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Anker's Eufy Cameras Caught Uploading Content to the Cloud Without User Consent [Updated]
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While I’m not an attorney, you might want to research wiretap laws in your state or jurisdiction. For example, in my jurisdiction it is a felony to intercept or record audio without two party consent, punishable for each instance. That means each video with audio is considered a separate felony.
Florida Recording Law | Digital Media Law Project
The video doorbells and cameras I purchased allow you to disable audio in stored recordings to comply with wiretap laws, and potentially allow the recoded video (minus audio) to be used as evidence. My understanding is in the case of video doorbells, consent is given when the button is pressed.
AWS storage. Well I know AWS is a big player in that sector but couldn’t help but wonder if they were selling facial recognition info to Amazon (remember the Ring was calling home to Amazon unbeknownst to some owners.). Also wonder where they got their FRS from (Amazon) or if it’s an in house development.
Good point.
No doubt the EULA for the button is on the back in micro print. Obvs.
Good points. I'm thinking of saying something like this in the wording: "Audio and Video surveillance in use on and around this property. Remaining on this property constitutes your consent."
Right, but as I understand it, it's just temporary storage for thumbnail images. Those show up in my list of recordings for each camera, but if it helps the app to respond faster, then I'm okay with it.
When my alerts hit, I want to be able to pull up a recording and start playback asap. I want to know if it's just the 3 am calico cat sauntering by, or if it might be something that I should un-holster my firearm for, such as a gator, bear, or panther. We have seen those where I live. Or a two-legged threat, we have those too. A major part of being one's own defense is that one does not react in situations that don't require it, but then when truly necessary, can react quickly and with appropriate force. Eufy is an important part of that for my home.
What got me into Eufy cameras was actually when Amazon trucks damaged my father's house twice in a row. The trucks would pull up his long driveway and turn around, hitting the gutter and putting a hole in it each time. He wanted a camera for the driveway to make it easier to get compensation when/if this happens.
At the time, we wanted a camera that was battery powered and lasted a long time, as we didn't want to wire something to the location where the camera needed to be for the best angle. We bought him the Eufy Solocam S40 which has on-device storage, and doesn't need a homebase. That camera also has a solar cell built in which keeps the camera topped off. Thus far the camera has been at or near 100% charge for over 6 months.
Of course time will tell how the Northern Ohio winter changes this. Not sure the solar will be as effective with a foot of snow piled on top of the camera.
With mine, I realized that even though they have Solar, and I mounted them on a side of a house that gets sun... the "ideal" camera angle is less than ideal for catching sunlight. As a result, I kinda wish I had gone for the Eufycam 3C + external solar cells bundle instead. Time will tell how this works out for me, but I can always add external solar cells with more optimal positioning as needed.
So your cam might be similar to my porch cam. A solar panel might not be able to keep the battery fully charged, especially through all of the winter months, with the lower hours of daylight. But the good news is (might be?) that the solar panel might still be helpful by EXTENDING the length of time it takes for the battery to reach zero. For example, instead of losing 2% each day, the solar panel may allow you to lose 1% per day, effectively doubling the length of time before you need to bring the camera inside to recharge it on a charger.
And 90 days from now, the hours of daylight will be increasing. So maybe you'll only need to charge your SoloCam once before we reach the Equinox in April. It's a thought.
I smell another very expensive Illinois biometric class action pending. Tisk, tisk, tisk, the companies will never learn.
Thankfully, it was easy to move all my Eufy Cam 2's to HomeKit with HKSV and even our Doorbell, with HomeBridge. Now to block all these services calling back to the Eufy servers...
Nice response from Anker, other companies could learn a lesson from them.
Here's exactly what we do, why we do it, and how it works. Here's where we messed up and what we will be doing to fix it moving forward.
Well done.
Here's exactly what we do, why we do it, and how it works. Here's where we messed up and what we will be doing to fix it moving forward.
Well done.
This thread is a joke. Typical clueless twitter mob mentality. How do you think those features were delivered to you in the first place? You don't get to be ignorant first, and then foment outrage later.
Eufy's response is on point and of course makes sense. And all they're going to do is update some inconsequential language, so that the clueless can remain clueless, but at least it is there.
