Ring’s CEO wants to “zero out crime in neighborhoods.” That single quote, from Jamie Siminoff, tells you more about this company’s direction than any press release about encryption ever will. So yes, Ring has just announced a meaningful improvement to how it handles your camera footage by default. And yes, that’s genuinely good news. But let’s not pretend the company has had a sudden change of heart about surveillance.
The new system is called TAKE, short for Throw Away the Key Encryption. Ring says it protects videos using unique, rotating encryption keys. A copy of those keys gets sent to a secure enclave in the cloud, used only to activate whatever smart home features a user has switched on, and then deleted. The idea is that Ring itself doesn’t hold onto prolonged access to your footage. The company uses a locksmith analogy: the person who made your lock doesn’t keep a copy of the key. It’s a clean pitch.
In practice, Ring customers can still view footage on enrolled devices and share it with trusted users. The rollout starts in September, though it may take time to reach every account. For users who want to go further, Ring already offers full end-to-end encryption, which cuts the company out entirely. The tradeoff is losing access to many smart home features, which most people won’t accept.
The reason this matters is context. Ring’s privacy record is genuinely bad. For years, the company allowed police to request footage from Ring cameras without any public disclosure and, critically, without the camera owner’s knowledge or consent. That program finally ended in 2024. But Ring then moved toward a partnership with Flock, a surveillance company, that would have let users share footage with law enforcement on request. That program was cancelled, officially because it needed more time and resources, though public backlash was the more obvious reason.
Then there’s the Super Bowl ad. Ring spent serious money advertising a feature called Search Party, an AI tool designed to find missing pets by linking Ring cameras into a shared network. Privacy researchers pointed out quickly that the same system could just as easily track people. The feature can be disabled, but it shouldn’t require user action to opt out of a surveillance network.
And none of that touches Familiar Faces, Ring’s facial recognition feature that identifies visitors to your home. It’s still active despite an ongoing lawsuit. When you combine Familiar Faces with Search Party’s camera-linking capability, you get a neighborhood-scale facial recognition network run by an Amazon subsidiary with a documented history of cooperating with law enforcement.
TAKE encryption is a real improvement. But encryption standards don’t change a company’s philosophy. Ring’s core business model still points toward more surveillance, not less, and a CEO who talks about eliminating crime through camera networks is not someone who has quietly decided privacy comes first.