A few days before our daughter was born, we learned that our home security was woefully inadequate.

This was the late Nineties, in Baltimore. We’d owned our house for less than a year, and the hard-wired system we’d inherited from the previous owners seemed like a futuristic luxury. In fact, the idea that we might even need an alarm made us feel paranoid and unneighborly.

But the system qualified us for a discount on our homeowner’s insurance, and the forbidding ADT stickers in the windows, backlit by the glow of the numerical keypad by the front door, gave us a warm and fuzzy feeling, especially in the late months of Shana’s pregnancy, when our nesting instincts were operating at full tilt.

So we dutifully armed it every night and turned it off every morning. We discovered just how powerful the Klaxon was one night when I forgot to lock the back door. A storm blew the door open, and I was halfway down the stairs — completely naked — by the time I woke up enough to realize what had happened.

The roar of the Klaxon pierced me and went right for the heart. After I’d silenced the thing, and mumbled our password into the phone for the benefit of ADT’s distant monitors, I sat on the stairs, caught my breath, and waited for the dizziness to pass. I asked myself: is this really better than sleeping through a break-in?

The false alarm scared me half to death, but was also oddly reassuring. We laughed about it the next day. The system worked! Against our will, a door had been opened. The response was everything ADT had promised.

In those early days, our system was limited to the doors and windows of the first floor. I suppose the previous owners had thought that the second floor windows were simply out of reach, but as we discovered on that balmy evening in May of 1998, the big downspout by the back door was sturdy enough for climbing, and the porch roof made an excellent platform for squeezing through the open window of my office.

We’d gone out for a drive, or perhaps to run an errand — anything to take our minds off the momentous event that was about to turn our lives upside down. When we got home, I noticed that a few things were out of place. “Hey, where’s our VCR?” I wondered. “And what happened to the pillowcase on my side of the bed?”

We called the police as soon as we realized there’d been a break-in. I foolishly insisted on a visit from the mobile crime lab. We knew how the thief had come in; surely he’d left fingerprints on the windowsill! The police van didn’t show up until 2AM. The technicians were bleary-eyed; they’d just processed three crime scenes. Murders. But they were very obliging. While one of them slathered the sill with fingerprint powder, another cheerfully informed me that the odds of apprehending the perp were basically zero.

The next day, I called ADT and added the second floor windows to the system.

It’s now May of 2014. In about a week, our baby daughter will turn sixteen. In all this time, we’ve never had another break-in, a fact which I attribute less to our security system than to a general improvement in the neighborhood. We recently replaced some windows, so I decided to shop around and see what has changed in the home security game.

It’s a brave new world! The old systems were based on land lines; the new ones use cellular radios. You used to have to hard-wire the door and window contacts; now they’re wireless. Gone are the days of waiting around for a technician; these days, alarm systems are DIY.

And the system isn’t limited to the keypad in your foyer: you can control it with an app on your mobile phone or iPad. I can be on the other side of the world and know if the side window in the family room is open or closed. If the new smoke detector or the carbon monoxide monitor goes off, I’ll instantly get an email about it. If there’s water in the basement, I’ll know about it at the speed of the Internet.

The modern wonders don’t end there. If we wanted to, we could add videocameras to our system, or special sensors designed to detect the sound of shattering glass. We could add “smart locks” to our front and back doors that respond to the press of a touchscreen a thousand miles away.

For every imagined incursion into our home, there’s a counter-measure. One company brags about its patented Smash-and-Grab technology, designed to confound the burglar who tries to destroy the control panel. Another company hints that all it would take to defeat a rival’s system is an inexpensive cell phone jammer.

None of the salesmen talk about the larger implications of wiring a home with Web-accessible surveillance cameras and Internet-enabled locks. What if there’s a rotten apple working at the monitoring center? What if a hacker decides to make your house his weekend project? Worst of all, what if Big Brother suddenly decides to focus his all-seeing eye on your little life?

These are real considerations, but people are good at ignoring what they don’t want to think about. I’m no exception. Our new system has plenty of bells and whistles. Apparently, I’d rather scare myself witless with false alarms — and risk a totalitarian dystopia — than have another stranger’s hands touch my pillows.