars specifically for key-sharing.
My driveway is four cars deep and two wide, so my various housemates all have to make a copy of their key available so we can move any cars blocking us in. If we could just generate a sub-key, that'd be much more convenient.
Similarly, how about the ability to easily give a temporary house key to your visiting friends/family without having to have n spare keys sitting around? (Right now we have a re-programmable keypad, but if we could generate temporary subkeys without either giving out the master code or programming in a subcode, that'd be ideal.)
I have a KwikSet Kevo, and it's been a huge convenience for me when returning home. I'm typically carrying several bags/waterbottle/misc items, and just tapping my lock rather than digging for a specific key is way easier, especially with hands full.
