Wyze is stamping security videos with user IDs. Here’s why

Picture this: You fire up the app for your security camera and scroll through your feed, only to find videos from perfect strangers—and if you’re seeing someone else’s videos, there’s a chance other users are seeing your videos, too. 

It’s a scary scenario, and it happened to Wyze early last year, when a third-party server outage triggered a breach that allowed roughly 13,000 Wyze users to see thumbnails of video events captured by other Wyze users. 

Wyze says it’s taken a variety of steps to prevent further privacy breaches, ranging from default two-factor authentication and OAuth login support to Google MASA certification and NCC penetration testing. But now, the budget smart home brand says it has a new safeguard to keep prying eyes off your security videos, even if they do get leaked into the wild. 

Wyze is calling its new security measure “VerifiedView,” and in a nutshell, it affixes a unique ID onto every video, image, or live feed shot by your Wyze camera. That ID must be matched to your account before anyone can see your captured Wyze footage—and if it can’t, those trying to access your videos will be blocked. 

Specifically, Wyze says VerifiedView works by writing a hashed version of your user ID into your Wyze cam’s firmware. Then, whenever your camera captures a video, an image, or a live feed, the hashed user ID is embedded into the metadata of that footage—and that embedding process happens on the camera itself, not in the cloud. 

If someone then tries to access your Wyze videos in the Wyze app or via an API, VerifiedView checks the ID stamp on the footage, and if it doesn’t match the ID of the viewer, they’ll get a “403 error” when trying to open the captured content, Wyze says. 

In other words, VerifiedView will act as a last line of defense against a “completely unimaginable” scenario like an overloaded cloud caching tool that leaks your Wyze camera footage. (We actually can imagine that scenario, but let’s move on.) 

This news story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best security cameras.

To enable VerifiedView on your Wyze camera, all you need to do is ensure your Wyze app and your cam’s firmware are up to date. Wyze says it’s been pushing the necessary software to its app and hardware since April, and the rollout will continue over the “coming weeks.” 

Wyze notes that those using older versions of the Wyze app will still be able to view their camera footage without a VerifiedView check for the “next few months.” After that, presumably, you’ll be locked out of your own security videos until you update the app.