Amazon-owned Ring is currently on the rocks right now as rumors began airing about employees having access over footages.
A report published by The Intercept reveals that Ring management is allowing employees to have access over video footages captured by their security cameras. Ring is a manufacturing company responsible for producing smart doorbells and cameras. Amazon acquired Ring at $1billion on February 2018.
The report claims that Ring employees are watching footages from doorbell owners' homes without them actually knowing about it. Some of them even bragging at one another about some quite private video parts that they have watched like customer's kissing, firing gun and stealing.
How did it happen? An unnamed source alleged that Ring executives and engineers are given the "high privilege access" to view the live customer camera footages both from their doorbell cameras as well as the cameras installed inside their homes. Although not everyone from the company has the access to such, all it takes is to have the customers' email address to be able to gain full access to their in-home and doorbell camera footages.
The Information hinted that these entire Amazon-owned Ring's privacy invasion began with their research and development team based on Ukraine. Members of the research team also known as the Ring R & D Team have special access to Amazons S3 cloud storage. The storage is where every video captured by the ring cameras across the globe are stored.
Employees are also given access to another database where video owners can be identified. Sadly, every video captured and saved on the said database is unencrypted as encryption means higher budget allocation.
A part of the Ring R & D Team job is to upgrade its object recognition software. That is why the company created the object annotation team that will primarily focus on watching round the clock household footages, identifying everything they see and tagging each one of them.
The said operation, however, has been reportedly compromised as employees are heard to have not kept their job and the videos private and even used the technology to even spy at one another and teasing whoever brings home a date.
On the other hand, Amazon-owned Ring issued a statement clarifying that their employees only watch videos acquired from Neighbors, the community app. They also assured that they have zero tolerance for abuse and they will take swift action against anyone violating the company privacy rules.
