The News: The Amazon Ring team recently announced support for Video End-to-End Encryption for its Ring camera battery powered devices that are extremely popular with consumers. The new measures to ensure its users have more layers of protection and the assurance that the data will not be shared should continue to propel the category in the future. See more on the Amazon blog.
Ring Camera Now has Video End-to-End Encryption for its Battery Powered Devices
Analyst Take: News of Ring Camera’s Video End-to-End Encryption for its battery powered devices is, in a word, big. A key trend in the consumer electronics market that continues to ring true today (pun intended) is that consumers will always want the technologies that the commercial markets have (of course, within reason) or at least try to mimic them in some fashion. In fact, many of the technologies that have come into the market such as drones got their idea many years ago. Believe it or not, the concept of unmanned drones was invented over a hundred years ago. Mobile health (mHealth), which is hugely popular today in the form of smartphones, smart watches, or other monitoring devices, has been around more than sixty years when Space Labs Medical invented medical telemetry, which allowed NASA to monitor the vital signs of astronauts orbiting the earth.
Within that vein, a key market segment that consumers desperately want is the ability to control and monitor their homes. The rise of home surveillance is hot. It’s easy to buy, easy to set up, and easy to use. A key feature that resonates with users is the ability to get alerts and record incidents that they can review or share with family members that are stored in the cloud. However, a key issue for users has also been the probability that those videos were to be shared with law enforcement without their knowledge.
Your Privacy is Key and Ring Wants to Ensure You Have it
To address consumer privacy concerns about their stored data not being used without their knowledge, the company last year introduced E2EE or end-to-end encryption of their wired Ring camera devices. Now, the Amazon Ring team is offering this capability for its battery-operated Ring Cameras, such as doorbells or other surveillance devices mounted around the perimeter of the home. In a nutshell, devices that are enabled (or switched on) with E2EE will only allow the user to access the video that has been captured and stored. This should go a long way toward easing consumer concerns about their privacy since many also have those devices are also inside the home.
The Ring camera service uses many cryptographic techniques that help maintain security and performance for its customers such as auto-generated high-entropy passphrases, envelop encryption, and security key exchange to name a few. The security features safeguard the consumer’s privacy in many ways, such as encrypting videos in transit and at rest, for use stored in the cloud and implementing cryptographic controls that authenticate data transfer between servers, systems, applications, and users such as TLS (transport layer security) and SRTP (secure real-time protocol). The Ring camera service also uses mandatory two-step verification for user sign-ins.
Wrapping it up, consumers are clamoring for smart home devices that make their lives much easier to control and monitor. They also want the assurance that their information will be safe and secure and their privacy respected. The Amazon Ring team’s steps to secure both wired and battery-operated devices is another excellent step for the organization and one that should continue to propel the category further in the future.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
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