Snippet: Anker’s Eufy Lied to Us About the Security of its Security Cameras ☇

Sean Hollister for The Verge:

Anker has built a remarkable reputation for quality over the past decade, building its phone charger business into an empire spanning all sorts of portable electronics — including the Eufy home security cameras we’ve recommended over the years. Eufy’s commitment to privacy is remarkable: it promises your data will be stored locally, that it “never leaves the safety of your home,” that its footage only gets transmitted with “end-to-end” military-grade encryption, and that it will only send that footage “straight to your phone.”

So you can imagine our surprise to learn you can stream video from a Eufy camera, from the other side of the country, with no encryption at all.

Worse, it’s not yet clear how widespread this might be — because instead of addressing it head-on, the company falsely claimed to The Verge that it wasn’t even possible.

As someone who picked up a couple of Eufy cameras due to their offline nature and HomeKit integration, I’m more than a little frustrated. It’s really hard to get excited about any new technology when inevitably you’ll be let down and typically it’s not due to performance, but privacy issues, ineptitude, or creepy nonsense.