Under their roof
What has happened to the photos, footage, passwords, and gadgets people kept on someone else's computer. 26 cases, each dated and sourced, with what we would do instead.
They can look at it.
A camera or a microphone that streams to a company is one that company's people can log into. That is not a theory. It is on the record.
- 2023
Ring let its own staff watch customers' bedrooms.
The Federal Trade Commission said Ring gave employees and contractors broad access to customers' video for years. One employee watched thousands of recordings from women's bedrooms and bathrooms before anyone noticed. Weak account protections also let attackers take over about 55,000 accounts, and some of them used the cameras to harass the people inside, including children. Amazon paid $5.8 million to settle in 2023.
The company that sold you the camera should not be able to watch it.
Source FTC press release(opens in a new tab)
Cameras that record to a box in your building - 2021
An ADT technician watched customers for four years.
A technician in the Dallas area added his own email address to more than 200 customers' alarm accounts, sometimes telling them it was to test the system, and logged in more than 9,600 times to watch women in their homes. He picked the houses himself while on service calls. He went to federal prison for a little over four years.
Nobody at a company should be able to add themselves to your cameras.
Source Department of Justice(opens in a new tab)
Cameras that record to a box in your building - 2022
A Roomba photographed a woman on the toilet. The picture ended up on Facebook.
iRobot's test vacuums sent pictures from inside people's homes to a contractor that hires gig workers to label them for training. Some of those workers, in Venezuela, posted the images to social media, including a woman on the toilet and a child. The testers said they never understood that people would see their homes. In December 2025 iRobot went bankrupt, and by January 2026 it belonged to its Chinese contract manufacturer, along with whatever it knows about its customers' floor plans.
A gadget that maps your house should answer to you, not to whoever buys the company next.
Sources MIT Technology Review(opens in a new tab)The Robot Report(opens in a new tab)
Devices we check for local control before you buy - 2025
Amazon stopped letting Echo owners keep their voice at home.
Some Echo speakers had a setting that handled requests on the device instead of sending the recording to Amazon. On March 28, 2025 Amazon removed it for everyone, because its new AI assistant needs the recordings in its cloud. Owners who still asked Amazon not to save what they said were told some features would stop working.
A privacy setting you were sold should not vanish in an update.
Source TechCrunch(opens in a new tab)
A smart home that runs on your own box
They can hand it over.
Once your footage sits on a company's servers, it is the company's to give. The law mostly agrees, which is a story of its own. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice.
How your data lost its warrant, in four dates
- 2022
Ring gave police footage without asking the owners.
Amazon told Senator Ed Markey that in the first half of 2022 Ring handed recordings to police eleven times with no warrant and no word to the owner, because Ring itself judged each case an emergency. That is still Ring's written policy. It decides, and it tells you afterward unless it decides not to.
If the recording is in your building, the request comes to your door.
Sources Senator Markey's office(opens in a new tab)Ring law enforcement guidelines(opens in a new tab)
Footage that needs a warrant served to you - 2026
Ring dropped a surveillance deal only after the public noticed.
In September 2025 Ring started letting police departments ask its customers for footage again, through the Neighbors app and Axon's evidence system. A month later it announced the same pipe would connect to Flock Safety, whose license plate cameras feed police departments and federal agencies. Then a Super Bowl ad showed a neighborhood of doorbell cameras hunting for a lost dog, the backlash was immediate, and within the week Ring cancelled the Flock deal, saying it would have taken more work than expected. The police requests and the emergency policy above stayed.
A policy that changes with the public mood is not a promise.
Sources Ring blog(opens in a new tab)CNBC on the announcement(opens in a new tab)
Cameras that record to a box in your building
Your insurer can ask too
Every homeowners policy has a cooperation clause. When you make a claim, you owe the insurer the evidence: footage of the break-in or the fire, receipts and records, an interview under oath if they ask for one. If you took a discount for cameras or an alarm, expect to prove they exist and work. Refuse, and the claim can be denied and the policy cancelled or not renewed, depending on the state.
