Ring will make TAKE default for cloud video

A Ring camera may spot a person, a vehicle or a package, then send an alert to its owner. From September, Amazon’s smart home division will begin rolling out TAKE — “Throw Away the Key Encryption” — as the default worldwide for Ring’s cloud video features and user controls, the company said.

The design relies on rotating encryption keys held temporarily in the cloud. Ring says it can access a key to decrypt and process a video for a requested feature such as Smart Alerts, then delete that key within 24 hours. The company describes the result this way: the cloud can do its job without retaining a lasting key to the footage.

That trade-off is aimed at keeping more features available than end-to-end encryption, which Ring says can restrict video search, video description and shared trusted users. TAKE was developed using Messaging Layer Security, or MLS, an open messaging standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Customers can still manually choose end-to-end encryption instead.

In practical terms, TAKE will make Ring’s cloud-based tools the default while leaving customers a more restrictive privacy setting. Ring says a customer who loses access to a device can recover encryption keys by authenticating while standing near Ring cameras, or by using a passphrase, a cloud backup, another approved device or passkeys.

The rollout follows criticism of Ring’s Familiar Faces feature, which uses facial recognition to identify visitors. In June, a class-action lawsuit accused Amazon of storing images of passersby without consent. Ring’s encryption change addresses how keys are handled; it does not resolve the separate dispute over how the recognition feature uses images.