![]() And Ring is now working on additional features, including a pet tracking system and a roving camera that can be remotely activated by customers to investigate disturbances.īut as Ring expands its user base, it is also drawing increased scrutiny from privacy and social justice advocates who are concerned about the Amazon-owned subsidiary's partnerships with law enforcement agencies and reports of racial profiling by users of Ring's Neighbors app. The Santa Monica-based company also unveiled an end-to-end encryption feature that adds an additional layer of protection to videos captured by a user's device. In January, Ring rolled out the Ring Video Doorbell Wired, its smallest and least expensive doorbell yet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation in particular has singled Ring out for marketing strategies that foster fear and promote a sale-spurring “vicious cycle,” and for “ reporting of so-called ‘suspicious’ behavior that really amounts to racial profiling.It's been a busy year for Ring, the home security giant best known for its video doorbells. Ring, which has said it would not hand over footage if confronted with a subpoena but would comply when given a search warrant, has law enforcement partnerships in more than 1,300 cities.Īdvocacy groups like Fight for the Future and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have accused Ring of using its cameras and Neighbors app (which delivers safety alerts) to build a private surveillance network via police partnerships. Ring recently made headlines for a deal it reportedly struck with over 400 police departments nationwide that would allow authorities to request that owners volunteer footage from Ring cameras within a specific time and location. Conversely, turning on end-to-end encryption doesn’t encrypt any videos created before enrollment because the service only encrypts videos created post-enrollment. Users can switch off end-to-end encryption at any time, but any videos encrypted with end-to-end encryption can’t be decrypted the keys to access those videos are removed permanently in the process. And users can share videos through Ring’s controversial Neighbors Public Safety Service, which connects residents with local law enforcement by downloading an end-to-end encrypted video to their smartphone, which saves it in decrypted form. However, Live View, which decrypts video locally on-device, will continue to run while end-to-end encryption is enabled. Ring notes that end-to-end encryption disables certain features, including AI-dependent features that decrypt videos for processing work like motion verification and people-only mode. But the public portion of the instance key pair and the account data key pair are copied to the Ring cloud after being signed by the account-signing key, as are the locally encrypted private portions of the account-signing key pair and the account data key pair. (Ring says these words are randomly selected from a dictionary of 7,776.) The passphrase, which can be used to enroll additional smartphones, is generated on-device. When a user opts into end-to-end encryption, the Ring app presents a 10-word auto-generated passphrase used to secure the cryptographic keys. Following the breach, Ring began requiring two-step verification for user sign-ins and launched a compromised password check feature that cross-references login credentials against a list of known compromised passwords. In 2019, a data leak exposed the personal information of over 3,000 Ring users, including log-in emails, passwords, time zones, and the names people give to specific Ring cameras. The rollout of end-to-end encryption comes after dozens of plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit against Ring, alleging they had been subjected to death threats, racial slurs, and blackmail after their Ring cameras were hacked. The feature launches today in technical preview for compatible Ring products. ![]() While the company already encrypted videos in storage and during transmission, end-to-end encryption secures videos on-device, preventing third parties without special keys from decrypting and viewing the recordings. In September, Amazon-owned Ring announced that it would bring end-to-end video encryption to its lineup of home security devices. Head over to our on-demand library to view sessions from VB Transform 2023.
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