A cancellation for not cooperating follows you. The claim, paid or denied, sits in the CLUE database that insurers share for seven years, and question two on the standard homeowners application asks whether any coverage has been declined, cancelled, or non-renewed in the last three years. Answer no and you have lied on the application, which is grounds to void the new policy. Answer yes and you are shopping in a smaller, pricier market.
None of that changes under your roof, and we would not pretend it does. What changes is who they can ask. Insurers already buy access to the devices in your house: in 2015 Nest began sending Liberty Mutual and American Family a monthly report on whether a customer's smoke alarms were working, with the customer's permission and in exchange for a discount, and today's programs hand out free sensor kits on the condition that they stay installed and active, which the insurer can see. Footage on a company's servers is a second door to your house. Footage on a recorder in your closet has one door, and you decide what is relevant to the claim you made.
Sources United Policyholders on your duties after a loss(opens in a new tab)Washington insurance commissioner on CLUE(opens in a new tab)The standard application form, ACORD 80, question 2(opens in a new tab)Texas Department of Insurance on being cancelled or not renewed(opens in a new tab)Liberty Mutual and Nest, 2015(opens in a new tab)Nationwide smart home program(opens in a new tab)
They can lose it.
Companies get breached, misconfigured, and bankrupt. When it happens, the copy they held may be the only one you had.
- 2022
LastPass lost a copy of every customer's password vault.
Attackers got into LastPass's cloud backups and left with encrypted copies of customers' vaults, plus unencrypted details like the websites each person used. Strong master passwords have held. Weak ones have not. Investigators have since tied a string of cryptocurrency thefts, one of them $150 million, to vaults cracked at leisure in the years that followed.
Your password vault should not be part of someone else's breach.
Sources LastPass notice(opens in a new tab)Krebs on Security(opens in a new tab)
Vaultwarden, a password manager on your own box - 2024
Wyze showed 13,000 customers other people's cameras.
After an outage, Wyze's servers mixed up accounts as they came back online. About 13,000 people opened their app and saw thumbnails from strangers' cameras, and 1,504 of them tapped to look closer. It was the second time in six months.
Footage that never leaves your building cannot be handed to the wrong account.
Source CNN(opens in a new tab)
Cameras that record to a box in your building - 2025
23andMe's customers' DNA became an asset in a bankruptcy.
A 2023 breach exposed the personal and ancestry data of 6.9 million 23andMe customers. In 2025 the company went bankrupt, and its customers' genetic data was sold along with the rest of the business for $305 million. Attorneys general from more than 40 states stepped in to force conditions on the sale and later collected an $18 million settlement for the breach. The buyer was a nonprofit started by the company's own founder, and people can still ask for their data to be deleted. Nobody who spat in a tube in 2015 agreed to any of it.
Data you handed over once can be sold again without you.
- 2024
Google Cloud deleted a pension fund's entire account.
A blank field in a Google setup tool put UniSuper's private cloud on a one-year timer nobody knew about. When it ran out, Google deleted the fund's subscription and its data in both regions where it was stored, backups included. More than 600,000 members were locked out for about two weeks. What saved them was a separate backup with a different provider.
A backup under the same account is not an independent backup.
Source Google Cloud blog(opens in a new tab)
Backups on day one, on a drive you can hold - 2026
A PBS station lost 70 years of its archive when its storage vendor vanished.
Nine PBS in St. Louis kept more than 50 terabytes of programs, going back to 1954, with a cloud storage company. In March 2026 the company cut off access without warning. It had gone out of business. The drives sit in a Denver data center whose operator would not hand them over, because on paper they belonged to the defunct vendor, so the station went to court to keep them from being wiped.
If you cannot point to the drive, you do not have a copy.
Source Current(opens in a new tab)
Backups on day one, on a drive you can hold
They can use it however they like.
Data collected for one reason gets used for another. The terms that allow it arrive by email, if they arrive at all.
- 2022
Google kept tracking people who had turned tracking off.
Forty state attorneys general found that switching off Location History did not stop Google from collecting location through a second setting most people never saw, and that the data went into advertising. Google paid $391.5 million to settle.
Off should mean off.
Source Michigan Attorney General(opens in a new tab)
A photo library, map included, on your own drive - 2022
Twitter used security phone numbers to sell ads.
