Wyze’s inability to meet these basic standards puts its customers and its devices at risk, and also casts doubt on the smart-home industry as a whole. No company can guarantee safety and security 100% of the time, but customers need to be confident that those who make and sell these products, especially security devices, are worthy of their trust. The fundamental relationship between smart-home companies and their customers is founded on trust. The company did eventually alert customers of the issue, and it notably guided them to stop using the first-generation Wyze Cam because “continued use of the WyzeCam after Februcarries increased risk, is discouraged by Wyze, and is entirely at your own risk”-but that was long after the serious vulnerability was first discovered and reported to Wyze, on multiple occasions, without getting a response. However, it comes on the heels of a March 2022 Bitdefender study (PDF), which showed that Wyze took nearly three years to fully address specific security vulnerabilities that affected all three models of Wyze Cams. If this were the first such incident, we might be less concerned. “Then the company has to say, ‘Here’s exactly what we’re going to be doing to rectify any potential situation in the future.’” “When these sort of things happen, very open and transparent with community as to why they screwed up,” Lightman explained. All of them agree the central issue is that Wyze has not proactively reached out to all its customers, nor has it been adequately accountable for its failures. We spoke about this incident to peers, colleagues, and experts in the field, such as Ari Lightman, professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University Jen Caltrider, program director at Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included and Wirecutter senior staff writer Max Eddy. With this incident, and others in the past, it’s clear Wyze has failed to develop the sorts of robust procedures that adequately protect its customers the way they deserve. The greater issue is how this company responds to a crisis. ![]() The concern is not that Wyze had a security incident-just about every company or organization in the world will probably have to deal with some sort of security trip-up, as we have seen with big banks, the US military, Las Vegas casinos, schools, and even Chick-fil-a. As such, we've made the difficult but unavoidable decision to revoke our recommendation of all Wyze cameras until the company implements meaningful changes to its security and privacy procedures. ![]() We believe Wyze is acting irresponsibly to its customers. We reached out to Wyze for details, and a representative characterized the incident as small in scope, saying they “believe no more than 10 users were affected.” Other than a post to its user-to-user online forum, Wyze Communities, and communication to those it says were affected, the company has not reached out to Wyze customers, nor has it provided meaningful details about the incident. On September 8, 2023, The Verge reported an incident in which some Wyze customers were able to access live video from other users’ cameras through the Wyze web portal. ![]() After six years of reviewing a variety of Wyze security cameras at Wirecutter, we’ve made the decision to suspend our recommendation of them from all our guides.
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