Anker's security cameras brand Eufy quietly removed 10 commitments from its privacy page, including encryption, after questions about keeping those promises
It's been two weeks since we reported that Anker's Eufy lied to us about the security of its security cameras, and we've been pushing the company for answers ever since.
Context & Ripple Effects
The privacy-page edits cap a two-week run of pressure: a security researcher reported in late November that [[a:985366|Eufy cameras uploaded images to the cloud without consent and were viewable without authentication]], and The Verge then reported the company misrepresented the security of its cameras. Days later, Anker conceded the web portal's live view has a security flaw while declining to explain the unencrypted streams.
The quiet deletion matters because encryption was one of the promises removed — and Anker would later admit the cameras were never natively E2E encrypted. It also echoes an earlier episode where owners could access other users' camera feeds, which Eufy attributed to a bug.
First-order effects
- Customers who bought Eufy cameras on the strength of the deleted commitments no longer have written encryption or privacy promises to hold the company to — the paper trail of claims is gone even as questions about the underlying security remain unanswered.
Second-order effects
- The episode hands competitors' marketing a wedge and raises the bar for the whole category: Wyze's own repeated cross-customer feed exposure shows these failures are not one vendor's problem, so rivals will be pushed to substantiate rather than merely assert privacy claims.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, self-published privacy commitments on product pages lose credibility as a trust signal, shifting the burden toward independent verification or third-party audit for consumer camera security claims.
The trend: Consumer smart-camera makers are moving from self-declared privacy promises toward externally verifiable security claims as repeated breaches erode trust in vendor-written commitments.