People gave Twitter a phone number or email address to protect their accounts with two-step login. Twitter also fed that information to advertisers to target them. More than 140 million people were affected, and the company paid a $150 million penalty.
Information collected to protect you should not be used to profile you.
- 2024
Photobucket rewrote its terms so it could sell your photos to train AI.
Photobucket holds about 13 billion photos, many uploaded before 2010 by people who forgot they were there. In late 2023 it changed its terms to let it license them for AI training, faces included, and in 2024 its chief executive said he was shopping the library to AI companies. According to a class action a federal court allowed to go forward, users got an email with a window to object, silence counted as consent, and the only other choice was to have their photos deleted.
Free photo hosting lasts until the photos themselves become the product.
Source PetaPixel(opens in a new tab)
Immich, a photo library on your own drive - 2024
Apple switched on photo scanning without asking.
iOS 18 quietly turned on a feature that sends information about the places in your photos to Apple's servers so it can name landmarks. Apple's list of new features did not mention it, and the photos already on the phone were included. Apple encrypts what it sends and says it cannot see the pictures, and there is no sign it is used for ads. That is a smaller sin than the rest of this page. It is here because the default was on, and you had to go looking to find out.
Anything that leaves the house should be off until you turn it on.
Source Macworld(opens in a new tab)
Immich, a photo library on your own drive - 2025
GM sold what its cars saw drivers doing to the insurance industry.
Millions of GM cars quietly logged every trip through OnStar, with speed, hard braking, and fast acceleration, and GM sold the records to two data brokers that insurers buy from. Some drivers found out when their premiums jumped. One of them pulled his LexisNexis file and found 258 pages covering 640 trips. The Federal Trade Commission said the sign-up was misleading, and in 2026 GM was barred from selling driving data to those brokers for five years.
A thing you paid for should not report on you to the people who set your rates.
Sources FTC complaint, 2025(opens in a new tab)FTC final order, 2026(opens in a new tab)
They can change the deal.
Free becomes paid. Included becomes premium. A device that worked yesterday needs a subscription or a signature today.
- 2021
Google Photos ended unlimited free storage.
For six years Google Photos promised free, unlimited backup of your pictures, and more than a billion people took it up. In June 2021 new uploads started counting against a 15 GB cap, and anyone with a real library was steered toward a monthly plan. The pictures did not move. The price did.
Unlimited lasts until the company changes the terms.
Source Google blog(opens in a new tab)
Immich, a photo library on your own drive - 2020
Wink gave its customers one week to start paying.
Wink sold smart home hubs with free service for six years. In May 2020 it announced that in seven days the free service would end, and any hub without a $4.99 monthly subscription would stop controlling the lights, locks, and thermostats wired to it. After the outcry it extended the deadline by one more week.
A hub you cannot run yourself is a subscription waiting to start.
Source Consumer Reports(opens in a new tab)
Home Assistant, which works when the internet does not - 2024
Roku locked TVs until owners agreed to new terms.
In March 2024 Roku TVs and players put up a screen with new dispute terms and one button: Agree. Until you pressed it, the TV did nothing. The terms gave up the right to join a class action, and there was no way to keep using the set under the old ones. To opt out you had to mail a paper letter to Roku's lawyers within 30 days.
A television you paid for should not stop working until you sign something.
Source TechCrunch(opens in a new tab)
Jellyfin, on whichever box or TV you choose - 2023
Chamberlain cut off every garage door not opened through its app.
Chamberlain and LiftMaster openers come with the myQ app. In November 2023 the company deliberately blocked Home Assistant and every other outside program from talking to its openers, so the door would answer only to its own app, ads included. The Home Assistant project removed the integration and pointed people to a small board that wires into the opener and works with no cloud at all.
If the door opens only through their app, it is their door.
Source Home Assistant blog(opens in a new tab)
Garage access that works locally - 2023
Sony told PlayStation owners their purchased shows would be deleted.
In December 2023 Sony told people who had bought Discovery shows on the PlayStation store, 1,318 titles from MythBusters to Deadliest Catch, that a licensing change would erase them from their libraries at the end of the month, with no refund. After the outcry Sony signed a new license that keeps the shows for at least thirty months. They stayed because two companies made a deal, not because anyone owned them.
