Amazon accessed video from "Ring" smartdoor bell / cameras

[shri]

I'd bet Amazon is NOT the only company that is accessing your smartlock / door camera / internal camera feeds...

Ring provided its Ukraine-based research and development team virtually unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world. This would amount to an enormous list of highly sensitive files that could be easily browsed and viewed. Downloading and sharing these customer video files would have required little more than a click.

A second source, with direct knowledge of Ring’s video-tagging efforts, said that the video annotation team watches footage not only from the popular outdoor and doorbell camera models, but from household interiors. The source said that Ring employees at times showed each other videos they were annotating and described some of the things they had witnessed, including people kissing, firing guns, and stealing.

In their defense.. its to aid machine learning.

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/10/...curity-camera/

[jgl]

https://www.theverge.com/platform/am...r-video-amazon

TL;DR if you have an exhibitionist streak, install Amazon cameras in your home.

[shri]

install Amazon cameras in your home.

Me thinks every "cloud" based camera is open to abuse and interception, either by incompetence or by design.

Does Netvigator / PCCW has its own monitoring suite? Do you think their security is any better than the best of the best of the best cloudy outfits, like Amazon?

[jgl]

This is a bit different than simple incompetence. Usually these stories are about incompetence and accident.

Here, it was a deliberate decision to open up files to a mass of managment, employees and contractors with little oversight for development reasons.

Looks like it was also a deliberate choice to not encrypt anything as it would lower the acquisition value of the company.

I probably don't have to say this by now, but I do think that cloud and private video is a terrible idea. I realise this is a minority opinion and most people would be in favour of it because of 'convenience' or 'Google/Facebook/Amazon already knows all so why fight it.'

[kimwy66]

We have Ring cameras but the internal ones are automatically switched off when the home automation system detects an authorised person in the house, so no risk of embarrassing videos being giggled at in Ukraine. Dont understand why people would leave cameras switched on when they are there.

Certainly the ease of use, extraordinary level of in absentia control & peace of mind gained overrides any concerns of strangers looking at my videos.

Given the millions of individual videos that Amazon must now hold, the chances are slim anyway, and I didn't see any mention of the level of detail available with the clips (location, owner details etc). And as reported in the first article, security protocols have been significantly improved. It's great that these tinfoil hat sites hold the big tech companies to account though, even if their reporting could dial down the sky-is-falling rhetoric.

Anyway, off to France in a week, got 2 more cameras from Amazon US in their black Friday deals, these ones will be running off-grid with solar power & 4G connection to allow for remote location. I'll wave to the Ukrainians when we have them installed, and I'm sure they will enjoy seeing the pine martens & foxes as much as we do.