Key making is a daily grind for clerks at Brownie's Hardware Store in San Francisco.
"On a slow day, twenty," clerk Alicia Ellis told KTVU. "On a busy day, in the hundreds easily. We do get a lot of people who say, 'Oh, I got drunk over the weekend and I lost my whole key ring,' and they'll have us make an entire set for them."
Websites and apps are now taking keymaking online. With a couple clicks of your cellphone camera, new keys can be made to order and mailed to your home.
In a year's time, San Francisco-based KeysDuplicated has created and shipped tens of thousands of new keys.
"The magic trick of taking a picture of something and then two days later getting an exact copy of it in the mail," said KeysDuplicated CEO Ali Rahimi. "You can just do this from your couch. You got a lot of things to do, you've got chores to do. And having one chore less to do is pretty nice. It's breathtaking when you get this object in the mail."
Some security analysts say these kind of services are putting people at risk.
"They're making it too easy for someone to copy your keys and be able to go into your house," Rambus Cryptography Research President Paul Kocher told KTVU Tuesday. "On one hand, there's a certain slightly scary creativity about it. But my general sense is the risks outweigh the benefits."
The fear is that a stranger can simply photograph someone's keys, upload the images to a keymaker website and have the copies sent to the address of his or her choosing.
Rahimi said his company's system is set up to fight fraud.
"We try to ensure that whoever's taking a picture of the key has physical access to the key. Part of the reason we ask for both sides of the key is to make sure they have enough access to turn it around. You type in an email, you give us your address and a few other pieces of identifying information. And you clear a few security barriers and we send you an email telling you the keys on the way," said Rahimi. "[A thief] would then have to type in their credit card and their mailing address which leaves a pretty long paper trail which points to them."
But Kocher said anyone can copy keys providing they have a few moments of access, a cellphone and prepaid credit card.
"A thief can also get a prepaid credit card from a grocery store, it's untraceable to any particular identity," said Kocher. "If you give your keys to a valet, they can easily copy your keys and they might know where you live through your car registration, for example."
KeysDuplicated said it doesn't store shipping addresses for the keys it creates to ensure there's no record of which keys unlock which homes.
Rahimi said anxiety about the safety of such services is "legitimate" but added thieves have long had easier ways to enter homes.
"It's going to be a lot easier for them to just use an old fashioned crowbar. We are not an easy way for someone to gain illicit access to your home," Rahimi said.
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