Loading…
0
Two years to realize my smart doorbell was leaking audio
I installed a smart doorbell back in 2021 without reading the fine print on the app's permissions. Turns out, the vendor was streaming raw mic audio to their servers for 'product improvement', not just when someone rang, but 24/7. My neighbor across the street in Minneapolis spotted a weird spike in my wifi traffic during a network audit, which took me another 3 months to verify with a packet sniffer. When I finally pulled the logs, my doorbell had transmitted over 400 hours of my front porch conversations, including a full argument with my landlord about a broken lock. I ripped it out that night and went back to a dumb wired bell, but the creepy part is I still don't know who had access to that audio or why. Has anyone else caught a 'smart' device doing way more than its box promised, and did you ever get a straight answer from the company?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
grant.nina22d ago
Had the same thing with a Ring cam back in 2020. Pulled the router logs and saw it uploading at 3am when nobody was within 50 feet of the door. Support gave me some script about "background firmware checks" and hung up, so I just blocked its MAC address at the router and kept the thing as a paperweight. If you still have those packet logs, file an FTC complaint, that's the only thing that ever got a real response out of these companies for me.
1