#Amazon security camera software

#Amazon security camera software

Is that a dog or your husband? Is that a burglar or a tree? Ring’s software has for years struggled with these fundamentals of object recognition. This real-time crime-fighting requires more than raw video - it requires the ability to make sense, quickly and at a vast scale, of what’s actually happening in these household video streams. Neighbors, the company’s disarming name for its distributed residential surveillance platform, is now a marquee feature for Ring’s cameras, billed as a “proactive” neighborhood watch. Ring’s decision to grant this access to its Ukraine team was spurred in part by the weaknesses of its in-house facial and object recognition software. Although the engineers in question were aware that they were being surveilled by their co-workers in real time, the source questioned whether their companions were similarly informed. Although the source said they never personally witnessed any egregious abuses, they told The Intercept “if knew a reporter or competitor’s email address, could view all their cameras.” The source also recounted instances of Ring engineers “teasing each other about who they brought home” after romantic dates. For someone who’d been given this top-level access - comparable to Uber’s infamous “God mode” map that revealed the movements of all passengers - only a Ring customer’s email address was required to watch cameras from that person’s home. with highly privileged access to the company’s technical support video portal, allowing unfiltered, round-the-clock live feeds from some customer cameras, regardless of whether they needed access to this extremely sensitive data to do their jobs. The Ukraine team was also provided with a corresponding database that linked each specific video file to corresponding specific Ring customers.Īt the same time, the source said, Ring unnecessarily provided executives and engineers in the U.S. The Information, which has aggressively covered Ring’s security lapses, reported on these practices last month.Īt the time the Ukrainian access was provided, the video files were left unencrypted, the source said, because of Ring leadership’s “sense that encryption would make the company less valuable,” owing to the expense of implementing encryption and lost revenue opportunities due to restricted access. Downloading and sharing these customer video files would have required little more than a click. This would amount to an enormous list of highly sensitive files that could be easily browsed and viewed. Beginning in 2016, according to one source, 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.

The marketing is working Ring is a consumer hit and a press darling.ĭespite its mission to keep people and their property secure, the company’s treatment of customer video feeds has been anything but, people familiar with the company’s practices told The Intercept. “Our mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods has been at the core of everything we do at Ring,” founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff wrote last spring to commemorate the company’s reported $1 billion acquisition payday from Amazon, a company with its own recent history of troubling facial recognition practices. The company has marketed its line of miniature cameras, designed to be mounted as doorbells, in garages, and on bookshelves, not only as a means of keeping tabs on your home while you’re away, but of creating a sort of privatized neighborhood watch, a constellation of overlapping camera feeds that will help police detect and apprehend burglars (and worse) as they approach. Ring has a history of lax, sloppy oversight when it comes to deciding who has access to some of the most precious, intimate data belonging to any person: a live, high-definition feed from around - and perhaps inside - their house.

But for some who’ve welcomed in Amazon’s Ring security cameras, there have been more than just algorithms watching through the lens, according to sources alarmed by Ring’s dismal privacy practices. The “smart home” of the 21st century isn’t just supposed to be a monument to convenience, we’re told, but also to protection, a Tony Stark-like bubble of vigilant algorithms and internet-connected sensors working ceaselessly to watch over us.