Here we go again... Alerts for movement outside Activity Zone.. Plus more..

[Tech-D]

I'm posting here so whenever someone asks me about Arlo products I can be 100% honest with them and show them all my problems since ownership.  Our new issue as of yesterday.

Started when I tried to open my Arlo App this morning so that I could disable the alerts since we would be working in the yard and didn't want to get a bunch of alerts of us working.  Logged into the app only to be greeted by:  "We're sorry, Arlo is currently unavailable.  Please try again later.", who knows how long this was going on but for me I documented from 11:02am to 12:41pm EST.  Finally was able to disable the alerts while we worked in the yard.  

Then, just before bed we Armed the cameras again and were pleasantly surprised (no really just being sarcastic) to find 59 alerts of motion detected alerts for movement outside of our Activity Zone.  Why does this have to be such an issue?  This issue has "popped" up multiple times since my limited time of ownership of your product.

You will find my screen shots attached to this post.

[JamesC]

Tech-D,

There was an issue Friday that some users were experiencing that has since been resolved. You can find information on that issue here: status.arlo.com

Are you still experiencing an issue with activity zones?

JamesC

[Heyroger]

Not sure about OP, but I am getting alerts for every movement in the camera. I have set up a tiny activity zone at my front door and cars still trigger the camera. It’s really bloody annoying!
Happy to start my own thread and supply screen shots or whatever. I’ve had the camera for a couple of months now and haven’t had them ever working well. Battery lasts about 2 weeks and I get hundreds of notifications.

[Tech-D]

Yes as of yesterday I was still running into the issue, I had to turn the alerts off for my cameras so as to not drain the battery.

I turned the cameras back on this morning, we shall see if they will decide to work today.

To say my frustration with this camera system has come to a boiling point is an understatement.

[Glennny]

I have the same frustrating issue.

[DDevlinJr]

I’m having the same problem. Does anyone have any solutions??

[Pantaz]

Pretty much the same here. The "activity zone" doesn't appear to have any effect whatsoever. With motion detection set to 4 (yes, four) it still records tree leaves moving in a gentle breeze.

[Pantaz]

... and the tree is outside of the "activity zone".

[Heyroger]

I've repositioned my camera so that the road that was causing me dramas is in the top 1/3 of the screen. I found this article: https://kb.arlo.com/000062211/How-do-I-position-my-Arlo-Ultra-camera-to-detect-motion-in-specific-ar...

I was hoping this might be a default and could be overridden with the manually set Activity Zones. This doesn't seem to be the case and I cannot figure out what Activity Zones are actually used for. I still need to tweak my camera as I have now moved part of my yard that I want to monitor, into the top 1/3 so now it is not registering motion where I need it.

Very much a shame really - quite disappointed.

[StephenB]

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@Heyroger wrote:

This doesn't seem to be the case and I cannot figure out what Activity Zones are actually used for.

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Lots of people are saying they aren't working at the moment.

But (when working properly) they will reduce the number of notifications and cloud recordings.  But they won't improve battery life - because all motion detected is still streamed to the cloud, and the cloud determines if the motion is in the zone or not.

The only ways to improve the battery life are to

• reduce the motion sensitivity
• adjust the camera position to reduce unwanted motion

In my experience, adjusting the camera position works out better.

If you have a paid subscription, you could also turn off "all other motion" and perhaps other classifications to reduce the notification rate.  That won't reduce the number of recordings.

[Tech-D]

Stephen:

   I have never had that Smart Alerts work the way you describe.  these are my settings and as you will see from my screenshot I get a large number of motion alerts.

[StephenB]

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@Tech-D wrote:

Stephen:

   I have never had that Smart Alerts work the way you describe.  these are my settings and as you will see from my screenshot I get a large number of motion alerts.

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Your screenshot is showing the library - and as I said, it doesn't reduce the number of recordings.

It should reduce the number of notifications you receive on the phone.

[Heyroger]

Why would Netgear make their software like that? Doesn't seem to make sense to me. I thought activity zones would give me the ability to configure what zones trigger a recording, not just what triggers an alert (which as has been pointed out so far, doesn't work anyway).

With such a wide angle, it's hard to find anything that doesn't trigger a recording unless I aim it at the floor. Pretty disappointing for such an expensive unit. The camera is great, but the software needs some much better UX design.

[StephenB]

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@Heyroger wrote:

Why would Netgear make their software like that? Doesn't seem to make sense to me. I thought activity zones would give me the ability to configure what zones trigger a recording, not just what triggers an alert

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FWIW, Arlo split off from Netgear in 2018.

Activity zones will reduce the number of saved recordings (it's just broken at the moment).

Smart Notifications don't work that way (likely because the AI vision software does make mistakes, and it is more conservative not to delete recordings it mis-classifies).  You can filter the library when you access it, which is convenient when you have a lot of false positives.

[Heyroger]

Has something happened in the last 30 mins-1 hr? I'm all of sudden getting heaps of alerts again!

This is after I had avoided getting a million alerts by pointing the camera lower so the road isn't in the main part of the screen. Of course, that meant that my driveway isn't alerting me any more which is pretty ordinary.

[JamesC]

Arlo recently deployed a cloud update enhancing Activity Zone accuracy. This should improve the experience for users reporting symptoms of motion detection alerts and recordings occurring outside of their defined Activity Zones. We are continuing to monitor Activity Zone behavior and will provide additional enhancements in the coming weeks.