Ring fired employees for watching customer videos
1–10 of 147 posts
Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos
#2I'm willing to bet this is a PR attempt showing something along of the lines of "look, we protect your data by firing the people that look at your videos!"
Which is absolute nonsense if this is their data protection policy. They'll only ever catch maybe 5% of the people doing it. This is also likely meant to hide the fact that their Ring security is extremely porous and they may want to keep it like that because that may also be how law enforcement gets access to those videos right now. Changing this may mean disrupting the police's access to them for a while.
https://www.wired.com/story/ces-2020-amazon-defends-ring-pol...
Combine this with all the security issues AWS buckets have had, along with employees also accessing Alexa recordings, and it's almost starting to look like Amazon doesn't care all that much about securing your data...
Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos
#3How is this even possible?
Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos
#4> It says three employees can currently access stored customer videos.
I can't think of a legitimate reason for 1 employee at Ring to have the capability of viewing customer videos.
1. Law enforcement requests? Blind-forward what the warrant asks for.
2. Verifying service is functioning? Canary devices utilizing the normal application workflow. Login to your canary account and make sure the video is working.
3. Customer asks you to review something? Just say you can't. The world will be happier.
Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos
#5It's the 2020 version of NSA employees using their vast surveillance apparatus to spy on their ex's[1]. Except this time people willingly let a for-profit company have streaming video access to their home.
What's next, people installing microphones in their home that stream audio to Google or Amazon?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveil-lance-watchdo...
Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos
#6Whenever end-to-end encryption is not used, scenarios like these are bound to happen eventually.
As far as I know, the only home surveillance products that use E2EE are ones that support HomeKit Secure Video [1].
Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos
#7I was always skeptical of cloud-based camera solutions due to privacy & bandwidth concerns, but now that those concerns are being proven true and reported in mainstream outlets I can’t imagine any reason to purchase them now. Long-term prospects for Ring can’t be looking good.
Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos
#8Whenever end-to-end encryption is not used, scenarios like these are bound to happen eventually. As far as I know, the only home surveillance products that use E2EE are ones that support HomeKit Secure Video [1]. 1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210538
I don’t know if Ubiquiti’s feeds are streamed encrypted, but at least the recording infra is 100% local and can be accessed locally without any cloud middleman if desires.
Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos
#9It's the 2020 version of NSA employees using their vast surveillance apparatus to spy on their ex's[1]. Except this time people willingly let a for-profit company have streaming video access to their home. What's next, people installing microphones in their home that stream audio to Google or Amazon? [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveil-lance-watchdo...
If a local home security surveillance company rolling up in a van installed cameras that they then used to spy on their customers, it's very likely the owner would be prosecuted. What puts Ring/Google/Amazon/etc above that standard? Just being large?
Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos
#10I was always skeptical of cloud-based camera solutions due to privacy & bandwidth concerns, but now that those concerns are being proven true and reported in mainstream outlets I can’t imagine any reason to purchase them now. Long-term prospects for Ring can’t be looking good.
You vastly underestimate the complacency of average consumers.