Does Amazon’s Reply Ring True For You?

They Share But On The Plus Side It Is Encrypted

The EFF and other privacy minded individuals and organizations have had a few problems with Amazon’s Ring products and it looks like that is not going to be resolved any time soon.  Their willingness to give unrestricted access to your Ring’s recordings, not to mention all your neighbours footage with the police was not well received by many.  Indeed the general insecurity of the Neighbors Portal app meant that far more people than just the police had access to your Ring and any video.

After a bit of work the EFF now reveals that Facebook and others are in on the game as well, with quite a large list of things they can see according to the list at The Register. In addition to FaceBook, Google owned Crashalytics also gets information, though what telemetry is sent to them is somewhat unclear as it what is delivered to AppsFlyer, MixPanel and others.

Ring did respond, stating among other things that “Ring uses third-party service providers to evaluate the use of our mobile app, which helps us improve features, optimise the customer experience, and evaluate the effectiveness of our marketing.”; a turn of phrase you should think about for a while.  The full quote is at the bottom of The Register’s post.