Wyze Band

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 Wyze band does come with Alexa built-in, which is different from most fitness trackers. It means there are actual microphones built into the band you wear on your wrist all day. Yeah, that’s kinda creepy. Wyze does say the band only listens when you long press the home button, which we sure hope is true.

What should you know about Alexa? Amazon makes it possible to automatically delete voice recordings immediately after they are processed. That's a nice feature after the controversy around human reviewers listening in to Alexa voice recordings. However, Amazon says when you delete your voice recordings, they still can keep data of the interactions those recordings triggered. So, if you buy a pregnancy test through Amazon Alexa, they won't forget you bought that pregnancy test just because you ask them to delete the voice recording of that purchase. That record of the purchase is data they have on you going forward and may use to target you with ads for more stuff.

The biggest worry we have about Wyze is the huge data leak they suffered back in December, 2019 that exposed the personal information of 2.4 million users of their security cameras 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.

What's the worst that could happen? Oh, maybe Wyze forgets to protect their database again and leaks a bunch of your data. Someone could use your biometric data to learn your drinking habits. They see that you tend to drink a bit too much on Saturdays and start targeting you then with ads to buy those expensive records you collect. You drunk buy way too much stuff and end up deep in debt. Perhaps it's not likely to happen. It's also not out of the question.