I used to think the same thing until I caught a 40 year old man stalking my teen daughter and continually trying to peer into her bedroom windows on camera. So while it feels good to be ignorant, it doesn't make everything go away. Also, the people commiting crime seem the most concerned with people having cameras. Hmm, wonder why.
We have a few rescue cats that each have... quirks. We have two indoor cameras set up in our basement: one on the feeding area, and one on the potty area.
Sometimes they fight over food (automated feeder) and one doesn't get fed. But it's hard to tell if they're meowing at us because they were bullied out of food, or because they know we are softies and will feed them if they meow enough. We can check the feeder footage and see who got fed.
One of them is potty-shy, and about once every 3-6 months stops using the litter box and starts using obscure corners of the basement until we can coax him back to using the litter box. We check the footage every couple days to make sure he's using litter boxes.
For a software-oriented site, I'm baffled at how obtuse users can be. A lot of the negativity I'm seeing is along the lines of "I have no use for an indoor camera, therefor anyone who uses them is dumb." There are lots of legit uses (if you think about it for more than 2 seconds), and not all of us want provide the police with indoor footage of our cats shitting.
Farms use cameras extensively for similar purposes. It makes sense. I think these kinds of specific, limited applications are very different from just setting them up everywhere because you are afraid and leaving them on all the time. I'd say the same if someone had a stalker or a deranged family member who might show up at any time. There are definitely good uses for networked surveillance cameras.
