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Smart home security cameras are nothing new. They’ve been protecting Australian homes for well over a decade now, but for a long time I never felt the need for them. This was predominantly because for the majority of my adult life living away from home, I’ve been in rented accommodation, and so I’ve either been unable to install anything of my own, or I’ve been on an upper floor of an apartment building.
I’m now living in a ground floor apartment with my partner, and we’re the owners. That means we’re free to install cameras as we see fit, and so we decided to place an old Ring Outdoor Stick-Up Cam above our front door, mainly as a ‘just in case’ safeguard.
I’m now glad we did, and I’ve just invested in some newer Blink Outdoor 2K+ cameras with clearer vision following an attempted break in. The good news is they weren’t expensive, with a 2-pack currently costing AU$77 in the Amazon Prime Day sales.
I never thought my home would experience an attempted break in, and there’s a chance you’ve had the same thought. For such a low price right now, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
- Follow our live coverage of the best Prime Day 2026 deals, many of which ship to New Zealand as well
These affordable Blink cameras last up to two years with 2 AA batteries, can record colour vision at night and can be installed practically anywhere via a range of mounting accessories. You do need to pay a subscription to view and store footage, but it could be a small price to pay to keep your home safe. View Deal
So, why have I made the impulsive decision to invest more heavily in home security? Well, my partner noticed the street-facing gate to our courtyard left ajar in the early hours of the morning. He suspected I just hadn’t closed it properly when we came home the night before.
Wanting to exonerate myself, we checked back over the footage taken by our Ring camera, which proved my innocence. We noticed more events were recorded around 1am, and sure enough, the Ring captured two youths climbing over the wall in the wee hours of the morning.
To say we were gobsmacked would be an understatement.
Fortunately nothing was stolen and they didn’t manage to get into our home — despite some clear hand prints on the glass door proving they peered in to see if there was anything worth nabbing.
Unfortunately, the Ring camera missed the activity by our door because it was only covering the front yard and fence area. I therefore now want to install more cameras in our outdoor area to ensure there are no blind spots, and the Blink cameras seem perfect for the job.
(Image credit: Future)Our Blink Outdoor Cam 2K+ review found that recorded footage is clear and sharp, even at night. Perhaps the biggest selling point for me is the two-year battery life with two AA batteries. The Ring camera I have right now relies on a rechargeable battery that needs to be recharged frequently.
The biggest drawback, however, is a new Sync Module Core that requires a paid subscription to store and view back footage. It’s crazy that you need to pay to use the camera you just bought, but hey, it’s 2026. A subscription costs from AU$4.95p/m for one device, or AU$15p/m for unlimited devices. Since I’ve bought two Blink cameras, I’ll need the latter.
Fortunately, the older Sync Module 2 is still available and is compatible with the newer Blink cameras. With this module, you can attach a USB flash drive to store footage on, bypassing the need for a subscription. Based on the AU$15 Blink Plus subscription, I’d make my money back in just under four months.
However, the subscription does also open up extra features, including AI motion detection — you’ll receive notifications only when it detects specific things such as animals or vehicles.
At just AU$77 in the current Prime Day sales, I was more than happy to add the Blink Outdoor Cam 2K+ to my basket. There are many other options to choose from of course, many of which are also on sale right now. I’ve listed a few below, and be sure to check out our guide to the best home security cameras and best video doorbells for total home protection.
- Ring Floodlight Camera Pro (2nd Gen): was AU$449 now AU$329
- Ring Spotlight Camera Pro (2nd Gen): was AU$399 now AU$279
- Blink Outdoor Floodlight Camera Kit: was AU$119 now AU$49
Bitdefender is a popular name in the online security market, primarily known for its robust antivirus solution. However, it also offers an all-around digital identity protection service called Bitdefender Identity Theft Protection.
If you’re an individual (especially a beginner) looking for an easy-to-use, affordable platform, Bitdefender could be the one for you. It helps you actively monitor your online identity, check for known breaches, and manage your financial accounts.
In this article, we will drill down into the various features of Bitdefender Identity Theft Protection, compare it with other products on the market, and examine its user experience. Read on to find out whether Bitdefender Identity Theft Protection is for you.
Bitdefender Identity Theft Protection and Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection are two separate products. This review will examine Bitdefender Identity Theft Protection. For our review of Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection, please click here.
