Google has temporarily suspended integration between its Nest hub and cameras from Chinese firm Xiaomi after a user reported being able to see other people’s camera feeds. The two companies have been working together to resolve the issue.
 
The problem came to light at the start of the year when a Reddit user posted that their Nest hub was able to access other people’s Xiaomi camera feeds.
 
“We’ve been working with Xiaomi and we’re comfortable that the issue was limited to their camera technology platform,” said Rachel, community manager for Google home products, in a Reddit post. “While we worked on this issue with Xiaomi, we made the decision to disable all Xiaomi integrations on our devices. We understand this had a significant impact on users of Xiaomi devices but the security and privacy of our users is our priority and we felt this was the appropriate action.”
 
She said that Google was re-enabling Xiaomi device integrations for everything but camera streaming after necessary testing had been completed.
 
“We will not reinstate camera functionality for Xiaomi devices until we are confident that the issue has been fully resolved,” she said.
 
The problem was initially posted by Reddit user Dio-V, who said: “When I load the Xiaomi camera in my Google home hub I get stills from other people’s homes.” The user also posted a video and various stills to illustrate the problem. One of them showed a sleeping child.
 
The camera was the Xiaomi Mijia 1080P IP camera using Xiaomi’s Mi Home app.
 
Xiaomi has apologised for the problem, which it says has now been fixed. It was caused by a cache update on December 26 designed to improve the camera’s streaming quality. A statement said the bug only happened in extremely rare conditions. Though the issue has been fixed, the service will not be resumed until it is certain the issue cannot happen again.