There Is No Perfect Smart Home Camera
You’ll always have to make a choice: security or privacy?
Late last month, Consumer Reports revealed multiple security flaws affecting Wyze and Guardzilla smart home cameras. Flaws in the Wyze Cam V2 camera exposed users’ email addresses and passwords, along with their Wi-Fi network names and login credentials. And Guardzilla cameras had a flaw that permitted attackers to add more emails to the user’s account, thereby allowing unauthorized users to access the camera feed.
Both of these issues were patched before Consumer Reports published its findings. But the situation highlights a problem with smart cameras in general. Devices from smaller companies like Wyze and Guardzilla may be particularly subject to security flaws — they don’t have the vast pool of resources to hunt down and fix security flaws and vulnerabilities that bigger corporations do — and options from giants like Amazon and Google have their own problems.
Amazon shares surveillance data from its Ring cameras with the police, and Google is forcing Nest users to migrate their accounts to a new or existing Google profile, raising some concerns about data sharing. If you’re shopping for a smart home camera, you’re basically asked to make a choice between which you value more: the device’s security, or your data’s privacy.