(Image credit: Bitdefender)Bitdefender Identity Theft Protection: Plans and pricingBitdefender Identity Theft Protection offers two plans: Standard and Premium. The Standard plan costs $69.99 for a yearly subscription, which boils down to $5.83 per month, making it one of the cheapest identity theft protection solutions on the market. This is also cheaper than Norton LifeLock's entry-level plan, which costs $10.46 per month.
With this plan, you get basic features like breach monitoring, credit reports and score, lost wallet protection, and identity theft insurance up to $1 million, along with one-bureau credit reports and monitoring.
The Premium plan costs $99.99 ($8.33/month). In addition to everything in the Standard plan, you get sex offender registry monitoring, bank, credit card, and investment account monitoring, and an additional $50,000 in ransomware protection and social engineering scams. Along with this, the plan also offers three-bureau credit record monitoring.
Bitdefender Identity Theft Protection: FeaturesBitdefender offers a bundled collection of features, ideal for anyone looking for all-around identity monitoring and protection. For starters, there’s a smart SSN tracker, which alerts you if an unfamiliar name or address is associated with your Social Security number.
Then there’s dark web monitoring, which scours thousands of websites, black market chat rooms, and other sources to alert you to any sale of your personal information. You can also access your credit reports and scores from all three credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.
There’s also a pretty handy credit score simulator, which helps you plan your finances and see how your future financial decisions may impact your credit score. You are also promptly notified if your personal details are used to apply for new credit, utility payments, or loans.
Much like other platforms, even if you’re unlucky and end up getting your identity compromised, Bitdefender offers restoration services from certified protection experts around the clock. These experts help you with paperwork and legal procedures while actively assisting you through the challenging process of identity restoration.
(Image credit: Bitdefender)With Bitdefender, you also get up to $2 million in identity theft insurance and an additional $25,000 for ransomware resolution and reimbursement in case you end up losing money due to ransomware attacks during your Bitdefender subscription.
Similarly, there’s a $25,000 social engineering resolution and reimbursement provision, which comes in handy if you fall prey to social engineering scams like phishing and end up incurring financial losses.
The Bitdefender website also lists credit freeze as one of its features. However, I found this to be a bit misleading, since Bitdefender only offers expert assistance with credit freezes. To actually place a credit freeze, you will have to contact the various agencies yourself. In comparison, platforms like Norton LifeLock allow you to instantly freeze your credit from the dashboard itself with a simple toggle button.
Bitdefender also offers a separate Digital Identity Protection product that gives you a 360-degree view of all your personal data. Much like its identity theft protection platform, digital identity protection also scans the public web and dark web for your personal data and sends you instant alerts if it finds any.
Besides this, there are simple one-click actions that help you close gaps in your digital footprint. You also get a graphic digital identity protection score, which tells you how well you are protected against common cybersecurity and identity theft threats.
We would have liked to see these features in the primary identity theft protection suite as well. But sadly, these essential features are missing. If you need them, you’ll have to get both products, but that would increase your total monthly cost to $9.16. Sure, that’s still pretty affordable, but managing two different subscriptions can be inconvenient in practice.
Bitdefender Identity Theft Protection: Interface and in useIn addition to being affordable, it’s nice that Bitdefender is also easy to set up and use. Once you have logged into your account, you will see a sleek and intuitive dashboard with all features suites listed on the left-hand side panel. You need to click on Identity Theft Protection to access all its functions.
Inside that, you'll find options such as Identity Vault, Breach IQ, Alerts, Credits, and Help listed on the top panel. Simply click on any of these options to access your data.
The Bitdefender interface enables you to quickly visualize data and view suggested actions (Image credit: Bitdefender)For instance, if you click on Credits, you will be able to see your credit score in the center of your dashboard, along with detailed credit summaries including open accounts, credit utilized, and hard inquiries made.
However, the in-use experience is pretty smooth. There are hardly any lags or complicated hidden menus, making the platform very beginner-friendly.
Bitdefender Identity Theft Protection: The competitionIdentity Theft Protection’s biggest advantage is its affordable pricing, with plans starting at just $69.99 per year. Even if you’re looking for three-bureau data credit monitoring, you effectively pay only $8.33/month with its annual plan, compared to IdentityForce's $34.90/month or Norton LifeLock's $29.17/month.
That said, I found Bitdefender a bit barebones when it comes to its feature set. Sure, it has everything you need to protect your identity, but it does lack certain advanced features offered by competitors. For instance, Norton LifeLock comes with an automatic data broker removal service, where the platform scans top data brokers and submits periodic opt-out requests so your data is not shared or sold on third-party websites.
