Home security service Ring provides customers with a false sense of security by failing to protect its Wi-Fi cameras from hackers, according to a class-action lawsuit.
A Ring customer in Alabama filed the suit on Thursday against Ring and parent company Amazon, citing a breach of a system he had installed at his home and a “swath of hacking incidents across the country” resulting from Ring’s “defective design.”
“Ring does not fulfill its core promise of providing privacy and security for its customers, as its camera systems are fatally flawed,” John Baker Orange says in his complaint, which alleges claims for negligence and invasion of privacy.
As Business Insider reports, Ring “has come under fire in recent weeks for security breaches including a case where a hacker was able to gain control of a Ring camera in a child’s bedroom.”
The company has blamed the breaches on poor password security in the hacked accounts but Orange cited its “lax security standards and protocols.”
In particular, Ring has been negligent in requiring users only to enter a basic password and not offering two-factor authentication, he alleged, adding, “it allows its products … to be set up in a manner that makes [them] unreasonably susceptible to hacking.”
In Orange’s own case, the suit says, hackers accessed the Ring camera he had installed over his garage and began talking to his three children through the camera’s two-way speaker system while they were playing basketball in the driveway.
“A company that provides security devices for one’s home needs to have a heightened focus on ensuring those devices are actually secure,” John Yanchunis, the plaintiff’s attorney, told Business Insider.
The suit comes a month after a group of Democratic U.S. senators wrote Amazon, expressing concerns about Ring’s doorbell cameras following reports that some Ukraine-based employees had access to video footage from customers´ homes.
“If hackers or foreign actors were to gain access to this data, it would not only threaten the privacy and safety of the impacted Americans; it could also threaten U.S. national security,’ the senators said.
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