Videos used for research and development were limited to those posted by customers to Ring’s Neighbors app, and those for which employees, contractors, and their friends and family had given their written consent for such use. In February 2018, employee access rights were narrowed further, with engineers (both employees and third-party contractors) only given access to customer videos if there was a business need. In January 2018, a male employee used his access rights to spy on a female colleague's videos, looking her up using her email address.

So, then, more abuse of that access occurred. However, Ring continued to allow hundreds of other employees and third-party contractors access to all video data, regardless of whether they actually needed it in order to perform their jobs. Only at that point did Ring review a portion of the employee’s activity and, ultimately, terminate his employment.'Īs a result of that incident, Ring narrowed its employees' access rights in September 2017, so that customers had to consent to customer service agents accessing their videos. 'Only after the supervisor noticed that the male employee was only viewing videos of “pretty girls” did the supervisor escalate the report of misconduct. Another employee noticed and reported it to their supervisor who allegedly told them that it was 'normal' for an engineer to view so many accounts. The employee allegedly went looking for camera feeds that suggested they may have been used in the most private of areas, such as 'Master Bedroom,' 'Master Bathroom,' and 'Spy cam'.īetween June and August 2017, the employee looked through the videos for at least an hour a day on hundreds of occasions. In one example, the FTC says a Ring employee viewed thousands of videos from at least 81 different female users. That's what the FTC has alleged in a recent complaint, for which Amazon is facing a settlement of $5.8 million.Īnd, unsurprisingly, some employees abused that access right. Not only that, but the employees-along with workers from a third-party contractor in Ukraine-could also download any of those videos and then save and share them as they liked, before July 2017. Every single Amazon Ring employee was able to access every single customer video, even when it wasn't necessary for their jobs.

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