Amazon Collects Every Last Bit of Data from the Ring Doorbell

Amazon collects all sorts of data from its Ring smart doorbell, including information regarding all possible interactions with the hardware and apps, a BBC investigation has revealed.

The Ring doorbell has been in the news mostly for the wrong reasons. It started with Amazon’s willingness to cut deals with law enforcement agencies all over the United States, letting them access recordings and live feeds from Ring doorbells.

Leaving aside privacy concerns, a number of vulnerabilities were identified, underlining the potential attack vectors. For example, Bitdefender found that the setup process for Ring could be exploited in a way that exposed the owner’s Wi-Fi password. The developers fixed the vulnerability, but other issues crept out.

Amazon did make some important changes to improve the security of the device, including the addition of two-factor authentication. But the BBC investigation into the scope of data collection uncovers other considerations.

It turns out that Amazon keeps a record of pretty much everything related to Ring, and that’s no overstatement. Data the company collects includes all interactions with the application, and everything related to the recording process and motion detection, including each time someone presses the doorbell or for how long.

Amazon also logs the exact coordinates of the doorbell, to a precision of 13 decimal points, and remote actions performed by the users, such as zooming in, for example.

For now, it’s unclear what the company does with such precise data, but it can range from innocuous actions such as training AI to potentially money-making market research. Technically, much of this data is anonymized so it doesn’t link back to the user. But there’s always the danger of a data breach.