As a journalist from The Intercept found, in 2020, the Ukrainian office of Ring started removing any mentions to its ties with Amazon. Representatives of Amazon also said that it does not have a company in Ukraine, there is only a contractor.

As it became known to AIN.UA, Ring had no legal presence in Ukraine. We could not find any legal entity, and individual entrepreneurs in Ukraine were concluding contracts with Deviget LLC, incorporated in Milton-Freewater, Oregon.

One of the most frequently cited reasons for such masquerade is Amazon’s alleged decision to disassociate itself from Ukraine after the notorious personal data breach. Supposedly, Ukrainian data labelers who trained the neural network could access videos of American users when out of office.

However, Amazon itself has been the target of many investigations. On the last occasion, Amazon was accused of collecting data of successful sellers, building up its own product lines based on those, and then making the sellers leave the platform. So, at any rate, the media attention toward Ring is not directly related to Ring itself. Ring’s former employee, who asked not to be named, has a different opinion, “Amazon was not sure about Ukraine from the first day. Because of some geopolitical reasons of its own.”

Either way, today the fact that the Squad team is working on cool products for Ring is mentioned neither on the website, nor on DOU, nor on social networks. The company has also stopped disclosing the number of its Ukrainian employees – since 2020, there were no workforce statistics on DOU, used compile the ranking of the top 50 companies. As with the rebranding news, all have been done without much ado. It seems that a beautiful billion-dollar story is over before it has begun. And yet, over a thousand Ukrainian specialists carry on developing a world-class product. 

Previously, an American startup with a large R&D office in Ukraine was involved in several scandals. In particular, Ukrainian employees were accused of illegal access to video from cameras. The senators wanted to clarify the details of the situation as well as other measures that Ring takes to ensure secure data storage.

In a response letter, obtained by Morherboard, representatives of Ring tell about the scandals and the company policy. A strong focus was on the company’s representative office in Ukraine.

AIN.UA provides the main points.

• Camera-recorded videos are stored on servers for 60 up to 180 days depending on the type and time of subscription. Then they are automatically deleted, but users can do it manually at any time. The data itself is stored in an encrypted video.
• Ring is not aware of any breach of a customer’s personally identifiable information that would require reporting to government agencies. But the company is aware of incidents when stolen credentials and passwords (from other applications and sites) are used by some bad actors to gain access to Ring devices.
• The R&D team in Ukraine has no unrestricted access to customer’s camera data. The employees can only access publicly available videos and videos available from Ring employees, contractors, and friends and family of employees or contractors with their express consent.

• The employees in the Ukrainian office use these videos to deliver high-quality services and to maintain and improve the customer experience.
• Aside from the technical support, members of the R&D team with public access, only three people in Ring have access to the stored customer videos.
• Over the last four years, Ring has received four complaints or inquiries regarding a team member’s access to Ring video data. Although each of the individuals involved in these incidents was authorized to view video data, the attempted access to that data exceeded what was necessary for their job functions. Ring has terminated these individuals and has taken multiple actions to limit such data access to a smaller number of team members.
• Ring does not yet offer facial recognition functions. But if users want it, it will think about implementing it.

Previously, Ring introduced mandatory two-factor authentication to ensure security. But the requirement applied only to new accounts – in their letter, the senators indicated that the measure should have been introduced for all users. There was no mention of this in Ring’s response.

AIN.UA publishes a brief retelling of the request, the full text of the letter is available here.

What’s it all about

The startup, producing IoT gadgets for home security found itself in the center of a scandal in January 2019. It turned out that the staff of the Ukrainian R&D office have “unlimited” access to the recordings from the cameras of the Americans and look through them to mark out passages for neural network training.

Now the Senate wants to clarify the details of the situation as well as other measures that Ring takes to ensure secure data storage.

Senators refer to investigation conducted by The Intercept outlet and other materials of the scandal in January. It indicated the authority of the Ukrainian office staff, as well as possibility of senior Ring employees accessing live video recordings of some cameras.

If hackers or foreign entities gain access to this data, it not only poses a threat to the privacy and security of Americans but also to the national security of the United States.

The authors of the letter write that Americans have the right to know what data they provide Ring and how they are protected. Questions raised by senators must be answered no later than January 6, 2020.

Points of interest

AIN.UA provides a short version of questions.

General questions

1. How many units has Rings sold to Americans?
2. Does Ring delete users’ video footage generated by Ring devices? Does Ring ever delete a user’s video footage it has retained? Please detail Ring’s default data retention policy.
3. Does Ring encrypt video footage, both in storage and transmission?
4. How regularly does Ring perform in-depth security tests, audits, vulnerability scans, source code reviews and penetration testing? Are independent security audits performed?
5. How many security incidents have you detected over the past two years? Please describe the severity of each incident.

Ukraine and other contractors

According to media reports, Ring has provided its Ukraine-based research and development team with unrestricted access to Ring’s entire camera database in unencrypted form, with each video file reportedly linked to a specific Ring user.

• How many employees of Amazon and Ring have access to American users’ camera data?
• How is employee access to customer video data controlled, logged, and audited?
• Do employees have access to live feeds?
• Do employees have access to any other information regarding the customer’s account other than camera data (e.g. user name(s), email address(es), physical address, geolocation)?
• To your knowledge, have there been any documented instances of this access being abused?

