Review: Funlux 720p HD Wireless Smart Home Day Night Security Surveillance Camera

After our tires got slashed (along with everyone else’s on the block), I started looking into security cameras so we can be of more help to the police should this happen again. I should have done a bit more homework before purchasing a couple of “Funlux” cameras – they get reasonable Amazon.com reviews, but these devices are unfortunately representative of cheap, low quality Chinese electronics that are flooding Western markets these days.

The required app has an arbitrary password length limit of 20 characters for your WiFi password, which made it unsuitable for the network I’m using it on (which uses a memorable phrase as its password). It also wants you to rename your WiFi access point to exclude spaces (what, because your programmers are lazy every user of your device has to conform to some arbitrary restrictions?). The Android app itself requires pretty much every possible permission under the sun, including your browsing history (!), call log (!?) and your phone’s microphone.

You should check out the reviews of the required MeShare app in the Android store, as well, before buying this product; as of this writing, it’s rated at 2.7 stars and a lot of people are complaining about the app being broken and unreliable. In-depth reviews by security researchers such as this one have also pointed out security issues with how the camera transfers passwords and images; since I couldn’t set up the camera, I’ve not verified whether those issues are still in place.

Funlux is a sister company of China-based Zmodo. It’s unclear what the point of the brand is since the hardware seems identical; perhaps it is to develop a brand more focused on the US market. (The Funlux website makes no mention of the company’s Chinese origins except implicitly through broken English like “From Our Customer” and “3.5 Million Global Customer”). There’s a certain iffiness in sending your camera recordings to a Chinese company with a privacy policy that’s pretty opaque as to their uses of the data.

In any case, I am returning the purchase because it’s not fit for purpose. A device marketed to increase one’s security should not ask the user to degrade their own security settings to use it. Frankly, if the industry was a bit better regulated, products like this would be recalled from the market.