Amazon's Ring dominates the growing video doorbell market. But little is known about the company's secretive R&D lab in Kiev, Ukraine. Here's the story of how customer video footage is sent there for image recognition purposes, despite internal concerns. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/at-rings-r-d-team-security-gaps-and-rookie-engineers …

The office, which opened in 2016 with three people, was originally going to be in San Francisco. But Ring founder Jamie Siminoff (of 'Shark Tank' rejection fame) opted to move the operation to Ukraine, where software engineers are cheap and entry-level employees are cheaper still

Today, more than 500 people work in Ring's Kiev offices. Most of them are contractors earning ~$5 per hour and dubbed "entrepreneurs" by the Ukrainian government, which allows Ring to save big on taxes. (More on that here: https://www.contactukraine.com/taxation/private-entrepreneur-taxation …) A typical contract agreement:

As Ring's Ukraine office was growing like a weed last year, the company was burning $10-$12M in cash per month. This put a lot of pressure on Siminoff, who spent much of his time meeting with investors, to quickly demonstrate improvements to Ring's flagship video doorbell product

From the beginning, there were signs of trouble. Customer videos from around the world were streamed unencrypted in the Ukraine office, despite concerns from management there about sharing data with employees who lacked training in how to handle sensitive user information.

In addition to storing users’ video history, Ring stores metadata, including home Wi-Fi network information and timestamps for when motion is detected. Security experts we talked with said the arrangement was "higher risk" for customers than need be. The ACLU is also concerned:

Ring's approach to using customer videos to train its AI software stands in stark contrast to its competitors, which rely on internally generated content and open-source data. Nest's facial recognition, meanwhile, requires user input/participation and can be toggled on or off.

The more data engineers can access, though, the better for Ring's software, which relies on motion detection + advanced image recognition to alert customers in real time of activity outside their home. I talked w dozens of former Ring employees to understand how they use the info

Customer videos first go to 'data operators,' which label the footage by drawing boxes around objects, naming them with words like "dog," "car" and "person." The manual work is tedious; turnover is high. "You feel like a vegetable," one former employee explained.

Video then goes to Ring's image recognition team, which has struggled to turn the data into reliable software. Much of the team lacks the necessary experience to develop the product, while video is often mislabeled. Customers routinely complain about false positives as a result.

“At Ring, the AI isn’t very smart,” a former Ring Ukraine customer-support specialist told me. “We just apologized and said, ‘We’re working on it.’ Sometimes, it couldn’t recognize a human from a dog.”

Last year, as talks with Amazon were heating up, Ring tried to fix the problem. But after it became clear that Amazon was going to acquire the company, the project was put on the back-burner. Because at that point, "why bother?" as one former Kiev employee put it. From the story:

Ring's Ukraine office operates largely independently from its Santa Monica headquarters. Former employees told me that's by design. A lot has been written about Ring, but company officials rarely talk about its R&D lab. Many U.S. employees don't even know what the Kiev team does.

Ring doesn't want former employees there to discuss their work, either. Employees are asked to sign strict non-disclosure agreements when they leave the company. Here's an example of Ring Ukraine management reaching out to former employees to warn of the "risks" in talking to me.

Amazon has made changes since acquiring Ring earlier this year, designed to limit access to some information + improve basic security measures. But insiders say Ukraine employees have already found ways around them.

A Ring spokeswoman told me the company takes "the privacy and security of our customers’ personal information extremely seriously.”



As recently as October, however, even low-level employees in Ukraine were able to access sensitive user information and customer video.

You can follow @mattdrange.

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