Nest competitor Ring reportedly gave employees full access to customers’ live camera feeds

Last year, Amazon made waves in the smart home space by acquiring Ring for over $1 billion. Known for home security doorbells, a new report today claims that the company has a lax stance towards privacy that allowed more employees than seemingly necessary to access customers’ live camera feeds.

According to The Intercept, Ring’s engineers and executives have “highly privileged access” to live camera feeds from customers’ devices. This includes both doorbells facing the outside world, as well as cameras inside a person’s home. A team tasked with annotating video to aid in object recognition captured “people kissing, firing guns, and stealing.” [Update: According to Ring, annotation is only conducted on “publicly shared Ring videos.”]