Amazon’s Ring app shares loads of your personal info, report finds

Enlarge / A Ring camera doorbell. (credit: Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images)

Amazon's Ring line of home surveillance products has come under intense scrutiny in recent months following a seemingly endless litany of worrying revelations about Ring's police partnerships, account security, vulnerabilities, employee snooping, and sharing of extremely detailed location data. Now, we have a new report to add to the pile: it seems the app that customers use to manage and control a Ring camera is sending all kinds of personal data around as well.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation took a deep dive into the Android version of the Ring app, which it determined to be "packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers' personally identifiable information." Moreover, the EFF adds, this data sharing happens "without meaningful user notification or consent and, in most cases, no way to mitigate the damage done."

The personal data sent by Ring seems to go to four main recipients, the EFF found: Branch, ApplsFlyer, MixPanel, and Facebook. Those recipients presumably combine data they gather from the Ring app with data they collect from other sources-either information they collect in-house or buy/trade from other third parties-to build a fleshed-out digital doppelginger profile for any given user.

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