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.