Xiaomi camera bug shows creepy footage from wrong house, Google temporarily kills Mi Home integration with Assistant

In a day and age when we have smart devices taking over our homes, one bizarre incident has reminded us that our privacy, and security, are both at stake. One Reddit user with screen name/u/Dio-V who owns a Google Nest Hub and a bunch of Xiaomi cameras asked Google Assistant to show them feed from one of their own cameras.

Instead of showing them feed from their own cameras, they got to see footage from other people's homes including footage of a baby sleeping and an old man sleeping in a chair. What made the whole situation even creepier was the fact that the footage was black and white and distorted - like scenes from a horror film.

Given that the images were actually from other people's homes points to a major security vulnerability. And it also means that your own home's feed could have shown up on someone else's smart display, anywhere across the world.

To stop this immediately and run investigations, Google temporarily killed Google Assistant integration for Mi Home smart products including light bulbs and cameras. A Google spokesperson told Android Authority - "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".

For its part, Xiaomi released a statement stating that they have always prioritised "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 apologise 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," said Xiaomi.