Ring’s online career postings suggest that the company is still hiring Ukrainians to view and tag videos of Americans. Please confirm this practice and explain its purpose.

• Please describe the process by which Americans’ data is accessed by employees or contractors in Ukraine or any other country outside the United States and the standards by which they are held?
• Please detail in how many other countries employees have access to Americans’ Ring data?
• Please detail, for each country where employees have access to Americans’ Ring data, which data privacy or retention policies are in place and any ability for a foreign government to access (through a legal process within that country or otherwise) any Americans’ Ring data stored within that country?

According to media reports, Ring employs a “head of facial recognition research” and has applied for a “facial recognition patent.” Please describe Ring’s plans regarding the addition of facial recognition capabilities to its products.

• Does Ring intend to use, currently use, or has it used, any type of image matching software capable of facial recognition, including Amazon’s Rekognition?
• Does Ring contact to, or request assistance from, any entity regarding facial recognition? Which entities or agencies? Please provide relevant guidelines or memoranda outlining this relationship, including any audits or analysis you have undertaken to evaluate the use of facial recognition.

Position of Ring and Amazon

Ring and Amazon have not answered the requests of American media.

In response to an inquiry from AIN.UA, the former head of Ring Ukraine, Kira Rudik, declined to comment. Currently, she is a member of the Verkhovna Rada and the first deputy chair of the Committee on Digital Transformation.

What did the company begin with? 

Like many other interesting projects – it began with the Founder’s garage in South California. In 2011 James Siminoff, the Founder of the company, has gathered a small group of engineers to work on his idea. Just one year later, in 2012, a team of five guys (three engineers and an intern) presented DoorBot to public. It was a doorbell with a camera and Wi-Fi. While ringing the doorbell, the dwellers of the house could see who visited them.

According to the Founder, it was not easy to manufacture such a product. Especially, taking into consideration the battery that should serve at least a year, video streaming, instant messages and mobile application. However, even with a small number of personnel and lack of funding, the first smart bells were delivered to customers in November 2013 – less than in a year after announcement of the product.

Below is a photo of project Founder with his son and prototype of the device on the production site in Asia in August of 2013.

Only in 2013 the company produced 20,000 pcs of gadgets and delivered it to the customers in 85 countries. Later they changed the name of the product – from too “geek and tech” to understandable Ring. According to the Founder, it should mean a “security ring”, provided by the company’s gadgets around a user’s estate. In 2014 just 42 employees worked for the company.

What are they doing now?

Since Ring has managed to raise a few funding rounds, to increase personnel number and largely expand product line, the total amount of investments, raised by Ring in the course of six rounds, made $209.2 million. Among the investors there are such names as Goldman Sachs, Virgin Group, Qualcomm Ventures and Amazon Alexa Fund. The company’s price  was estimated at $1 billion and it was bought by Amazon at this price. During the last investment round in January of 2017, when the company raised $109 million and was estimated at $445 million, that is double more than in the previous round. Then the funds were spent, among other things, on development of Ring’s R&D office in Kyiv. For today, a total number of employees, according to Crunchbase is up to 1,000”.

The company produces a wide range of products for residential security: apart from smart doorbell with an application, they also produce Ring Spotlight Cams — cameras with motion detectors and a possibility of video streaming at 1080HD, sets of security devices Home Security Kit, etc.:

In January last year they also presented a new generation of the smart bell: Ring Video Doorbell 2. It supports video streaming at 1080HD. This device is equipped with night-vision device, adjustable motion detectors, etc. The company positions all their products as solutions to combat crime in any residential neighborhoods.

How does the Ukrainian office work? 

It became known in 2016 that the company launches an office in Ukraine.

Kyiv laboratory Ring Labs started developing software in the area of machine learning, computer vision, data mining and other spheres of artificial intelligence.

Ring integrated inventions of the Ukrainian engineers into their products. In particular, in Kyiv they analyze video data from Ring’s clouds. This data is used to build neural networks and algorithms to improve the company’s product performance efficiency.

The first employees of the office in Kyiv:

A decision to launch R&D office in Ukraine was taken in order to get easy access to the skilled personnel. Then the company explained to our editorial team, “Ring company was impressed by tech skills of the Ukrainian professionals. Machine Learning, Computer Vision and artificial intelligence as a whole – are very complicated tasks. In the company we believe in the potential of Ukrainian developers, their high skills and unique expertise.”

Here and further – photos of the company’s office and DOU profile

In December of 2016 about 30 employees worked in the Ukrainian office. Now it is about 445 (according to the rating of the largest IT companies).

Ring Ukraine is located in Business Center “Toronto Kyiv” near Olimpiyskaya subway station. When we dealt with office repair and reconstruction, we had an intention to make it similar to offices of the companies in Silicon Valley. The employees are offered bonuses in the form of medical insurance, full-year gym membership, lunches and dinners in the office. Moreover, in the office we have recreation rooms and sleeping areas.

The office is headed by Kira Rudik, COO. In response to our question concerning the future of the Ukrainian office after closing the deal, she replied, “Still we can’t make any official statements.” Now Ring Ukraine is actively seeking for new talents: according to DOU, at the moment they have 11 vacancies, including frontend developers, security engineers, product managers, 3D modelers, etc.

At the time of this article publication we have no information about the future of Rink’s Ukrainian office after the company’s purchasing by Amazon. Our editorial team is waiting for comments of Ring and Amazon.