Take a look at our top picks for the best smart home products, and you will no longer find the Wyze brand among them. That’s a big shift compared to past guides where we’ve selected Wyze as an affordable, all-purpose home security brand for cameras, sensors and more. So what happened? We’d like to take time for a fuller explanation about Wyze’s current struggles with security and privacy, and why we’re changing our recommendations.
Over the past few years, Wyze has suffered from repeated data leaks and security breaches, including a 2019 user data leak, exposed databases in 2022, and exposed video files that same year. More recently, Wyze has seen breaches in both September 2023 and February 2024 that let at least 13,000 people see actual video footage from the Wyze security cams of other users.
So far, our attempts to contact Wyze for a statement on the matter have been unsuccessful. When addressing the latest February 2024 security flaw, Wyze forum representative WyzeDave noted that: “Our engineering team has added a new layer of verification between users and event videos to prevent this from happening again. We’ve also removed the client library and will not be using caching until we can find a new client library and stress-test it for extreme scenarios like we saw on Friday. This investigation is not wrapped up yet, we will continue to discuss as a leadership team and evaluate what needs to change to better protect our users.”
How CNET responds to home security breaches like these
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Trusting a security company with your personal information requires a good track record.
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