Saw this article, and while not entirely correct it is going to get a lot of traction in some quarters. What annoyed me was they prominently featured Wyze products in the majority of the pictures.
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Not surprised they feature Wyze products considering apple’s latest acquisition. cough xnor.ai cough
Wyze has no one to blame but themselves for their recent security missteps and Apple’s acquisition has nothing to do with it…
One out of four photos shown means Wyze was featured prominently in a majority of photos in the article?? 
Actually 3 out of 4 photos in the version I am looking at. And yes to me that means prominently. 
However the article is factually inaccurate by stating that Wyze and Ring don’t have 2FA. Both do. And recently Ring went a step farther and made 2FA mandatory which is not common in IoT vendors. Admittedly Wyze and Ring use the weakest version which is text message based but the article made it appear 2FA was not even available which was false and purposely misleading.
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Wyze is shown in 1 of the 4* photos from the article that YOU linked. (* a Ring doorbell camera, a Osiris: IoT water pipe monitor and LiFX smart bulb were the other featured products.) 
They did get the 2FA info wrong but it’s one of about a dozen paragraphs…
Other than the massive innuendo click bait this article represents, what does this article offer? Why would China care, or further, be able to use, pictures of my driveway or back yard? So very confused here on the end game of the Chinese?
Wyze, an American company, writes the firmware and software for Wyze devices, not the Chinese. OTOH, the number of clicks this article receives is everything to them. It is their job to instill paranoia, and Wyze has posted counters in these groups again and again.
I do agree, always protect yourself from the cloud by not exposing it to your most sensitive data. Period. Have mistakes been made in the industry? You betcha. But pictures of my driveway benefiting the Chinese? C’mon!
In opposition to the article Wyze devices DO have 2FA. So use it, and stop the paranoia. Otherwise, enjoy their view of your driveway?
Yeah, I think you’re correct and the article is full of clickbait and innuendo. Some of the fear with Chinese device manufacturing is that processor chips may have back doors, regardless of who wrote the firmware, whether it’s Microsoft, Wyze, Cisco , or others. I don’t follow it that closely, but I think they actually have found these back doors in Huawei equipment which is why they were banned. This has been a concern especially with communication equipment and why some nations have banned certain manufacturers for things like new 5g cell tower equipment, etc. I think there was just a thing with that in the UK recently
I understand the fear, and lord knows backdoors might be present on foreign manufactured equipment. So why do I care about the view of my backyard is my question? Can that get me to reveal classified info, or what…?
BTW, not approving Huawei may be because the US wants to get the $$$$$. More logical, but I’m fine with that.
Sorry, not ethical, so the current US government shouldn’t be doing that (right???)
In some cases illustrations, graphics etc are statically linked. In other words they don’t change. In other cases they are dynamically linked and may change based on any number of factors including things like where your IP address is located, various cookies you may or may not have set and a few dozen other criteria.
So in short what you see is not at all necessarily what I see. The text in all likelihood stays the same but even that may slightly change in regional editions. However all that said in a free country I get to define what I consider prominent in my own opinion!
MOD NOTE: Post edited to conform to the Community Guidelines.
It may not be specifically about the view of your backyard. That’s just one camera for one person. There are countless cameras not pointing into a seemingly innocuous backyard.
Cameras can be tied to an IP address and can be associated to a location. And what might seem like an innocent view (such as a backyard), the cameras have a peripheral view the owner did not intend.
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Residential areas do not typically lend themselves to views of classified areas. Even if a classified area was in view, it would typically be miles and miles away. The resolution of these cameras can’t reveal what my neighbor is doing tens of yards away, how would a view of a supposedly classified area miles away be useful to the Chinese?
Not all cameras are pointed in back yards and occasionally a camera or device may be owned by someone much more interesting or important than me . The idea of backdoors isn’t necessarily that the people that put it there want to view all data on every device everywhere, all the time, but more of casting a large net in case they do want to use it at some point, or perhaps with network equipment they may occasionally get access to someone they deem important.
I’m not talking about Wyze, which I don’t think is subject to any of this, more in general with some electronic and computer equipment from China which has already been found to have the exploits and backdoors built in.
Also, with a network device, the problem may not be with a backdoor to use the device as intended, such as viewing a camera, but to gain access to a network for other reasons.
I’m sorry did I miss where Apple devices are made in that story?
I don’t believe you did miss that, but others may have missed why xnor.ai ended their agreement with Wyze.
It’s been discussed on this forum and Reddit and Facebook and Twitter to death. So honestly the only way you could miss it was to just plain not look.
And they got their 200 million dollars using data we provided to them for free.