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A $10K Bounty Awaits Anyone Who Can Hack Ring Cameras to Stop Sharing Data With Amazon -Wired
Usually, when you see a feel-good story about finding a lost dog, you don’t immediately react with fear and revulsion. But that was indeed the case in response to a Super Bowl commercial from Amazon-owned security camera company Ring. There’s now a group offering to dole out a $10,000 bounty to wrest back control of the user data Ring controls.
The ad showed off a new feature from Ring called Search Party. It uses a network of Ring cameras to scour a neighborhood for signs of lost dogs. But as the details of a leaked internal Ring email reported by 404 Media revealed, the service could eventually be used to find other animals and people as well.
The commercial was met largely with widespread criticism across social media and the tech press, which called out Search Party for essentially being a thinly-veiled neighborhood surveillance dragnet. People are even publicly destroying their Ring cameras. In response, Ring immediately canceled its partnership with the controversial AI surveillance company Flock. Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff has been on something of an apology tour since the Super Bowl commercial aired. (A Ring spokesperson acknowledged our request for comment and says the company will provide one shortly; we'll update this story when we hear back.)
The Fulu Foundation, a group founded by repair advocate and YouTuber Louis Rossmann, pays out bounties to people who can remove user-hostile features on connected devices. The nonprofit saw this pushback as a moment of opportunity for people to take back control of their devices.
“It's been an interesting moment for people to grasp exactly the trade-off that they have had to accept when they installed these security doorbell cameras,” says Fulu cofounder Kevin O’Reilly. “People who install security cameras are looking for more security, not less. At the end of the day, control is at the heart of security. If we don’t control our data, we don’t control our devices.”
The ad showed off a new feature from Ring called Search Party. It uses a network of Ring cameras to scour a neighborhood for signs of lost dogs. But as the details of a leaked internal Ring email reported by 404 Media revealed, the service could eventually be used to find other animals and people as well.
The commercial was met largely with widespread criticism across social media and the tech press, which called out Search Party for essentially being a thinly-veiled neighborhood surveillance dragnet. People are even publicly destroying their Ring cameras. In response, Ring immediately canceled its partnership with the controversial AI surveillance company Flock. Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff has been on something of an apology tour since the Super Bowl commercial aired. (A Ring spokesperson acknowledged our request for comment and says the company will provide one shortly; we'll update this story when we hear back.)
The Fulu Foundation, a group founded by repair advocate and YouTuber Louis Rossmann, pays out bounties to people who can remove user-hostile features on connected devices. The nonprofit saw this pushback as a moment of opportunity for people to take back control of their devices.
“It's been an interesting moment for people to grasp exactly the trade-off that they have had to accept when they installed these security doorbell cameras,” says Fulu cofounder Kevin O’Reilly. “People who install security cameras are looking for more security, not less. At the end of the day, control is at the heart of security. If we don’t control our data, we don’t control our devices.”
https://www.wired.com/story/a-10k-bounty-awaits-anyone-who-can-hack-ring-cameras-to-stop-sharing-data-with-amazon/#intcid=_wired-verso-hp-trending_4aa1ac07-e111-4a4b-a089-3b0203edf4c6_popular4-2]
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