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Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

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Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#41

Post by bluejekyll »

michaelt wrote: post #23
cabaalis wrote: post #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. Custo…

In an ideal world, sure. But it's easy enough to imagine how you'd end up with this situation. For example, you have a customer support phone number, and you want your call centre workers to be able to see exactly what the user sees, and help the user do anything the user can do through the website. After all, if you're keeping your support costs down, the website should be able to do 99% of what users call support f…

Even if you offered a “log-in as customer” feature, that could incorporate a notification and/or authorization request to the user so that it can’t be abused.

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#42

Post by giancarlostoro »

mackey wrote: post #35
giancarlostoro wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wyze has End to End encryption for their cloud stuff, or you can save it all on an SD card instead. Wyzecams are also really cheap $20 but they dont have a doorbell, so for now I'm keeping Ring (came with my house) till I see a good alternative.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but Wyze doesn't actually encrypt the files they store, in their case end to end just means that the files are secure in transmission. Apple secure Video actually encrypts the files so they can't be viewed by Apple.

You might be right all I was able to find was this:

https://forums.wyzecam.com/t/meaning-of-end-to-end-encryptio...

I can always just revert to using an SD card instead of sending my data over to them on the other hand. I am okay with this so far though, they delete videos after 15 days anyway.

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#43

Post by gjs278 »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #37
booleanbetrayal wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My neighbor, across the street, has a Ring camera aimed directly at my house, since that is where their front door faces. What is my recourse for preventing my private property from being recorded?

Where do you live? In some European countries you need a license for surveillance cameras as in you're not allowed to record public spaces, only your private property must be in frame and for this you need a license. Otherwise you face significant fines. GDPR is on your side here as well. I had to consent to the surveillance cameras when I joined my local gym. Also at our workplace we had to consent to being taped by…

europe is literally filled with cameras to the brim

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#44

Post by jodrellblank »

bshacklett wrote: post #27
teraflop wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always somebody with root access to the servers.

Encryption with customer managed keys solves that pretty easily. It also solves any ethical questions with regards to furnishing data to comply with warrants. This creates a new problem of managing keys, of course, but that's been solved many times now in other parts of the industry.

How are you going to datamine and AI train and sell customer data for to advertisers for profit, if you can't read the customer data?

Google makes billions from doing this, if we wanted Google to not be able to do this at all, we would have to pay them the same money (more!) collectively to incentivise them to do that instead. And I don't see any movement to take that into account and be willing to do it.

I don't know much about Ring, but I would be amazed if there was no plan or dream in their business model for things like "face recognition to let your friends in", or "tracking suspicious people around your neighbourhood" as a police contractor, or "selling info to FedEx about what their drivers are up to as seen from the customer side", or "selling data to real estate sites about which roads are busiest or quietest", or anything else they can gather.

Saying "my data, my property!" is a principle I can support, but without facing up to this, Ring's answer is very likely to be "we're secure don't worry about a thing .. behind you! a three headed monkey!".

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#45

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

hooande wrote: post #33
booleanbetrayal wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My neighbor, across the street, has a Ring camera aimed directly at my house, since that is where their front door faces. What is my recourse for preventing my private property from being recorded?

You have none. a tv crew could set up outside your house and record indefinitely. or even go through your trash. People are allowed to record public spaces. It's just bad behavior and the consequences are social

Sounds super illegal and not GDPR compliant. You're not allowed to tape my private property without my consent. At least in Europe.

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#46

Post by gnicholas »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #28
wmeredith wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Ring better than a Wyze cam pointed at your front door? Genuinely curious. I have several Wyze cams but have never interacted with a Ring much other than pushing the bell button at someone else’s house.

I prefer the Wyze cam all out, but it's already installed so I'm just leaving it there. I don't want to uninstall it until I have a better doorbell device or if theres serious security implications in keeping a Ring device. I'm also waiting for the outdoor / weather resistant Wyze cams that are set to come out this year, so I can put them facing the front door from the front part of my porch. I hope to have it trigge…

I also have a Wyze cam on the inside of a window looking out, and you're right that the IR would just reflect in the window, making it useless at night. But I think you can put an IR bulb (or LED array) outside, and just have that light up the area. I'm planning to get an LED array for mine when I have some free time. I also think that you probably don't really need a weather-resistant Wyze cam if it's mounted sufficiently close underneath eaves. Probably depends on how much wind you get in your area though.

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#47

Post by AmericanChopper »

mtgx wrote: post #2

I'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…

> They'll only ever catch maybe 5% of the people doing it

I wouldn’t be so confident about that. I’ve worked with a few large organisations where customer service staff needed to have access to sensitive customer data, and they usually had pretty good systems for detecting improper access to data, and would monitor it quite actively. I have no idea what monitoring systems Amazon has in place, but they could easily be doing quite a good job of it.

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#48

Post by 98codes »

michaelt wrote: post #23
cabaalis wrote: post #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. Custo…

In an ideal world, sure. But it's easy enough to imagine how you'd end up with this situation. For example, you have a customer support phone number, and you want your call centre workers to be able to see exactly what the user sees, and help the user do anything the user can do through the website. After all, if you're keeping your support costs down, the website should be able to do 99% of what users call support f…

Sure, but with just-in-time approvals for a specific time window, for a specific customer, with approval coming from management. Anything else is asking for abuse.

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#49

Post by bluejekyll »

jiveturkey wrote: post #31
gbrown wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You vastly underestimate the complacency of average consumers.

Yep, and Ring has already proven its model. If privacy were an actual problem, Ring would not have made it this far.

This might be an education gap. That is, people really like the cameras and the way they work/ease of use, but they may not be aware of how non-private the recordings are. If they were, their opinion might be very different.

Re: Ring fired employees for watching customer videos

#50

Post by giancarlostoro »

gnicholas wrote: post #46
giancarlostoro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer the Wyze cam all out, but it's already installed so I'm just leaving it there. I don't want to uninstall it until I have a better doorbell device or if theres serious security implications in keeping a Ring device. I'm also waiting for the outdoor / weather resistant Wyze cams that are set to come out this year, so I can put them facing the front door from the front part of my porch. I hope to have it trigge…

I also have a Wyze cam on the inside of a window looking out, and you're right that the IR would just reflect in the window, making it useless at night. But I think you can put an IR bulb (or LED array) outside, and just have that light up the area. I'm planning to get an LED array for mine when I have some free time. I also think that you probably don't really need a weather-resistant Wyze cam if it's mounted suffic…

The benefit of their upcoming outside cameras is that it will run on battery, and you plug it in only to recharge them.

That's a good idea, I had not thought about that, adding an IR bulb outside. I'm thinking of getting Wyze bulbs for outside though, I'm sick of coming home to complete darkness, just bought the home and there's no smart lights outside yet.

I do need to worry about weather mainly because I do live in Florida, and hurricanes do come through now and then. I will be sure to mount it securely though.

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