Cheap, Chinese Home Surveillance Cameras Watch Their Owners

​The best intentions of Amazon to reduce easy, warrantless surveillance of the American people are being undermined by cheap, Chinese cameras.
 
PPSA has long tracked the privacy threat of Amazon’s cooperative agreements with more than 2,000 police and fire departments to solicit Ring videos for neighborhood surveillance from customers. In January, we celebrated Amazon’s disabling of its Request for Access tool, a feature that facilitated requests from law enforcement to ask Ring camera owners to volunteer video of their neighbors and neighborhood.
 
The Electronic Frontier Foundation was so impressed by Amazon’s move that they removed Ring from its Atlas of Surveillance, a comprehensive, national map of points of police surveillance. In March, EFF removed 2,530 data points from its Atlas because Amazon will no longer facilitate warrantless requests for consumer video footage.
 
As EFF notes, this does not mean that the police won’t still be able to access Ring footage. PPSA reported in February that law enforcement in central Texas are ho-hum about Amazon’s policy change, telling reporters they will simply appeal to individual households to ask for videos. But at least this means police requests will be tied to actual events, requiring an expenditure of shoe leather after a burglary, car accident, or fire, instead of a broad array of surveillance footage available for police to examine.
 
Around the same time, journalists Stacey Higginbotham and Daniel Wroclawski of Consumer Reports (CR) demonstrated the alarming vulnerability of cheap, Chinese doorbell cameras sold by Amazon, as well as by Walmart, Sears, and Chinese online retailers Shein and Temu. These cameras are sold by the thousands under an ever-shifting array of brand names, but all are connected to the same app called Awit, owned by Shenzen-based Eken Group Ltd., and apparently managed in North America out of an apartment in east Los Angeles County.
 
Higginbotham and Wroclawski reported that with the use of the Awit app, these cameras were easily compromised and used for remote surveillance of their owners – the exact opposite of the purpose of a security camera. They wrote: “People who face threats from a stalker or estranged abusive partner are sometimes spied on through their phones, online platforms, and connected smartphone devices. The vulnerabilities CR found could allow a dangerous person to take control of the video doorbell on their target’s home, watching when they and their family members come and go.”
 
Worse, these doorbells expose their owners’ home IP address and Wi-Fi network name to the internet without encryption. They also lack a visible ID issued by the Federal Communications Commission, making them illegal to sell in the United States.
 
Weeding out junk products is probably a difficult task for Amazon, given the shape-shifting, brand-changing nature of some providers. Like many Chinese-made products, these doorbell cameras are booby-trapped, either through sloppiness or by intention, or perhaps both. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to envision them being used against U.S. officials, civilian or military, by Chinese intelligence during a crisis. Imagine the intelligence value of seeing National Security Council personnel leaving their homes at the same time around 2 a.m.
 
Amazon’s top search results showed few of these Chinese cameras available now, though it is hard to tell given the plethora of ever-changing brand names. Perhaps Amazon products should come with a cautionary “China” sticker for consumers.