According to The Intercept, Ring’s engineers and executives have “highly privileged access” to live camera feeds from customers’ devices. This includes both doorbells facing the outside world, as well as cameras inside a person’s home. A team tasked with annotating video to aid in object recognition captured “people kissing, firing guns, and stealing.” [Update: According to Ring, annotation is only conducted on “publicly shared Ring videos.”]
U.S. employees specifically had access to a video portal intended for technical support that reportedly allowed “unfiltered, round-the-clock live feeds from some customer cameras.” What’s surprising is how this support tool was apparently not restricted to only employees that dealt with customers.
Update: In a statement, Ring explicitly argues that “employees do not have access to livestreams from Ring products.”
The Intercept notes that only a Ring customer’s email address was required to access any live feed.
According to the report’s sources, employees had a blasé attitude to this potential privacy violation, but noted that they “never personally witnessed any egregious abuses.”
Meanwhile, a second group of Ring employees working on R&D in Ukraine had access to a folder housing “every video created by every Ring camera around the world.” What’s more, these employees had a “corresponding database that linked each specific video file to corresponding specific Ring customers.”
Also bothersome is Ring’s reported stance towards encryption. Videos in that bucket were unencrypted due to the costs associated with implementation and “lost revenue opportunities due to restricted access.”
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