That’s Liz Sheld, complete with a flashback to this report from last month:
If you own a Ring doorbell camera system, we’ve got some bad news. The smart home company owned by Amazon, which the internet retail giant shelled out more than $1 billion to acquire, has apparently been violating its customers’ privacy in a pretty shocking way. A new report from The Intercept quotes unnamed sources who confirm that engineers and executives at Ring have “highly privileged access” to live customer camera feeds, utilizing both Ring’s doorbells as well as its in-home cameras.
All that’s apparently required to tap into the live feeds is a customer’s email address. Meaning the company has been so egregiously lax when it comes to security and privacy that even people outside the company could have potentially done this, using merely an email address to begin spying on customers, according to the report.
When I installed a couple outdoor security cameras last year (I’m not about to install some internet-connected door lock or doorbell), I bought gear from Ubiquiti which stores all the camera recordings locally. It’s a more expensive solution than letting someone else store your videos their on servers, but it’s almost infinitely more secure.