As early as 2016, the Ring—the so-called home-security system that Amazon purchased in February 2018—provided its Ukrainian research and development team with unencrypted, virtually all-encompassing access to every video ever captured by every single device, according to sources cited in a Thursday report from the Intercept. The team was also reportedly given a database that could link the video files with specific customers. And some U.S. employees, The Intercept added, were able to tap into a customer’s 24-hour video feed with only their email address. “I can say for an absolute fact if I knew a reporter or competitor’s email address, I could view all their cameras,” one source said. The Ukrainian team was allegedly provided access so that they could perform the monotonous task of labeling every object in a video feed, to help the system identify what was happening outside a user’s home—but a second source added that the team also sometimes watched footage from inside homes, and would comment to each other about the residents.
A spokesperson for Ring denied that consumers were ever being watched unwittingly, noting that “These videos are sourced exclusively from publicly shared Ring videos from the Neighbors app (in accordance with our terms of service), and from a small fraction of Ring users who have provided their explicit written consent to allow us to access and utilize their videos for such purposes.” But as The Intercept notes, “Neither Ring’s terms of service nor its privacy policy mention any manual video annotation being conducted by humans, nor does either document mention of the possibility that Ring staffers could access this video at all.”
Read it at The Intercept
