I wanted to provide some important behind-the-scenes background of our upcoming major expansion into access control. For a decade, Brian Rhodes has done a great job at IPVM, covering access control tech and products. He's continuing that, and, in addition, we are expanding our technology and business investigations into access control that we are well known for in video and weapons detections (e.g., Hikvision, Verkada, Evolv).
We're already hearing through industry contacts that HID employees are saying things like we don't like them personally or are just bad. That's false but expected. This is a fairly standard pattern that we first saw with Arecont (Arecont wanted to believe we were out to get them and not they had serious problems - this started with Worst IP Camera Manufacturers 2011, and we were proven correct). To be clear and fair, HID is no Arecont, though HID has a substantial but different set of problems.
Behind the scenes, for over two months, we've reached out to HID repeatedly, asking about us visiting Austin (their HQ) and talking to them directly, including off the record, so that they could better understand our concerns and share their point of view. They have ignored it. I've, more recently, reached out asking for an off-the-record call. This, too, was ignored.
They don't need to speak to us, but I wanted to try. I have found, doing this for 15+ years, that such interactions can help companies better understand where we are coming from and help us share their point of view to the public, even if we disagree with it.
Why HID, Hikvision, Evolv, Verkada (or in the past, Arecont, Avigilon, etc.)? We want to focus our resources on companies that are either very large or growing very fast and raise significant ethical, legal, or security risks. There's no doubt HID is large, HID is arguably far larger in readers and credentials than any other company is in any other segment of physical security (see new HID Access Control Usage Statistics). In terms of the risks and problems, we'll start examining them in a series of upcoming posts.
The lines of communication remain open, and I am happy to speak with them off the record any time (or, for that matter, any other company we have been critical of - john at ipvm dot com).
Beyond HID, we plan greater coverage on NXP, Apple/Google/Samsung mobile credentials, and Flipper Zero, the latter two, given their fast growth rate). We do not plan at this time to cover much of HID's parent, Assa Abloy's door hardware businesses, as we are focusing on electronic / IP / cloud technologies.
If you have questions generally about our coverage or about access control / HID investigations, feel free to share.
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