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Reports raise video privacy concerns for Amazon-owned Ring
Amazon-owned smart doorbell maker Ring is facing claims that might give some smart home enthusiasts pause. Recent reports from The Intercept and The Information have accused the company of mishandling videos collected by its line of smart home devices, failing to inform users that their videos would be reviewed by humans and failing to protect the sensitive video footage itself with encryption.
In 2016, Ring moved some of its R&D operations to Ukraine as a cost-saving move. According to The Intercept's sources, that team had "unfettered access to a folder on Amazon's S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world." That group was also privy to a database that would allow anyone with access the ability to conduct a simple search to find videos linked to any Ring owner. At this time, the video files were unencrypted due to the "sense that encryption would make the company less valuable" expressed by leadership at the company.
At the same time the Ukraine team was allowed this access, Ring "executives and engineers" in the U.S. were allowed "unfiltered, round-the-clock live feeds from some customer cameras" even if that access was completely unnecessary for their work.
Also at The Mercury News.
Previously: Amazon Acquires Ring, Maker of Internet-Connected Doorbells and Cameras, for Over $1 Billion
Amazon Plans to Remove Google's Nest Products After Acquisition of Ring
(Score: 4, Insightful) by crafoo on Sunday January 13 2019, @10:12AM (1 child)
The temptation to collect and process as much user data that they can get access to is just too great. There is a gold rush for "big data" to train neural networks. video footage from just about any camera is useful. Even unlabelled data is useful (a human hasn't tagged all objects in scene and drawing bounding boxes around them). Although that is fairly accurately automated now too.
Adding sensors to your house that someone else has access too, and they are not paying you a monthly fee to have in your house, is simply madness. But somehow they talked many people into actually paying _them_ for the privilege. Pretty nuts.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @10:58AM
It's a service. You can implement your own with Raspberry Pi, if you want.