Your Privilege Gives Your Privacy Away: An Analysis of a Home Security Camera Service
Abstract
Once considered a luxury, Home Security Cameras
(HSCs) are now commonplace and constitute a growing part
of the wider online video ecosystem. This paper argues that
their expanding coverage and close integration with daily life
may result in not only unique behavioral patterns, but also
key privacy concerns. This motivates us to perform a detailed
measurement study of a major HSC provider, covering 15.4M
streams and 211K users. Our study takes two perspectives:
(i) we explore the per-user behaviour, identifying core clusters of
users; and (ii) we build on this analysis to extract and predict
privacy-compromising insight. Key observations include a highly
asymmetrical traffic distribution, distinct usage patterns, wasted
resources and fixed viewing locations. Furthermore, we identify
three privacy risks and explore them in detail. We find that paid
users are more likely to be exposed to attacks due to their heavier
usage patterns. We conclude by proposing simple mitigations that
can alleviate these risks