• Is WyzeCam Sending Data to Servers Other Than AWS?

    When the WyzeCam started selling a few years back, there was an alarming review on Amazon stating that it was sending data all over the world. The reviewer claimed seeing traffic heading to China, Japan and Germany, among other locations. The review on Amazon is probably no longer available. But the discussion on Reddit is still there.

    Is WyzeCam sending data to servers other than AWS? The answer is yes.

    And below is what our router data showed.

    WyzeCam Background Traffic

    As can be seen in the graph, there’s persistent traffic going to wyzecam.com and three IP addresses when there was no activity on the camera. The numbers are the number of requests sent over to the domain or the IP addresses.

    As shown below, these IP addresses are not AWS IP addresses.

    IP AddressLocationISP
    192.99.8.134CanadaOVH Hosting Inc.
    207.38.90.8USvelia.net Internetdienste GmbH
    209.90.225.74USWowrack.com

    However, since an AWS IP address isn’t inherently more trustworthy than a non-AWS IP address, a better question to ask is probably whether you can trust WyzeCam sending data over to these IP addresses, rather than whether these IP addresses belong to AWS.

    As a matter of fact, most likely no real data is sent over these connections at all. Because there’s no activity on the camera, these connections might simply be used to keep the server aware that the WyzeCam is alive.

    WyzeCam Streaming Traffic

    When I used the WyzeCam app to stream video to the smartphone, the bandwidth monitor showed upload traffic to another IP address.

    As you can see, most of the upload traffic was sent over to one IP address. And it was the public IP address of my smartphone. There didn’t appear to be any upload activity to WyzeCam servers in this case.

    WyzeCam Events Traffic

    When it detects motion or sound, the WyzeCam automatically records a 12 second video. During our test, the WyzeCam sent the video to an AWS server.

    In conclusion, the WyzeCam does send data to servers other than AWS. For example, the keep-alive traffic was not sent to AWS. When streaming, the WyzeCam established a peer-to-peer connection with the streaming device (the smartphone). Data was only sent to AWS for the short snippets generated by events.

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