Nebraska’s attorney general filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the home security camera seller Lorex, accusing the company of downplaying the privacy risks posed by the Chinese tech company that “supplies all the component parts” for the cameras Lorex sells.
On its website and through retailers, Lorex, which sells a variety of home security and doorbell cameras, assures consumers that it is “committed to protecting the integrity, privacy, and security” of their information and is “committed to taking every step possible to ensure” surveillance recordings remain private.
But in a 39-page lawsuit filed Tuesday, Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers’ office alleged those claims are misleading due to Lorex’s ties to Dahua, a China-based security company that used to own Lorex and still manufactures the cameras it sells.
“And that’s why we ultimately are filing our lawsuit — because they have been dishonest with Nebraska consumers,” Hilgers said at a Capitol news conference where he unveiled the litigation Tuesday morning.
The federal government has long raised alarm over Dahua, which has for years been designated as a “Chinese military company” by the Department of Defense, which in 2021 determined the company is owned or controlled by “a military-civil fusion contributor for the Chinese military.”
Federal regulators later banned the use of Dahua equipment for the surveillance of critical infrastructure.
The company, too, is subject to China’s 2017 national intelligence law that requires companies to cooperate with intelligence agencies, prompting international data privacy concerns that have led to restrictions on Chinese technology companies in some countries, including the unenforced ban on TikTok in the U.S.
Dahua sold Lorex to Skywatch, a Taiwanese company, in November 2022.
But in Tuesday’s lawsuit, Hilgers’ office alleged Dahua maintains ongoing “involvement and control over both the hardware and software of” Lorex cameras.
The lawsuit cites warnings from the Congressional-Executive Commission on China that Lorex products are “a known security risk to U.S. customers because critical vulnerabilities are regularly discovered” in Dahua products.
Those vulnerabilities include “unauthorized viewing of video and audio feeds and archives, as well as unauthorized network access and remote tampering with settings,” the commission wrote in 2023.
Lorex’s failure to disclose Dahua’s “ongoing involvement and the associated surveillance risks” while marketing their cameras as “safe and secure” amount to a violation of Nebraska’s consumer protection and deceptive trade laws, the state alleged in Tuesday’s lawsuit.
The state will ask a District Court judge to bar Lorex from making misleading claims about its cameras and to pay civil penalties for allegedly violating consumer protection laws.
“We’re just saying: ‘Just be honest with consumers, and let the free market speak,'” Hilgers said Tuesday. “If there are a lot of people who want to buy cameras that they know expose their children, as an example, to Chinese surveillance or hackers … there may be people who want to buy that. I’m willing to bet that market’s pretty small.”
Reach the writer at 402-473-7223 or awegley@journalstar.com. On Twitter @andrewwegley
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