UPDATE – Xiaomi has released an official statement on the issue: “Xiaomi has always prioritized our users’ privacy and information security. We are aware there was an issue of receiving stills while connecting Mi Home Security Camera Basic 1080p on Google Home hub. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused to our users.
Our team has since acted immediately to solve the issue and it is now fixed. Upon investigation, we have found out the issue was caused by a cache update on December 26, 2019, which was designed to improve camera streaming quality. This has only happened in extremely rare conditions. In this case, it happened during the integration between Mi Home Security Camera Basic 1080p and the Google Home Hub with a display screen under poor network conditions.
We have also found 1044 users were with such integrations and only a few with extremely poor network conditions might be affected. This issue will not happen if the camera is linked to the Xiaomi’s Mi Home app.
Xiaomi has communicated and fixed this issue with Google, and has also suspended this service until the root cause has been completely solved, to ensure that such issues will not happen again”.
Smart home security cameras are supposed to make you feel safe, but not when your camera feed is accessible to others.
A Reddit user recently found a security bug when his Xiaomi Mijia security cameras showed feeds of other homes when he viewed them on his Google Nest Hub via voice command. These feeds are in black and white with distortions, but you can still see some of them quite clearly.
Android Authority then reached out to both Google and Xiaomi for clarifications, in which only the former has responded so far. A Google spokesperson said, “We’re aware of the issue and are in contact with Xiaomi to work on a fix. In the meantime, we’re disabling Xiaomi integrations on our devices.”
It is likely that the fault falls on Xiaomi’s end or Google wouldn’t have been so quick to disable the support for Xiaomi. Either way, Xiaomi better come up with a solid explanation or things might just blow up.
