$10,000 bonus offered if you can hack Ring cameras to stop them from sharing your data with Amazon
Did you watch this year’s Super Bowl? If you did, you’re probably one of those people who was sitting on your couch upset about the Ring camera TV ad.
The ad focuses on Ring’s new “Search Party” feature – an AI-driven feature designed to help find lost pets by installing doorbells and nearby video cameras. In the ad, the family dog goes missing, and Ring cameras all over the place are filming their search for the animal.
Ring probably hoped the ad would sell the “Search Party” feature in a fun way. But, in fact, many people were alarmed that the technology was once again proving to be a major privacy concern.
As one person commented on social media as the ad backlash began:
“If they can identify the dog, they can identify you.”
One ring owner posted on Reddit:
“The Super Bowl commercials were the last straw. They want to sell me hardware, sell me subscriptions to use the hardware, sell me subscriptions to monitor my system, and then sell all my information to rogue players. They’re basically giving up the privacy and security of my community, and they’re charging me for the information. That’s not fair.”
Some posted videos of themselves destroying their Ring devices in protest, and online forums were ablaze with discussions about data ownership and consent.
And it’s against that backdrop that the Fulu Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on device patents, offered a cool US $10,000 to anyone who could find a way to run doorbell cameras in the area, cutting off the flow of video data to Amazon’s servers.
The Fulu Foundation makes no profit in the traditional sense of hunting for security vulnerabilities that can be patched. Instead, any winner will need to demonstrate a method that allows the affected Ring cameras to work locally and redirect images to the owner’s computer or server, without transmitting the video to Amazon’s cloud services.
In short, the goal is to give Ring camera owners more control over where their footage goes.
“In an ideal world, device owners would be able to modify that software to instead push that video to their computers or server, if they so choose,” said Kevin O’Reilly of the Fulu Foundation. “
This is not the first time Ring has found himself in hot water over privacy.
For example, in 2023 the US Federal Trade Commission alleged that Ring failed to protect customer privacy and security, including allowing employees to access customer videos.
One employee reportedly viewed thousands of records of women in their bedrooms and bathrooms. Crying was eventually required to make a US$5.8 million refund to customers as a result, as well as remove the illegally obtained videos, and implement stricter privacy and security policies.
Whether anyone ultimately wants a profit remains to be seen. But the basic question remains: if you bought a security camera, shouldn’t you be the one to decide where its video ends up, and how it is used?
