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Anker’s Eufy lied to us about the security of its security cameras. Despite claims of only using local storage, Eufy has been uploading identifiable footage to the cloud.
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- Title
- Anker's Eufy lied to us about the security of its security cameras
- Authors
- Sean Hollister
- Published
- Dec 1 2022
- Word count
- 1232 words
Follow up to this article:
Anker’s Eufy deleted these 10 privacy promises instead of answering our questions
You can also tell they had those promises up until very recently because Linus Sebastian (of Linus Tech Tips) showed their website, with one of said promises, live on stream not too long ago (← link to an official clip on the matter).
I really appreciated such an uncompromising take from a high profile channel on this - Anker outright lied, that’s what matters, and anyone even slightly trying to justify their actions has missed the point. The insanely bad security practices compound the issue, but incompetence could at least be fixed by hiring better engineers; the fact they chose to take the data in the first place, though? That’s malice, and that’s an awful lot harder to come back from.
“It’s a shame we can’t work with them anymore, because they’ve been a good partner up until now” is exactly the level of seriousness that’s warranted. No equivocation, just frustration that their otherwise genuinely good products are now tainted to the point that nobody should buy them in future.
To be clear: Linus and Co. have committed to not working with Anker (parent company of Eufy) on a previous stream (timestamped; see: 6:16). ← The clip is from Nov 29. The actual show (not timestamped) is from Nov 26.
It's not a sudden change of pace as of recently. They went with a resounding "fuck that" way back when the news first broke out.
I know a lot of people are complaining about this (for very good reason) but I'm mostly just disappointed because Anker have been my go-to phone cable brand for years.
I'll need to find a new place, so I'm taking suggestions if anyone has any.
Ditto. Anker is one of the very few brands I actually trust when it comes to chargers, cables, surge protectors, power banks, etc. So I'm super disappointed in them over this too.
However, despite being disappointed, in all honesty I will probably still keep buying products from them since their prices are hard to beat, and they have yet to fail on me or damage any of my electronics. And the only other companies I can say that about are APC and Belkin, who I also occasionally buy stuff from too.
So if you're looking for an alternative to Anker, Belkin is who I would recommend for most things. Belkin products tend to be a bit more expensive than Anker, and they have less product variety, but they're also incredibly reliable. I would also recommend APC too, but they only make surge protectors and battery backup/UPS systems, and also tend to be much more expensive than the others since they typically have lifetime warranties, and come with insurance against equipment damage.