The new security breach to hit Wyze and its cameras is just the latest in a long—and we do mean long—line of privacy screw ups which have plagued the home security market since the category arrived on the scene. The breach, where 13,000 users received thumbnail images from stranger’s cameras, has been a clear disaster for a company which has garnered something of a tarnished reputation because of its attitude to its customers in the past.
The breach was heralded by a large service outage for the smart home brand that severed the connection between Wyze’s app and its cameras on February 16, leaving users to flood the internet with complaints that their cameras weren’t working. Issues ranged from cameras going offline, to being unable to connect their camera to the internet, to one user even claiming that they could view a video feed that wasn’t theirs. Wyze blamed the issue on Amazon Web Services (AWS), citing a problem with “device connection [that] caused login difficulties”. It was on February 21 that the true extent of the breach was discovered—namely that 13,000 users had images of their homes displayed on other users' apps.
