Ring let its staff in Ukraine watch unencrypted video files of customers: Report

In another case of privacy breach, Amazon‘s ring let its staff watch unencrypted video files of customers on its servers and live feeds. Amazon happens to be in the focal point of incidents associated with security breaches. Earlier, Jeff Benzos owned company has leaked the usernames and e-mail addresses of customers, its voice assistant Alexa has sent 1700 audio recordings of a person to a random contact. Also, there was the instance of Amazon Echo sending audio recordings to a random person. Now the latest addition to the list of security breaches is the one associated with the recently acquired smart doorbell company, “Ring ” for $1billion.

According to the reports, Ring gave unlimited access R& D team in Ukraine to the Amazon‘s S3 cloud storage. The cloud storage reportedly contained all the videos sourced from the customers globally. The employees had unlimited access for watching, downloading as well as sharing the videos. It was done to compensate for its underperforming AI that lacked object and facial recognition. Reportedly Data Operators tagged and labelled the vehicles and objects captured in the surveillance videos. Further, the employees also annotated various actions like kissing, firing guns, and stealing in the videos.

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That’s not all! The company even gave highly privileged access to US-based executives and engineers containing round the clock live camera feeds deemed unnecessary. Sources revealed that the customer’s e-mail addresses are enough to pull the camera feeds.  To make the scenario even worse, one of the former employees revealed that they had access to the system literally from any computer or anywhere. Reacting to the allegations Ring’s representative offered a clarification. According to him” the company considered the privacy of the customers very seriously.” They carried the annotation only for the videos that were either publicly shared from the neighbourhood app, or only after receiving written consent from the customers granting permission.

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