Why is this camera reporting to China?

I have 4 wyze cams and this one is listed as reporting to China.

What makes you think it is reporting to China? “Nova Electronics (Shanghai)” is the name of the manufacturer associated with the MAC address of your camera. In other words, it means the camera you have was manufactured by that company. The first 3 octets of the MAC address are unique for each vendor, but the 1st three octets of my Wyze camera (2C:AA:8E) does not match yours , and mine resolves to “Wyze Labs, Inc”.

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Did you buy your cam from Wyze? There have been numerous reports here of Wyze clones.

Did you happen to plug in a wyze sense bridge into that camera. Similar situation on my end here and found nova electronics listed on my network. Associated with cam that bridge is on.

Why is the post being removed?

Because I screwed up. I thought the address you were listing was the address you thought was in China. Hey, it was 2 AM, lol.

All of my cams have been bought directly from wyze.
Here are the 4 cans I have from Wyze.

I haven’t seen a response to smcnally75’s question – What makes you think it is reporting to China? You are just listing manufacturer names.

Just like @smcnally75 is mentioning. The MAC address of each device on your network has a manufacturers origin of who the address is registered to. Mind you this is not a highly controlled regulated database; its mostly so people can lookup what company manufactured the device (or communication chip). There are errors in the database just like most databases and not everything may be resolving to Wyze.

@ryan.bonner is confusing the MAC manufacturer with outgoing communication from his router. Looks similar to Eero’s interface. I have seen Brother wireless printers MAC address resolve to companies I have never heard of in 3rd world countries. It does not mean its phoning home like ET. (Dating myself a little by referencing a Spielberg movie many younger people never heard of).

No, they are not necessarily talking to a server in China just because the MAC associates with a company based in China. Now if someone dove really far into the rabbit hole on this one and traced all the servers the camera is talking to and one just happens to be based in china then the statement would be true.

The answer would be that it is not reporting to china (or whatever country) it is communicating with the information necessary to provide all the functionality intended by Wyze.

Think of it like presuming everyone associated with a specific major religion is an extremist.

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Since he bought all the cameras from Wyze, I surmise they are sourcing the network interface card from multiple vendors to meet production quotas.

Most of my cams come up as wyze… had one come up as ieee registration authority which traced back by ip to my pan cam and the other odd one on my network… nova (Shanghai) is the camera with the wyze sense bridge attached to it.

Like the ET reference as well! Not the only old one in the room lol

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I just had one of my cameras re-connect to my network with with Nova manufacture ID - it has been running for a year with the IEEE identifier. Blocked it out of my network and monitoring the others to see if any switch. Assuming its a naming table resolution hiccup the others will either follow or if not, I will restart the device and see how it comes back on to the network.

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I have one that currently has a hardware address other than what is on it’s bottom plate. I’ve seen complaints here that there is still a bug they thought they squashed that allows the HW address to change randomly. So that can come into play too.

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What would be ideal is if someone were to explain to anyone who is concerned, exactly how to trace data packets to their destination. If, in fact, Wyze cams are only sending data to Wyze servers in the US, it should be easy to prove with WireShark or any packet sniffer. Tell us publicly how to verify it rather than refusing to address the issue by casting doubt on the original poster.

However, to the original poster, if , like me, you have read claims of this online and are concerned that Wyze has somehow made a deal with their Chinese production company to build these cameras for so cheap as long as they get to keep a copy of all data transmitted, I can assure you that there are much better, faster, easier, and less suspicious ways of doing just that without exposing it to the end user. Once the data is on Wyze servers (supposedly encrypted), a Chinese mirror computer could sync the data on their own vpn without having the cameras do anything.

And another thing to consider is the lag such a jump would introduce to the Cam. It would be pretty laggy like Ring or something. So they aren’t likely going to waste the few resources on the can to plot a route through China before getting to their own server.

But like I said: it would be nice if people offering support were more direct and less likely to cast doubt by asking questions like “what makes you think that?” Who really cares what, this is a common theme about Wyze cams. Address the issue or link is to the blog post that already addressed the issue, please.

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I did address the issue. He thought the manufacturer name meant it was talking to China. It is simply a manufacturer name, and may not even be a real name, because the cams have a bug that allows them to occasionally change their hardware address.

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I don’t think that’s the issue. It may have been one piece of the puzzle, but it’s not solved. Does the firmware come from the manufacturer. Because that would explain why the cam would connect to Chinese servers. Is Wyze trading access to cam streams for a break in price? I think the original poster was confused about the MAC address as just part of the problem. The part he thought he could verify. The bigger issue still exists and needs to be addressed.

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So feel free to address it.

I don’t work for Wyze. I just got my first order of Wyze cams about a week ago.

I am just a fellow user like you. I addressed his concern about the manufacturer name. There are other threads on this if you want to pursue this further, some of which have responses by actual Wyze employees.

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