How To: Protect Your Home

        While walking my dog this afternoon, I began to notice these kinds of placards on the lawns of every single house for a couple of blocks, but when I crossed a busy street into a separate grouping of houses, none of them had these security systems. When I asked my dad about them, and why our house doesn't have one of these systems, he replied that ten years ago none of the houses around us had them, and they slowly began cropping up one by one.

       My first thought was that people were buying them to make their homes more safe. But if that were the case, why would only people on a certain block have them?

        Then I started thinking that people were buying these systems out of paranoia. If a robber looking for a house to pillage, and a couple of your neighbors had these types of security systems, wouldn't that make your home seem more easily accessible to a possible burglar? With that mindset, it's no surprise that one street is ADT protected, and the next is not. 

       The graph shows how the stocks of Tyco, the company that owns ADT, have been gradually increasing over the past ten years. (The drop near the middle is due to the '08 crash.) 

        The ADT website says that their product will allow customers to: 

"Get the peace of mind that comes from knowing that the #1 security company in America is helping protect your family and home,"

Is it possible that their increase in sales is due to the paranoia caused by not having their systems? What other products do we own that are for "peace of mind" rather than functionality?