Eufy lost my trust.
Eufy was caught sending snapshots and metadata of events to their cloud servers. Apparently you can also access camera streams online. All unencrypted. All unauthenticated.
Granted, you need to get the URLs for all of this. But that’s just an exploit away.
There’s 2 major problems:
- Stuff is being sent to the cloud without consent
- It can be accessed without authentication, authorization, nor encryption
The first issue is bad enough. I don’t subscribe to their cloud services. There is absolutely no reason they should be storing any of my data, media, metadata, etc. I expect all of this to be kept local, as was advertised.
Sadly, that’s, now, past tense, it seems. I’m no longer seeing the marketing for local only recordings.
And this highlights another problem. When asked about this, Eufy’s response was that they store the content for notification purposes, but the content is later deleted. Further, they plan to encrypt the API. Specifically, the API.
They will not be encrypting the content. They will not be encrypting the direct links. They did not state they would be securing any of the data from public access. They plan to encrypt the API. So if you can still get the URLs, you can likely still access them.
This is a breach of trust. In fact, this likely violates privacy laws in various countries. This is definitely just a plain and clear violation of privacy.
Historically, I’ve steered people towards Eufy Security as trustworthy because you can use their cameras without the cloud stuff. Everything is locally stored! Except it’s not. Not only has Eufy broken my trust, this makes trust of others in me in question.
I really liked Eufy. I liked Anker and Soundcore. They make good products. But this breach of trust is big enough that I can’t return to the brand. I can’t trust them. Which sucks because I liked their cameras better than Unifi in terms of quality, and like Unifi, it was supposed to be safely kept in my home network and never leaving.
So it’s time for me to search for a replacement for my cameras. I recently bought a Homebase 3 preparing for support for my cameras to be added, but there’s even problems there. Everything around all of this is bad, at this point. I have a little time to return the HB3 and so I’ll be taking advantage of that.
But now I have the stress of replacing my cameras.
I think Reolink might be a good option?