Wyze is rolling out a new program to make sure only you can see your home security cameras.
In an announcement Tuesday about its new VerifiedView program, Wyze explained that it already uses "strong protections like password requirements, two-factor authentication, cloud security, encryption, tools to detect suspicious logins, and much more." Despite those efforts, though, the company has suffered several high-profile breaches that potentially let people look into strangers' homes.
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VerifiedView, Wyze said, aims to fix that.
VerifiedView is "an additional layer of protection that goes beyond industry standards" and acts as a final safety net to ensure that content on a Wyze camera is only seen by the intended audience.
How it works
When you set up a Wyze camera, your user ID will be digitally stamped onto the camera's firmware. The camera then digitally stamps that same ID onto every photo, video, and livestream. Before anyone views a camera or downloads or shares that camera's content, Wyze runs an instant check verification process to make sure the user ID on the content matches the one on the account trying to see it. If the ID doesn't match, access is denied, even if the user already has access-level permissions.
This means that even if someone has your login credentials or there's a scenario where a cloud outage causes issues with permissions, the app will never show images to the wrong user.
How to enable Wyze's VerifiedView
You don't need to do anything to turn on VerifiedView. It will be rolled out through an update, so if your Wyze app and camera firmware stay up to date, you'll receive the feature. Wyze said it's been rolling out slowly over the last few months to its most popular camera models and will keep rolling out over the next few weeks.
If you have an older version of the app that's not updated, you can access your own content without the new verification system for a few more months until you update.
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You can check to see if you have VerifiedView by looking for its internal name, SightSafe, in the release notes of your latest app update.
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