Bought means rented until the file is on your drive.
Source PlayStation(opens in a new tab)
Jellyfin, on whichever box or TV you choose
They can turn it off.
Hardware that depends on a server lives as long as the server does. Sometimes the company shuts it down. Sometimes it is just a bad day in Virginia.
- 2024
Google switched off every Nest Secure alarm system.
Nest Secure was a home alarm system Google sold from 2017 to 2020. On April 8, 2024 it turned off the servers behind it. The keypad, the sensors, and the app stopped working together, and Google's own support page now says not to use the system at all. Owners were offered store credit or a rival company's alarm.
An alarm should not need permission from a data center to arm.
Source Google support(opens in a new tab)
Sensors and alarms that run in the house - 2022
Amazon turned its own security cameras into paperweights.
Amazon launched Cloud Cam in 2017. On December 2, 2022 it shut the service down, and because the cameras could do nothing on their own, they stopped working that day. Every saved clip was deleted. Owners got a free Blink camera, which also runs through Amazon's servers.
A camera should not become trash because its maker closed a server.
Source GeekWire(opens in a new tab)
Cameras that record to a box in your building - 2024
Spotify bricked a gadget it had sold two years earlier.
Car Thing was a small dashboard controller Spotify sold for about $90 in 2022. In May 2024 it announced the device would stop working on December 9, 2024, and told owners to recycle it. Refunds came only after a class action was filed.
If it needs their server to turn on, they decide when it turns off.
Source Engadget(opens in a new tab)
- 2025
One bad day at an Amazon data center put doorbells, speakers, and beds out of action.
Ring, Alexa, and a long list of other products run out of Amazon's data centers in Northern Virginia. When those stumbled in December 2021, and again for most of a day in October 2025, doorbells stopped recording and speakers stopped answering. Owners of Eight Sleep smart beds found them stuck at whatever angle and temperature they were last set to, because the bed could not take an order without the cloud. Nothing in those houses was broken. The permission slip was.
Your internet can go down without taking your house down with it.
Sources AWS summary, 2025(opens in a new tab)AWS summary, 2021(opens in a new tab)Washington Post(opens in a new tab)
Home Assistant, which works when the internet does not - 2022
Google locked a father out of ten years of his life over a photo of his son.
A father in San Francisco took pictures of his toddler's swollen groin to send to the doctor. Google's automatic scanner flagged them as abuse, shut down his account, and reported him to the police. The police cleared him. Google still refused to give the account back. He lost a decade of email, every photo of his children, his documents, and his phone number, with no person to call.
Ten years of pictures should not hang on a machine's guess and an appeal form.
Source New York Times(opens in a new tab)
Immich, plus a backup we test before we leave
What we do instead.
Same six problems. Under your roof, each one has a plain answer, and none of them is a subscription.
- They can look at it
- Cameras record to a recorder in your building. There is no company account that can see them. Remote viewing runs through a private tunnel to your phone and nowhere else. Security you own
- They can hand it over
- Footage on your recorder needs a warrant, served to you, at your door. Your insurer asks you too, not a company. Either way, you know about it. Why the warrant matters
- They can lose it
- Backups on day one. A second drive in the building, and if you want it, an encrypted copy off site that only you hold the key to. Tested before we leave. What comes with a setup
- They can use it however they like
- Open source software has no advertising department. Nobody sells what it holds, because nobody else has it. The apps, in plain words
- They can change the deal
- Standard hardware, open source software, written notes, and no subscription to raise. If you ever want someone else to take over, they can. That includes leaving us. The rules we work by
- They can turn it off
- Everything we install keeps working when the internet is down. The lights, the locks, the cameras, and the files do not ask a data center for permission. Home Assistant
Some of these companies fixed the problem or paid a fine. Most did. It does not change the pattern: the decision was theirs, and you found out afterward. We are not lawyers and none of this is legal advice. It is the reason we think your stuff belongs under your roof.
Want it under your roof instead?
Call and tell us what you are paying for and what worries you. We will tell you what it takes to bring it home, and if it is not worth it, we will say so.