When it comes to smart home cameras, privacy and security seem to be at a premium. You never know when footage of you or your family is being uploaded to the cloud and stored on multi-billion dollar companies’ servers. This seems to be the case with Eufy. A user discovered that Eufy secretly sends pictures of its users to the cloud, while it claims that it does not.
Forget gold and oil, your data is the real valuable resource. Companies like Google and Meta make hundreds of billions of dollars from your data, and that’s scary. This is why these companies have faced so many fines and lawsuits over surreptitiously selling your data. A $200 million fine is nothing compared to hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue from data.
Eufy was caught uploading your data to its cloud
A security researcher by the name of Paul Moore posted a pretty haunting revelation in the form of a video. In the video, he exposes that Eufy, the smart home camera division of Anker, actually sends your data to its cloud.
What makes this worse is the fact that the company claims otherwise. On its website, it says that your data is always stored locally on your device. No one has access to your footage other than you. And, people believed that! However, Moore found out that the company has been lying.
He posted a video showing what’s going on behind the curtains. First, he logged into his account, and went to his online panel. He then used Dev tools to get a deeper look at the code behind the site. Moore took a picture using one of the cameras and saw that there is a new item under the get_all_history_record Section.
When he opened up the section, he saw an AI faces subsection. Under that subsection, he saw a URL. When pasted into a browser, he saw the very same picture that he took with his camera. This was discovered on the Eufy MySecurity website. It even showed an image taken from just before he took the actual picture.
Eufy is secretive, but your data is not
What makes the situation worse is the fact that the data that’s sent to the cloud is completely unencrypted. This means that anyone with an internet connection can view the uploads. That’s extremely scary and haphazard on the company’s part.
Moore also says that there is some AI facial recognition going on. This means that if he were to walk in front of a completely different camera from a completely different user, it would still recognize his face.
Eufy has not responded to this just yet, however, we are all waiting with popcorn in hand to hear what the company has to say. We can definitely expect some serious lawsuits to ensue after this Fiasco.
2022-11-30 15:11:55