Wyze Alerts Camera Owners After Privacy Glitch Exposes Images To Strangers

It seems Wyze is a little slow to learn from its privacy mishaps. Not many months ago, users were able to see thumbnails of Wyze cameras that were not their own in the Events tab. Even though it was supposedly fixed, another server issue on Friday, February 16th, caused a glitch that resurfaced the issue for some users. Again. It has since been rectified, but can Wyze be trusted?

Wyze security camera users (10 million of them, according to Wyze Labs) experienced a service disruption on Friday, with ramifications that stretched into the weekend. What happened was that one of Wyze's AWS (Amazon Web Service) servers bugged out and corrupted a very small subset of user data. This caused a familiar security issue where some users were able to see thumbnails of other users' cameras in the Events tab. 

In an email that went out to Wyze owners, the company clarified that, "as we worked to bring cameras back online, we experienced a security issue. Some users reported seeing the wrong thumbnails and Event Videos in their Events tab. We immediately removed access to the Events tab and started an investigation. We can now confirm that as cameras were coming back online, about 13,000 Wyze users received thumbnails from cameras that were not their own and 1,504 users tapped on them."

According to Wyze, only thumbnails were visible, rather than the live streams or any stored media assets. That's a plus, at least. Over the weekend, some Wyze users reported not being able to access Event videos, and this might be related to Wyze beefing up protection by adding a new verification layer before users access Event content. As an owner of a few Wyze cameras myself, I didn't experience any thumbnail crosstalk, but following the backend modifications, a couple of my cameras and motion sensors were unpaired requiring me to set them up in the app again.

These privacy faux pas may seem minor, but in this case Wyze didn't seem to have completely addressed the potential for this to happen, following the first occurrence in September of last year. Could this become the death knell for users to hop onto another brand? After all, you fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.