Amazon.com has reached a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for its doorbell camera unit Ring. The case related privacy infringement claims. As per a report in the news agency Reuters, according to a filing with the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Ring is to pay $5.8 million.
As per the report, the FTC said that Ring gave employees unrestricted access to customers’ sensitive video data said “as a result of this dangerously overbroad access and lax attitude toward privacy and security, employees and third-party contractors were able to view, download, and transfer customers’ sensitive video data for their own purposes.”
What FTC charges against Ring were
FTC claims that Ring did not have any privacy or data security training before 2018, even as the company’s employee handbook prohibited misuse of customer data. It further claimed that Ring failed to implement basic security measures to protect users’ information from online threats like “credential stuffing” and “brute force” attacks, despite warnings from employees, external security researchers and media reports.
In February 2019, Ring changed its access practices so that most Ring employees or contractors could only access a customer’s private video with that person’s consent.
The report adds that as part of the FTC agreement with Ring, the company is required to disclose to customers how much access to their data the company and its contractors have. It must also delete any work products it derived from those videos. The deal is valid for 20 years.
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