I empathize with you. We used a cam for the same reasons to monitor my MIL who was living in our house. Your situation is tougher with the building situation.
There are certainly camera systems available that provide secure communications but you’re in any case giving up one piece you can’t overcome; the physical security of the hardware. Before my MIL had gotten worse and we could still leave for a few days, we’d put our echo show in her room. The aides never thought of it as security and we could use it two-way. It doesn’t serve the same purpose, though.
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I don’t think there’s much disagreement on this board about that. I’m at the point to say “that ship has sailed”.
Where they go from here is important as they’ve certainly had a teachable moment. They’re also going to get tested, as we can bet hackers are having a good old time taking shots at all their hardware. The bad press isn’t lost on that circus.
The actions and response times to current or future issues will be the make or break for them.
Yes! Before any experience with security cams, I considered using an old cell phone with the Alfred app operating 24/7 so I could monitor from a distance. And I thought about the Show as well. But I am 500 miles away and even the simplest option has confounding factors because Mom can’t troubleshoot, even if it’s just a glitch that might require rebooting, resetting or any interaction with it at all ideally, much less installing software updates or relogging into wifi if connection is lost.
Is the Show fairly stable? I’d go back to considering that if it’s most likely to be “set it and forget it”. It wouldn’t alert in the same way as a security cam but it might be better than nothing.
Thanks for the suggestions.
Would Bitdefender’s white paper about the vulnerabilities be helpful? See the outlined “download research paper here” button under the Vulnerabilities at a Glance section of the following article.
https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/labs/vulnerabilities-identified-in-wyze-cam-iot-device/
Not exactly Bill. A listener on port 80 doesn’t mean it returns a valid response a browser understands. Script based web services often run on port 80 and don’t generate anything a browser would understand. You would have to follow the bitdefender recipe. Seemingly: *The card contents can be viewed through the hello.cgi functionality located at /cgi-bin/hello.cgi; then the files can be *
downloaded through the /SDPath/ path.
Given a decent net connection, our show is incredibly stable. It doesn’t have a night vision mode, however. You can control it with the app and I believe it has some other abilities it didn’t have a few years ago to monitor its location.
Isn’t it sad that you can find a kennel to put your dog in that has a “kennel cam” but we can’t do the same for our loved ones?
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Absolutely. Even worse, the ALF balked at the idea of my putting a cam in Mom’s room because “it would violate the privacy rights of the staff.” However, they did offer the option of allowing me to install a self-contained trail cam with no remote access and only if they would have exclusive access to its sd card contents. WTF?!
If there IS a vulnerability, Wyze should disclose that there IS a vulnerability (not necessarily the full details) so that customers can make an informed decision as to whether or not to continue operating the cameras until a patch has been issued. Especially if the issue is going to take 3 years to fix.
How would you feel if the manufacturer of the lock on your front door knew that the lock just didn’t work but didn’t want to tell you until a fix could be offered (which in this particular case would be 3 years)? Whereas if you knew the lock didn’t work you could take matters into your own hands and switch the lock out yourself.
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I suppose by Wyze’s twisted logic, even just letting the public know there’s a vulnerability would set criminals off on a scavenger hunt to figure out what the vulnerability is and how to exploit it.
But I believe as a practical matter, the crux of Wyze’s silence lies in its fear that it would lose customers or sales and its own immediate survival or convenience was judged to be more important.
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Oop. I hadn’t seen these before.
I don’t know how much more national recognition of Wyze’s mishandling it’s gonna take before the big retailers stop selling Wyze hardware in order to distance themselves from the situation.
Especially when added to its other concurrent security lapse;
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All ears, love it! 
Won’t Wyze security engineers and their new hires:
Though we kicked off development quickly, we want to respond quicker in the future and have made significant advances in our security infrastructure, including hiring a team of dedicated security engineers to work exclusively on responses to security events and strengthening protection.
love the chance to hone their game in the never ending quest for truth justice and a better tomorrow?
Lol, I say “look, you’re all ears!” sometimes too. If I could only set her “detection zone” to exclude anyone walking by on the front sidewalk
Security pros are, pardon the pun, a breed unto themselves. I know a few and they command big $$ and share the same intensity that my buddy in the picture does when it comes to security. While they have to deal with challenges at times, their main job is to prevent them in the first place.
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Yeah, isn’t that kind of them. I get that it could be a PITA to them, but then again, if you have nothing to hide… I could relate a few experiences we had when my wife’s mom had to spend short times in an ALF but I’m guessing we’d just be swapping war stories.
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A friend adopted a Mexican street dog, a little terrier who’s adapted well to pampering, seems to have got his ‘alert’ dialed-in, not too little, not too much, she thinks he’s psychic, his nemeses are the squirrels who bomb him (and my friend) from the flame (?) trees with dagger-like seed pods, then chatter cruelly while he licks his paw…
The breed
Do any of your pals of ‘the breed’ laugh like T.Hulse in Amadeus?
When they’re among ‘people,’ I mean, doing it when alone don’t count… 
What does this have to do with security and wyze?
Well, she had a situation virtually demanding a v3 aimed through a window to counter the mischief of local ne’er-do-wells in her open backyard.
After speaking a few minutes we mutually agreed her radar pup was sufficient - and the degree of mischief insufficient, to warrant the electronic eye.
They’re addictive, y’know. Watch out.
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Good grief, this is none-sense. How much does Wyze pay you?
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Such an interesting response. I think we are mostly in agreement except two small points.
- Context isn’t victim-blaming. I mean, we aren’t even sure there are victims but let’s assume for the sake of argument that there are. I would fully support blaming Wyze because it would be completely Wyze’s fault. Anyone who interprets my remarks otherwise is confusing painting a full picture of the actual risk with the assignment of blame.
- You can’t have it both ways. “…we all need to try harder and be much more vigilant in our efforts to protect our privacy.” We are in absolute agreement! We do all need to try harder! but those same people who don’t understand technology can’t then claim there is a profound and huge security breach. They fundamentally don’t have the understanding. Now I’m glad to sit down with whoever and explain the implications of this breach and how it could have impacted them and why I would rate the severity as relatively low.
If someone then refuses to learn about the technologically complex they are condemning then they have lost the right to contribute because they aren’t, they are spreading misinformation.
So I feel completely comfortable educating my family and members of the public that giving out their wifi password is the technological equivalent of giving someone the key to your house. The vast majority of people are trustworthy and won’t abuse your trust but it isn’t without risk.
Let me emphasize, in case it’s unclear, we are in total agreement that Wyze was irresponsible (see my post above). We are in total agreement that Wyze has an obligation to inform their customers (see my post above).
Maybe it’s silly to want reason and nuance to prevail in this age of extremism and emotional newsporn around every corner but I don’t see any way out of our collective information quagmire than, when possible, trying to fight oversimplification of complex systems.
All the best, Mx. Beans.
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I truly liked that expression! 
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