Wyze Cams

There’s nothing in Wyze’s privacy policy that worries us overly much. We like that Wyze does not sell your personal information. They say they can share de-identified or aggregated information with third parties, which is pretty common and not too worrisome. Although it’s a good time to remind you that it’s been found to be pretty easy to de-anonymize some types of data and track down an individual’s patterns, especially with location data. And they do some targeted advertising with data they collect. Again, this is pretty normal in our digital ad economy and nothing stands out with Wyze that concerns us too much.

The biggest worry we have about Wyze’s affordable security cams is the huge data leak they suffered back in December, 2019 that exposed the personal information of 2.4 million customers when they left a database unprotected for 22 days. That is not good, not good at all. Fortunately, Wyze jumped on fixing their epic goof, which is what you want to see when something like this happens. And as far as we can tell, Wyze hasn’t had any major security vulnerabilities or data leaks since then.

All in all, these cameras seem ok for your indoor and outdoor spying needs. What’s the worst that could happen? Well, we suppose you could share your videos to the Cloud, rather than keeping them stored locally where they tend to be safer. Some major state sponsored cyber attack could happen and that state, say, Russia for example, could learn who you and your neighbors vote for and then target you with ads to try and change your vote. That would not be cool. Also, probably not likely. Still, not cool. Store those videos locally people!