Hot on the heels of a moderate backlash on their Sidewalk initiative, Amazon has decided that maybe Ring doorbells should be a little more considerate of your privacy. Up until today, if you had subscribe to the Ring Protect Plan which provided a means for you to store history of your Ring camera’s footage in the cloud, that video – in theory – could be viewed by Amazon and local law enforcement depending on the partnerships they have set up with various jurisdictions. There has been much debate about whether doorbell camera videos should be considered private, but once you account for all the various uses and placements of the devices, especially backyards and sideyards, the video footage really shouldn’t be considered “public space.”
Make your Ring truly private
Assuming you are using one of the 13 models that are compatible with the service, you can add device-specific encryption to your videos which essentially makes them only viewable on your mobile device with the Ring app. Previous to this new feature rollout, law enforcement could send out bulk-requests to users in a geographic area to “share” their video footage. Now, if you opt-in to the E2EE version of the Ring app, law enforcement must request access via warrant, and supposedly neither Ring nor Amazon can see this footage without requesting it from the specific user. Keep in mind that you have to OPT IN to this feature and it will break certain accessibility, such as viewing on Alexa devices or Shared User access. If privacy is more important to you than accessibility, you should enable this feature immediately:
https://account.ring.com/account/control-center/video-encryption/advanced-settings/end-to-end
Image by Tumisu from Pixabay