Also, while Bitdefender’s identity insurance coverage of $2 million is certainly nothing to sniff at, Norton LifeLock gives you up to $3 million whereas Aura up to $5 million.
Bitdefender Identity Theft Protection: Final verdictBitdefender Identity Theft Protection is an ideal choice if you're an individual looking for basic identity protection services. The platform offers everything from social media monitoring, dark web monitoring, and identity breach alerts to credit monitoring and three-bureau credit reports. You also get identity theft protection of up to $1 million with the higher-end plan.
That said, if you're looking for identity theft protection for families, Bitdefender might not be the perfect pick, since it only offers individual plans. In that case, you'll have to look at other alternatives such as Aura or Norton LifeLock. Bitdefender also lacks certain advanced features, such as the ability to manage credit freezes from the dashboard and data broker removal services.
Businesses have spent years being told that data is their most valuable asset.
They have invested heavily in cloud storage, data warehouses, cybersecurity, access controls, compliance teams and governance frameworks. They have built sophisticated systems to store and protect first-party data.
Then, when they want to use it, they have to move it somewhere else.
That is the contradiction at the heart of today’s data strategy. Companies work hard to keep their data safe, only to export it into third-party platforms when they need to activate it for advertising, analytics, monetization or customer engagement.
The issue is that too much of the ecosystem still ignores ‘data gravity’. To put it simply, data gravity refers to who owns the data and where it lives. If customer data sits inside a brand’s platform or another controlled cloud environment, the starting point should always be respect for that environment.
Forcing the brand asset outside of its own atmosphere invites a leakage problem. As with every movement or duplication, there is risk.
Expectations of data movementThe industry has become resigned to the fact that data has to travel in order to be useful. Want insight, activation, measurement or personalization? The default answer is almost always to export it to a third party and then pay them for the privilege of analysing your own data.
But every export, upload, sync, copy or transfer creates a risk opening. It means another vendor to trust, another contract to manage, another access policy to audit. Put simply it means another place where something can go wrong.
The issue is not whether businesses should use their first-party data. Of course they should. It is direct, proprietary and built from real customer relationships. The issue is that using it should not require constantly duplicating it or shipping it away.
Every transfer is a new riskWhen large volumes of first-party data leave a company’s controlled environment, the risk increases. Data that is protected inside carefully managed IT infrastructure is suddenly passing through another system with completely different permission structures and potentially more lax security.
That does not mean third-party platforms are careless, as we know most are highly sophisticated. But network and internet security is not only about the strength of one organisation. It is also about how many places the data exists, how many systems must be trusted and how many people can access it.
For cybercriminals, sensitive customer and commercial data is incredibly valuable. The more copies that exist, the more targets there are - and the more opportunities to intercept, compromise, ransom or otherwise misuse that data. A business may have excellent internal controls, but once the data leaves its environment, it is relying on someone else’s controls too.
This is also where governance has to move upstream. As data activation and interoperability become bigger priorities, organizations need to bring legal and InfoSec teams into the design of the solution.
Far too often, any work in the data activation journey has been built around workarounds and that simply does not scale. A better model is to use those governance functions as enablers, so that activation can become usable and auditable from the start.
Leakage and corruptionWhen people hear “data leakage”, they often think of a major breach. But one of the more common risks is quieter: data corruption caused by constant movement between platforms, warehouses and third-party systems.
Every time data is exported, reformatted, matched, duplicated or re-imported, something can change. Fields can be mapped incorrectly, definitions can shift, permissions can be misapplied and outdated versions can keep circulating.
After enough movement, businesses can lose confidence in which dataset is accurate, who has touched it, where copies sit and whether the analysis of this data represents anything remotely valuable to the company.
That matters because first-party data is valuable precisely because it is accurate and collected with user consent. Keeping it in one controlled environment is safer for consumer privacy and better for data integrity. The more it is moved and manipulated, the greater the risk that businesses turn a trusted asset into a liability.
Bring the software to the dataFor years, businesses have accepted constant data movement as the cost of progress. But that model is starting to look outdated. First-party data is more valuable, regulation is tighter, cybercrime is more sophisticated and customers are more privacy-conscious.
The future should not require businesses to choose between using their data and protecting it. The smarter model is to respect data gravity and activate data where it already lives.
That requires bringing software to the data by building activation around governance and control from the onset. It’s more than an ideal, it's a necessity and the businesses that benefit most will be those that respect the needs of data owners. As ultimately the asset belongs with them.
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This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.
The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit