> Is your building management moving online?

I'm more against apartments that don't use such tech; they make payment, maintenance requests, and communication a lot easier.

>Have new cameras been installed in your home or neighborhood? Has access to your building changed? For instance, you no longer have a standard key?

Security cameras and electronic locks are great, for the most part. The latter allows auditing of who accessed my place.

>Is your landlord using new payment, notification, or screening systems?

See first point. Although I note (from two difference places since moving to Austin) many to have moved screening over to "get a $100k liability insurance policy and you're good" (~$100-200/year).

With that said, given how FB et al have their tentacles in everything, now I am worried about how much privacy they bleed when I use such resident portals.

I would like to audit the landlord's daughter. Seriously, who or what I'm bringing home is no one's business. There was a time when surveillance went overboard so much that they wrote restrictions on it into the Constitution, but unfortunately the Constitution puts restraints only on the government. You'd like to see them put onto private parties as well. And then there's information leaking. Jeff Bezos owns the nation's doorbell cameras, he knows who lives where and shares the information freely with the cops that no one trusts, all without a warrent.

Is your landlord using new payment, notification, or screening systems?

Having rented from bankruptcy artists more than once I'd really really appreciate a credit history of the landlord. A repair history of the building would be nice to have, too. Can't move into a place where the roof needs fixing but the owner is too overextended to fix it.

sure, if you're renting an entire building. less so if you're sharing a building with other tenants.

> Having rented from bankruptcy artists more than once I'd really really appreciate a credit history of the landlord. A repair history of the building would be nice to have, too. Can't move into a place where the roof needs fixing but the owner is too overextended to fix it.

I bet you could get some of this if you offered to pay above market rent or if you show interest in a unit that's been listed for a while.

Yes, I agree they shouldn't be doing it arbitrarily. I mean that e.g. when I suspected unauthorized access (which happened).

The result was that 1) the system is absolutely insecure and can be cloned very easily and 2) all the hardware I needed to reverse-engineer & copy it (including several new key fobs) cost me the same amount as a single official replacement.

I don't think the building owners are setting the price either, it's the vendor of the "security" system that is reselling cheap insecure crap at 20x the real price and exploiting information asymmetry to sell them.

At least with low-tech solutions like old-style keys everyone is on a level-playing field and selling them for 20x the price wouldn't fly (because it is common knowledge that a locksmith can make you a copy for the price of 2 cups of coffee), but this kind of new tech allows them to get away with it, and this trend will only get worse as "landlord tech" advances.

Regarding car keys, the astronomic price you mention is also price gouging just because they can. The actual hardware is not expensive at all, it's just that they (officially) need to be programmed by the dealership and that allows them to set any price they want. Of course, there is software and tools out there (if you look in the right place) that will completely defeat the apparent "security" provided by such system so you're not even gaining anything regarding security.

Your list of vaguely plausible what-if scenarios is exactly what I’m talking about. Neither of us has any idea what the true costs are, but for some reason the tech makes us more open to accepting what is at the end of the day an erosion of tenant rights and services.