Ring fined $5.6 million by US FTC for poor security and spying incidents
The Federal Trade Commission has formally accused Amazon’s smart doorbell subsidiary of “compromising the privacy of its customers.”
The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has ruled that smart doorbell maker Ring must reimburse $5.6 million for a series of poor security practices.
The complaint was filed in June 2023, and the FTC alleged at the time that Ring employees and contractors accessed customer videos more or less at will.
“Not only could all Ring employees and third-party contractors based in Ukraine access each client’s videos (all of which were stored unencrypted on Ring’s network), but they could also easily download any client’s videos. and then view, share or disseminate them. at will,” the FTC said in a court filing at the time.
“Prior to July 2017, Ring did not impose any technical or procedural restrictions on employees’ ability to download, save or transfer customer videos.”
That bird has now truly come home, with an indictment claiming that Ring compromised “the privacy of its customers by allowing any employee or contractor to access consumers’ private videos and by failing to implement basic privacy and security protections, allowing hackers to take control of consumers’ accounts, cameras and videos.”
According to the FTC, Ring employees and contractors could easily view private images since there were no safeguards against such use.
A Ring employee was found to have viewed “thousands of video recordings belonging to at least 81 unique female users.” When alerted to the behavior, a supervisor suggested it was perfectly acceptable, but became more concerned when he discovered the employee was only looking at “pretty girls.”
In addition to spying on customers, the FTC found that 55,000 US customers had their accounts compromised through credential stuffing and brute force attacks, as the security of user accounts was severely inadequate. Some users even experienced verbal death threats from hackers through their own doorbells.
However, given that Amazon bought Ring for over $1 billion a few years ago, we can’t see the $5.6 million making too much of a dent in Amazon’s coffers. Furthermore, that figure will be shared among 117,044 clients, which represents a very small individual payment.
