Wyze, the Seattle-based tech firm that makes a speciality of good residence merchandise and wi-fi cameras, has launched a serious safety replace that it hopes will rebuild some misplaced belief. The corporate has been affected by quite a few safety failures over the previous few years, most notably when an AWS outage led to 1000’s of customers having access to recorded movies from different folks’s properties. That incident, paired with the corporate’s historical past of lackluster responses to safety flaws, even led The New York Occasions to explicitly cease recommending Wyze merchandise greater than a yr in the past.
Now, in a YouTube video announcement that cheekily mentions the AWS outage, Wyze is introducing a brand new layer of safety that the corporate is asking Wyze VerifiedView. The added layer of safety works by embedding a novel consumer ID into the firmware of a Wyze digital camera upon setup. The digital camera in flip stamps that ID onto each picture, video and livestream. Earlier than any system can entry that footage, the Wyze software program will verify that the embedded ID matches the one for the consumer earlier than it permits the footage or photographs to be seen.
Wyze is adamant that this new layer is solely constructing upon its already strong safety construction, which the corporate considerably meaninglessly says is akin to “barbed wire fencing, booby traps, safety guards, acid sharks, laser scanners, and AI robotic guard canine.” Whereas it’s not talked about within the press launch, the announcement video clarified that VerifiedView could by no means come to older fashions just like the Wyze Cam Pan V1 and V2 attributable to {hardware} limitations.
Wyze says it has been pushing this replace to its hottest fashions because the starting of April, and that customers of these fashions simply must replace their firmware and app to obtain the replace. Which fashions precisely stays unclear, as Wyze additionally talked about that another fashions will obtain the updates over the approaching weeks and months, however once more didn’t specify which fashions they had been referring to.
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