Ring is rolling out a new encryption technology that it says will give customers more confidence about the privacy of their cameras and footage, even as the Amazon-owned company keeps building a system that sits at the center of home surveillance. The update reinforces Ring’s policy that no third parties, including law enforcement and Amazon itself, can view home security footage without the customer’s consent. That’s the promise. The reality is a market flooded with cameras, police access, and people increasingly uneasy about who gets to watch whom.
Who Holds the Key
The technology is called TAKE, an acronym for “throw away the key.” Ring said that when videos are stored in the cloud, they will be kept in what the company describes as a secure digital vault to which only the user has the key. Ring said it will only get the virtual key to run features like video search for a limited time with a customer’s approval and then will “throw away the key,” so it doesn’t have ongoing access to the videos.
That’s the company’s pitch: privacy by design, but only after years of public suspicion about what an Amazon-owned surveillance company does with footage from people’s homes. Ring said it will roll out the new encryption as the default security setting on all of its cameras starting in September. The company said TAKE provides a similar level of protection as end-to-end encryption, where sensitive data is scrambled when traveling between one trusted endpoint, like a camera, and another, like a customer’s phone, and no outsider can access it. Ring said the new technology is more effective for the multi-device, multi-user configurations used by many Ring customers.
What People Are Worried About
Ring founder Jamie Siminoff said, “People are always going to have questions about, like, how do you store it? How do you protect it?” He said, “As a company we’ve done, I believe, a really good job with that, but this is the physical way of now giving them confidence … this is the show, not just tell.” Siminoff said he hopes the new encryption will help ease privacy fears, including for non-Ring users who worry about walking by a neighbor’s home or a friend’s front door. “I think there is an anxiety of, like, I just don’t know what’s happening with this (footage),” he said. “I think people will hear about this and then feel more comfortable when they see a Ring camera, knowing that there’s a default encryption on it, that it’s locked to the specific person.”
That anxiety didn’t come from nowhere. It came from cameras on homes and businesses, and from public spaces used for police, which has sparked backlash, protests and users ditching or destroying devices. Ring said the new encryption is the latest move by a security camera company to address consumers’ privacy and surveillance fears. The company said users can still voluntarily share footage with law enforcement if police request it through the company’s Neighbors app. So the pipeline to the cops remains, just wrapped in softer language and a cleaner interface.
The Police Channel Stays Open
Ring began offering end-to-end encryption in 2021, following calls from privacy advocates, but it restricted how people could use their devices. Ring said it will retain end-to-end encryption as an option starting in September. That matters because the company’s history with law enforcement has long drawn criticism, and the new setup doesn’t erase that relationship. It just adds another layer of branding around it.
The update comes as many Americans feel growing unease about the proliferation of cameras in people’s hands, on homes and businesses, and in public spaces for police use. Earlier this month, law enforcement technology firm Flock introduced new police auditing and accountability controls. Ring has long faced criticism over its relationship with law enforcement, and the company faced intense scrutiny earlier this year after a Super Bowl ad about a lost dog feature prompted surveillance fears. Weeks later, Ring canceled a controversial partnership with Flock.
The pattern is familiar. New hardware, new promises, new controls, and the same old machinery of monitoring underneath. Ring says the default setting will change in September. The cameras stay. The cloud stays. The police request channel stays. And the people living under all that hardware are still the ones expected to trust the apparatus with their front doors, their neighbors, and their footage.