Eufy's response is on point and of course makes sense. And all they're going to do is update some inconsequential language, so that the clueless can remain clueless, but at least it is there.
Agree, and this is fine by me too. But the more concerning issue a number of Eufy camera owners (including me!) had was our cameras going "offline" in the app and failing to function.
I ran into this not too long ago, and Eufy had no comment except telling some owners to try a hard reset of the problem device(s). In my case, I had several of their C24 outdoor cameras that stopped responding, but I could see in my router they were still online with valid IP addresses. So the Eufy Security app on my phone stopped working with them for some other reason.
If they truly just operated locally, this shouldn't have happened!
I got one camera back up and running by just unplugging power to it for 10 seconds or so and reconnecting it. The others required a hard reset and configuring them again as new cameras, and one of the two still went offline 2 more times in 48 hours, requiring multiple hard resets/reconfiguring before it suddenly started working again. No more failures since then.
Pretty clearly something related to back-end Eufy server issues ....
Nah, I get it just fine. I just disagree with your opinion, which I believe is objectively incorrect. Have a nice day.
This has always concerned me with any cable I use. I won't use a cable unless I have personally purchaed it in a sealed package. The thought that Anker, or any other major brand, would be use a cable for nefarious purposes is just unsettling.
I wonder if anyone has ever checked any (anker) cables to see if anything unusual was happening...
Anker is a Chinese company based in Changsha, Hunan (home province of Mao Zedong). Everyone who trusts a Chinese company with their privacy deserves what’s coming. You cannot expect privacy from a company coming from a country where privacy doesn’t exist.
Unless you were somehow committing a crime, I don’t think the police are going to care if you’re recording audio on your own property. I’m sure most stores that have video cameras also record audio. If I walk into a store on the phone or talking to someone they’re not going to arrest the store owner for wiretapping.
Of course if the cameras have the capability to record audio and video outside of your property, then you might be a little gray area. I have a camera in my apartment the records audio and video. If someone comes into my apartment, I point it out so I have them on camera acknowledging it 😂😂
And that ladies and gentlemen why you should always use FOSS software whenever possible. Unfortunately the masses have no idea how these devices work and think its just like buying an oven, no one will see them or track them or spy or on them.
The problem with FOSS is it gets zero support compared to paid options. I’ve seen it talked about so much in the FOSS community where they say you can’t expect developers to give much support because they’re doing it for free. If I’m using a product, I need it to work. Just because the product is free doesn’t mean I’m OK with it not working. I like open source, but there needs to be some sort of financial incentive for the developers to support the product.
Yea I figured out 2 nights ago my doorbell stores images in the cloud in an awkward way. I removed it from the wall and brought it inside to charge. Plugged it it but hadn’t turned it off in settings. When I opened the app to shut it off I noticed it had been recording, so I deleted the videos. After deleting the videos my thumbnail was there with me in a t-shirt and my underwear. So I’m somewhere in the cloud half naked.
Yep... agree. I love FOSS when it's really a viable option. But except for the most popular and widely used handful of products, it's almost always a situation where using an open source application results in a huge time investment to tinker with it so it works properly.
I've been in I.T. as a career for around 30 years now, and I still experience it regularly. So I can easily see how FOSS solutions are usually just non-starters for more casual users.
As one example related to this whole topic? I wanted to stop using Eufy's supplied app to monitor their cameras, so I tried to install and configure ZoneMinder. I got my C24 cameras configured in a mode where they streamed H.264 video constantly on my LAN and got ZoneMinder to grab that video and save/process it. But 2 days later, my server had crashed because ZoneMinder completely filled the drive space. I reconfigured it so it was in its own disk partition (so filling it up wouldn't affect the rest of the server's OS or other apps running on it) and tried again. In 2-3 days, ZoneMinder crashed again. The clean-up process was a laborious matter of deleting each video clip's entry from the mysql database it indexed them all in. Hours more work tweaking all the complicated settings to make it properly detect motion so it wasn't saving too much useless footage. But ultimately, I never did get it to reliably erase all of the oldest content to make room for new when the disk was getting full. I finally gave up because I just didn't have more time or energy to invest in getting it right. Went back to Eufy's included solution.