Having a Ring security camera can be a pretty, handy thing in 2022.

You can talk to folks at your door without having to be face-to-face which is a nice Covid-19 buffer. And, you can keep watch on your home while you are not there. But, having a Ring, or any other type of security camera which uses WiFi has long come with a warning from security advisors that the thing - like any type of computer device - can be hacked.

And the idea that someone can hack into a security camera in your home and watch you without your knowledge... well, that’s just not tolerable. But according to a recent story on Yahoo!Life, a family claims that happened and the story they tell crosses that line from concern right on into super creepy if not downright horrifying.

According to the story, a mother posted a video to TikTok that shows her three-year-old son telling his father that he wants the security camera in his room removed because it keeps talking to him at night and asking him if he “wants ice cream.”

The woman posted a video to TikTok taken from footage recorded by that same camera which shows her husband putting their son to bed. As the husband turns to leave the room, the young boy, who is speaking in Spanish, stops him and insists that he take the camera out of the room. The father asks why and the little boy explains that it has been talking to him at night in a strange voice and asking him if he wants ice cream.

The video can be viewed, here.

It’s at that moment the man calls his wife, who enters the room and begins to talk to her son about what he says he has been experiencing. The mother asks the son if the voice is that of a boy or a girl, and he tells her that it is a boy that has been talking to him.

The woman said it was not the first time the son has mentioned the camera talking, but this time it was apparently convincing enough that they decided to take the camera down. The woman said in another video posted to TikTok that she called Ring and was advised to change her passwords and two-factor authentication.

Ring said in a statement to PennLive it could not find any evidence of someone hacking into the woman’s camera.

“We take customer privacy and security extremely seriously,” the company said. “We worked directly with this customer in February to investigate this matter and found no indication of unauthorised access or suspicious activity related to her Ring account or devices.”

Ring said all of the video in its cloud are encrypted, and the company said it offers customers “a wide range of privacy and security options to help them protect their personal account information.”

Ring has reportedly faced multiple class-action lawsuits by folks who claim that their doorbells or security cameras were hacked and used to terrorise them.

There’s a long-list of things owners of the cameras can do to make sure they continue to work in their favour. A DigitalTrends report suggest making sure the password to the device and the network it is on is secure, not sharing login information, avoiding sharing videos on social media, purchasing a firewall and antivirus software and keeping the device itself up-to-date.

 - TNS