In an effort to restore trust in the security of its cameras, smart home brand Wyze has developed VerifiedView — a new layer of protection that embeds your user ID into the metadata of every photo, video, and livestream. Wyze claims the system matches this data to your account before playback, blocking unauthorized access to your footage.
“This is a safety net,” Wyze co-founder and CMO Dave Crosby tells The Verge. “On top of doing everything we can to protect users, we’ve built this double check at the end to make sure that they’re extra protected.”
“We realized that we cannot survive if we keep making these stupid mistakes.”
The move follows several rough years for Wyze on the security front, starting with a vulnerability on its v1 cameras that it knew about for three years and never disclosed, followed by two high-profile incidents in 2023 and 2024, where users saw images from other people’s cameras.
Crosby says that Wyze now sees fixing its security practices as existential. “We realized that we cannot survive if we keep making these stupid mistakes that we’re making,” he says. “We’ve got to make monumental changes so this kind of stuff never happens again.”
VerifiedView is just one result of this major shift; Wyze has also expanded its in-house security team, Crosby says, and “invested millions of dollars” in strengthening its security architecture from top to bottom. That includes re-architecting its security stack, requiring two-factor authentication, launching a bug bounty program, and deploying monitoring tools to detect and prevent threats.
Wyze is also committed to being more transparent around security. “One of the biggest mistakes we ever made was not being more transparent on that,” Crosby says, referring to a flaw Bitdefender identified in its camera in 2019, but which the company didn’t disclose to customers until 2022.
VerifiedView is available now via a firmware update that began rolling out in April. “It’s 100% deployed on our most popular cameras — Wyze Cam v4, v3, Pan v3, and OG,” Crosby says, adding that it’s coming to the rest soon. Some older cameras don’t have the hardware to support it, but Wyze is exploring ways to accommodate them. Users can check to see if their cameras are on the new firmware on Wyze’s site.
Investing in rebuilding
Wyze offers a line of inexpensive smart home devices, including indoor and outdoor security cameras. Image: Wyze
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