• Bloomberg reports that Amazon's Ring subsidiary has fired "at least four employees for improperly seeking access to customer data over the last four years." Specifically, the firings took place because the employees watched more customer video shot by Ring doorbells and cameras than was appropriate for their jobs.
The story notes that "Ring has been beset by allegations of privacy flubs in the last year, from a report that employees had previously passed around unencrypted footage captured by doorbells, to claims from civil liberties groups that Ring’s partnerships with law enforcement, which allow police departments to ask that doorbell owners turn over footage to aid investigations, risk enabling a government surveillance network."
On the other hand, there has been a lot of coverage of a high-profile murder investigation in New Canaan, Connecticut, which is just a couple of miles from my house, and one of the things that apparently led to the arrest of the husband of the victim was footage of him collected from such doorbells that accounted for time that he'd been using as an alibi. Since his wife's body still has not been found - just DNA suggesting her body had been dismembered and disposed of - this kind of makes me glad this stuff exists.
The story notes that "Ring has been beset by allegations of privacy flubs in the last year, from a report that employees had previously passed around unencrypted footage captured by doorbells, to claims from civil liberties groups that Ring’s partnerships with law enforcement, which allow police departments to ask that doorbell owners turn over footage to aid investigations, risk enabling a government surveillance network."
On the other hand, there has been a lot of coverage of a high-profile murder investigation in New Canaan, Connecticut, which is just a couple of miles from my house, and one of the things that apparently led to the arrest of the husband of the victim was footage of him collected from such doorbells that accounted for time that he'd been using as an alibi. Since his wife's body still has not been found - just DNA suggesting her body had been dismembered and disposed of - this kind of makes me glad this stuff exists.
- KC's View:
