Amazon Ring Neighbors app left user data exposed

Ring, owned by Amazon curious police service friend everywhere, suffered another embarrassing security trip. The surveillance Company’s Neighbors app—Which was launched in 2018 as a sort of ‘neighborhood watch’ feature – apparently left users with exact geographic data and home address information exposedInternet.

Neighbors is Ring’s online forum where users can share public safety information about what’s going on in their communities. His essentially a more dystopian version of Nextdoor. Posts on Neighbors are public but supposedly anonymous, with the full name and location of a poster hidden. However, due to the recently discovered security bug, a savvy web browser could have accessed information about home addresses, as well as the exact latitude and longitude of a poster’s location. TechCrunch Reports.

Likewise, every time a user posted to Neighbors, the Ring servers generated a unique number for the post. These numbers have gradually increased with each publication, making it easy to link the ID number to other information on the poster, including geographic data, according to TechCrunch. However, all of this was invisible to the user of the application.

The company claims to have fixed the problem: “We fixed this problem shortly after learning about it”, a spokesperson for Ring said in a statement. “We have not identified any evidence of access or malicious use of this information.” Yet these are, of course, famous last words.

This is certainly not the first time Ring has had security concerns. In fact, last year Gizmodo revealed how the data exposed by the application authorized journalists to locate thousands of Ring users across the United States Even more unhappy is the fact that Ring is currently pursued on a spate of hacking incidents last year in which disgruntled cybercriminals made their way into the home security system and hurled racial slurs, death threats and other obscenities at owners without distrust via devices connected to the Internet.

Ring, who was acquired by Amazon in 2018 for more than $1 billion, has done its best to compensate for these problems by increasing security in other areas. Yesterday, for example, the company announced that it would start deployment of end-to-end encryption for his products.

The company has often criticized, not only for its security concerns, but also for its extensive relationships with law enforcement agencies across the country. In June of last year, the company had partnerships with at least 1,300 police departments across the United States, making it essentially a “for-profit surveillance network. ”