Wyze is a Chinese Company ( Discussion Continued)

[carverofchoice]

I know this was probably passed down from somewhere else on the internet, so please don’t think I am putting the blame for this on anyone in particular. A lot of it is likely misunderstandings passed down through something like that telephone game until people really believe the misunderstandings, but I do have to say that almost everything being passed on in this post is misrepresented.

@docee

Wyze is a Chinese company disguised as an American company. Its owner is a Chinese company called Hualai.

Hualai is only ONE of Wyze’s suppliers. This would be similar to saying Walmart is owned by Frito-Lay because Walmart sells Dorritos. Or that the company who built your home is owned by Lowes or Home Depot because they got some lumber or sheetrock there, even though they got other supplies from other businesses too.

Hualai did not make the Headphones, or the scale, or the robot vacuum or the watch, or surge protector, or lock, or memory card, sprinkler, etc, Hualai is ONE of the major manufacturers they contract with to make hardware for them, but they do not own Wyze and they have nothing to do with several of Wyze’s other products.

As a business owner, I have done business with several other companies in various ways. None of them owned us, and we didn’t own them. Some we did A LOT with, and some we did a little bit with. We didn’t have a relationship of parent company, or subsidiary, or even partnership or anything like that. We weren’t related to each other in any way like that. We simply had a relationship of "I pay you to make or do this one thing or x things for me, and then I use that however I want for my other business relationships or consumer relationships. Nearly EVERY business works this way. If this is something anyone is opposed to, then you basically can’t ever interact with ANY business.

If you want to see who some of Wyze’s other suppliers are, you can look here:

List of Wyze Suppliers, Which Products They Supply, & More

In mid-May 2021 I compiled a list of all publicly known Wyze Suppliers/Manufacturers and What products we have records of them supplying to Wyze. You will note that contrary to popular myth, NONE OF THE SUPPLIERS ARE XIAOMI, though Xiaomi does use a couple of the same suppliers/manufacturers for their products, hence the similarities or identical design for some of the products (despite differing and customized firmware, which Wyze does a much better job with). I shared the following research w…

As for TUTK, Customer provided the best information. Basically, TUTK does nothing but establish the initial P2P connection (then is no longer involved), it never gets a video feed or anything. They don’t get any data that matters…

However, if even that is too much, and a company can never contract anything out except their own in-house options, then such a person would need to get rid of EVERYTHING digital with internet connectivity. There are experiments with people creating VPNs to fully block out all direct and indirect connections to just the major tech companies everyone loves to hate: Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. and run their lives without them. Turns out they could hardly use any company or any internet because directly or indirectly nearly every company has some association with other companies who get “data” of some sort from those business relationships. They tried blocking those companies out of their life for a month individually, then all of them together. It was basically impossible unless they just wanted to go offgrid and offline for a month. It was pretty close to that.

My point is that we should not be surprised if Wyze or anyone else contracts out little things that don’t matter. TUTK and other things aren’t getting our private data or video feeds or profile information. You can’t go to any other competitor and not have the same problems. Every tech company has partnerships with other companies to do specialized things for them, that doesn’t mean anything important or secure or private is being exposed.

There is no need to try to stir people into a frenzy of fear and panic over things that being very much misrepresented for drama and excitement, or from simple misunderstanding. Wyze IS the parent company of themselves, they have business relationships with other companies just like nearly any successful company, they pay people to manufacture and supply them with hardware and they customize their own firmware and do a lot of other stuff with it. Wyze maintains control of their own firmware and connectivity, not Hualai, or China or anyone else. I am glad that not everyone likes Wyze because it keeps competition in the market. I very much support people choosing and supporting other competitors too for this reason…just don’t naively assume any other company is absolutely 100% in-house only with no other business relationships or any data ever involved with contractors or other businesses in some ways. Even mega-corps like Google and Apple and Amazon have had contractors they hire leak info about them, such as how their AI assistants spy on us, and record stuff and are accessed by people who are not even employees of their company (and could technically even be downloaded and sold by them to anyone). Seriously, Wyze is no less secure than basically any other company you could do business with. Even the most high security in the world like the NSA gets things leaked by contractors or employees.

Just take your own reasonable precautions and try to live life the best you can without panic and obsessiveness and life will be awesome.

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EDIT: In a comment farther down the thread I post a response directly from a Wyze Employee on this subject. I am now going to copy it here into this post as well so people just starting to read this thread can read an official Wyze response right away without having to sort through all the extra unofficial opinions first:

@carverofchoice

I was actually the one who brought it up in the Reddit AMA so we could get it addressed from a real Wyze source. Here is what WyzeShawn said about this issue for those who would prefer to read it here instead going to an external source to search through and try to find the applicable posts (but I added direct links to each comment for those who want to go view it themselves):

Source Direct Link about Hualai & Wyze Trademark

ME : This isn’t Cam Plus specific, but forums have been pointing out that one of your suppliers, Hualai, has been granted the Wyze Trademark in China. Can anyone from Wyze please explain why your supplier, Hualai, holds the WYZE trademark in China since you are not a subsidiary of Hualai?

WyzeShawn : “ Hualai is one of Wyze’s ODM hardware partners. Right now, we are focused on building enough cameras given the materials shortage and cost increase. We will be looking into the trademark question when we have time. ”

Source Direct Link - Another question of mine where he clarifies a little bit more about Hualai:

Me : Since you have a close relationship with Hualai (one of your suppliers who also helps with dev support sometimes), I saw on their page showing what their AI can do (look at the second section that shows an animation of their AI capabilities):

https://www.hualaikeji.com/en/technical

Will you ever have your AI do like they show here and highlight what it is detecting as an object and label that box with a confidence ratio (so we know what it is actually identifying correctly or incorrectly instead of guessing what in the frame it thinks is the object)?

Will you add in thousands of objects like they have done?

WyzeShawn : Awesome question. This is probably the first time I’ve seen a question like this!

First, I want to make it clear, Hualai is one of Wyze’s ODM hardware partners. All Wyze AI technologies are completely developed in-house independently. The Wyze AI team has a fully functional AI team ranging from data annotation and preparation, model building, engineering deploying etc. We also have very strict policies about data and technology access.

For the bounding box on the images, that’s one of the things that could be interesting to add to the video. It could help our users to quickly identify the object and improve the detection result if anything is wrongly identified. We’ll review the priority of this requirement later after this event!

For other types of objects, we surely want Wyze Cam to learn to recognize more objects in the future, but we also want to make sure we are a good teacher here (by ensuring the accuracy of the detection). So, in short, we are working on it!

(He technically answered the bottom one first, then answered the top one afterward…I just wanted to post them in order of most relevant to our current topic first)

I can’t speak for anyone else, but it sure sounds like Wyze is pretty emphatic that they aren’t owned by Hualai, and Wyze is totally separate just as most of us have been saying. I love how he basically said they had more important concerns with their supplier at the moment (getting enough camera’s built by them is a higher priority for them right now than beefing with them about the China trademark that they don’t need right at the moment anyway), but they’ll get around to investigating it. They’re busy enough with another lawsuit against Xiaomi and Roboroc right now anyway. One battle at a time.

I thought he was also pretty clear about how their AI stuff is all independent and in-house with strict data/technology access policies. I think he did a pretty decent job addressing this “Hualai/China” nonsense. I am grateful he chose to humor me on those questions so I could post a response from a Wyze employee here.