A pair of recent reports have raised serious privacy concerns about Amazon-owned home security company Ring, maker of popular products such as the Video Doorbell Pro.

The Intercept on Thursday reported that Ring has a team of "data operators" in the Ukraine who manually tag people and vehicles in customer videos as part of an effort to "train" the company's software to be able to detect these objects on its own. Citing a source "with direct knowledge of Ring's video-tagging efforts," the report notes that these video annotators view footage from outside—and inside—customers' homes.

"The source said that Ring employees at times showed each other videos they were annotating and described some of the things they had witnessed, including people kissing, firing guns, and stealing," The Intercept reported. This process has reportedly been going on for years, possibly even to this day.

The Intercept's report follows recent revelations from The Information about "security gaps and rookie engineers" within Ring's Ukraine-based research and development team.

Backing up The Information, The Intercept also on Thursday reported that Ring in 2016 gave its Ukraine-based R&D team "virtually unfettered access to a folder on Amazon's S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world." Those with access to these unencrypted videos could easily browse, view, download, and share them. Meanhwile, some US-based Ring executives and engineers had access to "round-the-clock live feeds from some customer cameras," The Intercept noted.

In a Friday statement to PCMag, Ring said its team members do not have access to live streams from its products.

"We take the privacy and security of our customers' personal information extremely seriously," the company said. "Only a limited group of team members access and view Ring user videos in order to troubleshoot issues upon the user's request, to improve the service with the user's consent, to provide copies upon the user's request, or to comply with legal requests."

The company went on to say it has "strict policies" in place for all its team members.

"We implement systems to restrict access to information and hold our team members to a high ethical standard," Ring said. "Anyone in violation of our policies faces discipline. In addition, we have zero tolerance for abuse of our systems and if we find bad actors who have engaged in this behavior, we will take swift action against them."

In a statement to The Intercept, the company said it does "view and annotate" some customer videos, but only ones that have either been publicly shared via its Neighbors app or come from "a small fraction" of users who have "provided their explicit written consent" allowing such access.