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Ring faces FTC charges of privacy violations

  • The FTC charged Ring for compromising customer privacy
  • Complaint: 55,000 US customers fell victim to cyberattacks
  • Ring is now required to pay $5.8 million in consumer refunds

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(NewsNation) — The home security camera company Ring has been charged by the Federal Trade Commission with compromising customer privacy and failing to implement sufficient security measures.

The FTC found that Ring, which was acquired by Amazon in 2018, allowed any employee or contractor to access consumers’ private videos without adequate policies and surveillance, leading to breaches and unauthorized access to personal spaces within customers’ homes.

“Customers had no reasonable way of knowing that hundreds of Ring employees and third-party contractors in Ukraine had unfettered access to live streams and stored videos of customers in their bedrooms, their bathrooms, their children’s nurseries, and elsewhere in and outside their homes.” the FTC complaint stated.

According to the complaint, this lack of privacy safeguards resulted in more than 55,000 U.S. customers falling victim to credential stuffing and brute force attacks from January 2019 to March 2020.

Hackers gained access to hundreds of thousands of videos, and in some cases, they used the camera’s two-way communication to harass, threaten and insult individuals, including elderly and juvenile occupants of monitored rooms.

Under a proposed order subject to court approval, Ring will be prohibited from profiting from unlawfully accessing consumer videos. The company will also be required to pay $5.8 million in consumer refunds.

Additionally, Ring must delete data products derived from unlawfully reviewed videos and implement a privacy and security program with robust safeguards, including stringent controls on human review of videos and the use of multi-factor authentication for both employees and customers.

The company responded to the charges in a statement, saying, “Our focus has been and remains on delivering products and features our customers love, while upholding our commitment to protect their privacy and security. Ring promptly addressed these issues on its own years ago, well before the FTC began its inquiry. While we disagree with the FTC’s allegations and deny violating the law, this settlement resolves this matter so we can focus on innovating on behalf of our customers.”

In a separate case involving Amazon’s cloud-based voice service Alexa, the FTC said Amazon had deceived users of the voice assistance service for years.

It retained children’s recordings indefinitely unless a parent requested the information be deleted, the agency said, and even when it deleted those recordings, Amazon often kept the transcripts.

In imposing a $25 million fine, the agency said Amazon had violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and FTC Consumer Protection Chief Samuel Levine accused the tech giant of sacrificing “privacy for profits” in “flouting parents’ deletion requests.”

FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya said Amazon kept kids’ data indefinitely to refine its voice recognition algorithm. In a separate statement, he said the Alexa ruling sends a message to all tech companies who are “sprinting to do the same” amid fierce competition in developing AI datasets.

“Nothing is more visceral to a parent than the sound of their child’s voice,” tweeted Bedoya.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Tech

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