Amazon Prime Video secretly storing viewing habits

Technology companies has made their system robust with use of Artificial Intelligence ( AI), they can even see what all we doing, our habits, likes and dislikes, expenditure patterns and they can predict what are you next going to buy, as our smartphone listens to our conversations and it records also.

Recently, one true has come out, Amazon Prime Video viewing habits stored on internal server exposed online. A database containing viewing habits of Amazon Prime Video users, stored on an internal Amazon server, was accidently exposed online that could be accessed by anyone with a web browser.

An internal Amazon server containing the data was publicly accessible online, says, Anurag Sen, a cybersecurity researcher and those data’s are stored in the server.

The Elasticsearch database named Sauron stored about 215 million entries of pseudonymised viewing data, including the name of the show, viewing time, device and internal data like network quality and subscription.

Shodan, a search engine for internet-connected things, cited that the database was first exposed on the internet on September 30, but because the database was not protected with a password, the data within could be accessed by anyone with a web browser just by knowing its IP address, the report said.

The database had nearly 215 million entries of viewing data, such as the name of the show or movie that is being streamed, what device it was streamed on, and other internal data. The Amazon Prime Video database was later removed from the Internet.

An Amazon spokesperson told that there was a "deployment error with a Prime Video analytics server". "This problem has been resolved and no account information (including login or payment details) was exposed. This was not an AWS issue; AWS is secure by default and performed as designed," the spokesperson added.

In its latest Q3 earnings call, the company said that 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power', attracted more than 25 million global viewers on its first day, the biggest debut in Prime Video history, and closing in on 100 million viewers to date. It also kicked off the inaugural season of Prime Video as the exclusive home of NFL Thursday Night Football with more than 15 million viewers for its first game.