Wyze Lock

Smart locks are one of those connected devices that seem to worry lots of people. The pros: They offer a lot of convenience with multiple ways to unlock the door to your home, a way to track who comes and goes from your home, they can allow you give out a keypad number to people like a babysitter and then revoke that when they no longer need access, and they can help you make sure you locked your front door when your anxiety kicks in on vacation. The cons: They can be vulnerable to any number of things such as power outages, lost or compromised phones, ransomware attacks on the company who made your lock, product security vulnerabilities, WiFi and/or Bluetooth vulnerabilities, home hub vulnerabilities, bad software updates, data leaks, and more.

With all that said, how does Wyze Smart Lock stack up? This lock operates over Bluetooth, so you need to be within about 10 feet to lock or unlock it using your phone. You can get the Wyze Lock Gateway to enable WiFi access too. We found no known security breaches of Wyze’s smart lock. However, in December 2019, Wyze suffered a huge data leak that exposed the personal information of 2.4 million security camera users 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.

On the privacy side of things, Wyze seems pretty good. 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. This isn’t great, but it’s also pretty normal in our digital ad economy and nothing stands out with Wyze that concerns us too much. Just be careful with what you share with third parties such as Alexa or Google Assistant as they can collect data on you too.