After months of scandals around the security camera Ring and its controversial partnerships with law enforcement, perhaps it was inevitable that the Amazon-owned company would face a far more common sort of scandal for sellers of internet-connected consumer surveillance devices: They can be hacked. After an extremely creepy incident in which hackers cracked a Ring camera inside a child's bedroom and used it to talk to three young girls, it's clear that Ring doesn't just raise questions over how consumers should share their devices' surveillance data with the police. It's also a quintessential example of the broader problem of people putting insecure internet-of-things devices into their most private spaces.
And Ring wasn't the only one caught up in a child surveillance scandal lately. So was Toys "R" Us, which is back after its bankruptcy and stood accused of surveilling children after reports about its use of high-tech sensors to track shoppers around stores. The company behind those sensors, however, claims that the cameras are designed not to register people shorter than 4 feet tall.
Meanwhile, another long-running surveillance story—the FBI inspector general's investigation into the origins of its own Trump-Russia probe and the FISA-enabled monitoring of Trump staffer Carter Page, who was suspected of ties to Russia—concluded in a 500-page report that exculpated the FBI of any partisan political motivations in the probe while also pointing out serious flaws in its adherence to legal protocols. Another equally complex surveillance scare is coming to a head, as rural US wireless providers are resisting an FCC proposal to million iranian accounts breached
