Amazon-owned Ring, a maker of home security cameras, has a number of third-party trackers on its Android app, which allows it to share users’ personally identifiable information (PII) to companies such as Facebook, and Google-owned Crashlytics, an investigation done by advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found out. Three trackers that were found to be sharing information with third-parties are not even mentioned in Ring’s privacy policy EFF said, and added that the list of trackers was last updated a year and eight months ago. EFF did not clarify if Ring was selling users’ data to all these companies. “Ring claims to prioritize the security and privacy of its customers, yet time and again we’ve seen these claims not only fall short, but harm the customers and community members who engage with Ring’s surveillance system...This data is given to parties either only mentioned briefly, buried on an internal page users are unlikely to ever see, or not listed at all.” — EFF “The danger in sending even small bits of information is that analytics and tracking companies are able to combine these bits together to form a unique picture of the user’s device,” EFF noted. This tracks users’ interactions with other apps, and worryingly, happens without notifying them, or soliciting explicit consent from them. “Even when this information is not misused and employed for precisely its stated purpose (in most cases marketing), this can lead to a whole host of social ills,” the organisation said. Information being shared included users' names, email…
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