Ring cameras are still a terrible purchase even with end-to-end encryption
Ring, everyone's least favorite technological narc, seems to be making steps to keep its footage secure.
The Amazon-owned home security system company now offers end-to-end encryption of the video and audio collected on its battery-powered video doorbells and security cameras. This comes about a year after it enabled end-to-end encryption on its plug-in devices.
End-to-end encryption prevents anyone from grabbing videos or messages as they travel between you and the person you're sending them to. That means it ensures that no one — including hackers, government officials, or, ideally, the company that owns the device — can read your message or watch your video while it's being sent.
This newly enabled privacy feature also means the video picked up from a Ring camera can only be accessible from the iOS or Android device linked to an owner's account. According to the Verge, if you have end-to-end encryption enabled on your Ring camera, no one but you can access the recorded footage. This change is basically increasing the security features on Ring, which already encrypts video and audio recordings by default when they're uploaded to the cloud or stored on Ring's servers.
"Even if law enforcement asked Ring, or its parent company Amazon, for the video, they couldn't provide it," according to the Verge. "Only the enrolled mobile device can unlock the video."
As Mashable previously explained, end-to-end encryption "basically takes your message, jumbles it up, sends it, and unjumbles it once it reaches your recipient. So anyone who tries to intercept your message in between you and your recipient just gets a bunch of mess instead of the message itself."
That doesn't mean your Ring video cameras are completely harmless or safe from bad actors, though. End-to-end encryption protects your privacy against anything trying to mess with your messages while they're in transit, but it doesn't protect the video metadata and also can't do anything about the recipient of your message sharing whatever information you send them.
And, ultimately, even with end-to-end encryption, there are plenty of problems tied to having a video camera doorbell like Ring.