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Ring doorbell cameras began as a security gadget for people but quickly turned into tools of mass surveillance through various upgrades and features, be it the infamous Familiar Faces feature or the much-criticized Search Party Super Bowl ad.
Finally, after years of backlash from both experts and the public, Ring has introduced a feature that could address many of these concerns.
Welcome TAKE, Ring’s latest encryption feature that keeps your camera footage in an encrypted vault that Ring can access for only 24 hours. After that, the company has no way of accessing the footage on its own unless you ask it to process older footage again, in which case the key is temporarily handed back and then deleted once more.[1]
However, TAKE does not address the Familiar Faces feature, and concerns over non-consensual facial recognition still exist, which is why experts are skeptical about how far TAKE can go in solving Ring’s surveillance concerns.
And the reaction from Ring owners has been less than warm. In the r/technology thread about the announcement, the top comment was three words long: "Yea they're trustworthy /s." It drew more than 450 upvotes.[2]
Here’s everything you should know about the new TAKE feature and what it can — and cannot — do to bolster your privacy.
TAKE stands for “Throw Away the Key Encryption” and does exactly what its name suggests. This new standard encrypts your doorbell and camera videos with keys that change every five minutes.
TAKE will come included with Ring users worldwide, with the encryption happening on the device for newer models and in the cloud for older ones.
What’s important is that Ring will only get temporary access to these keys for 24 hours through an isolated AWS Nitro Enclave, and only to run cloud features such as smart alerts, video descriptions, or video search.
After 24 hours, Ring permanently deletes its copy of the key. The system is designed so that these keys are irreversibly deleted. That said, your enrolled devices will hold a copy of the key so you can access old footage, though recovery depends on having an authorized device or backup method available. However, Ring itself cannot access it without your request, and even then only temporarily and for the specific purpose you initiate.
If you want to process the footage at a later time, the app will hand over the temporary key to Ring for that specific purpose and period. Once the purpose is fulfilled, Ring throws the key away.
TAKE is also expected to limit what Ring could hand over to law enforcement authorities. Earlier, Ring had access to old footage from your camera. However, the current 24-hour limit puts a hard technical restriction on what it may be able to share with other third parties.
That said, a Ring spokesperson has said that it will provide encrypted video files and non-video information in response to law enforcement requests.
It’s important to note that Ring already offered an opt-in alternative: end-to-end encryption (E2EE), which was much stricter than TAKE. With E2EE enabled, Ring never got access to any of your encryption keys, not even for 24 hours.
But this also disabled several cloud features, such as video search and smart alerts, taking away a large chunk of Ring’s functionality. TAKE tries to find a middle ground between privacy and utility.
Ring pitched TAKE as a privacy win. Its customers responded by asking why they should take the company's word for it.
In the r/technology thread about the announcement, the highest-voted comment was three words long: "Yea they're trustworthy /s." The replies underneath it were not warmer. "Prove it Amazon. We don't trust you," wrote one commenter. Several said they had already replaced their Ring cameras with local-storage systems that never send footage to a company server at all.
The technical objection underneath the sarcasm is a fair one. TAKE is built on Messaging Layer Security, an open standard from the Internet Engineering Task Force, but the throw-away-the-key part is Ring's own design running on Amazon's own infrastructure. Nobody outside the company can inspect it. You are trusting Amazon to delete a key it created.
Redditor badgerj put it more plainly: "this is the equivalent to telling everyone your house can't be opened because only you, and Ring have the key."
That's the gap between TAKE and true end-to-end encryption, which Ring already offers. With E2EE, Ring never holds your keys at all. Commenter ParentPostLacksWang proposed a version of exactly that, jokingly named NAKED, "so the user generates their own key and never gives it to anyone. Like proper encryption works." Ring's own white paper says TAKE is "inspired by the privacy principles of E2EE." One commenter's response to that phrasing has been widely shared: "salmon in jello is inspired by the principles of food, but it is not edible."
Others questioned the timing. TAKE arrived weeks after Flock Safety's surveillance contracts drew national scrutiny and months after a class-action lawsuit over Familiar Faces. "I think in this case they see what's happening to Flock and are trying to have some deflections ready," wrote commenter enby_them.
The skepticism has a concrete basis, because TAKE leaves Ring's most-criticized feature untouched.
Familiar Faces works exactly as it did before. Your camera still scans and analyzes the face of every person who walks past it, including delivery drivers, mail carriers, and neighbors who never agreed to any of it. Encrypting the footage afterward doesn't change what the camera does in the first place. It's the same problem people have raised about Meta's smart AI glasses.
Police access hasn't disappeared either. It has been narrowed and rerouted. A Ring spokesperson confirmed the company will still provide encrypted video files and non-video information in response to law enforcement requests.
And the stakes here aren't abstract. Home security footage is a record of your routine. It shows when you leave for work, when the house is empty, whether you live alone, and who visits. Combined with basic details like your name, email address, and home address, that's enough for someone to build a convincing phishing attack or an identity theft attempt aimed specifically at you.
If you’re worried about your personal details being out there in the wild, an identity theft protection service can give you some peace of mind. It continuously scans the dark web and known databases for your leaked information and could even help you restore your identity before attackers cause further damage.
Ring has been at the center of controversy over the last year. The latest wave of controversy started with the introduction of Familiar Faces back in December 2025.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Senator Ed Markey had urged Amazon not to launch the feature back in November 2025. However, Amazon went ahead with the launch in December.
Then came the Super Bowl ad in February 2026 about a new feature called Search Party. The ad was supposed to showcase a heartwarming scenario in which a family uses a network of Ring cameras across a neighborhood, with the help of AI, to find their missing dogs.
However, people quickly realized that if this AI could scan every camera in a neighborhood to find a dog, it could potentially do the same thing to find a specific person.
The ad went viral for all the wrong reasons. Several people posted videos of themselves smashing their Ring cameras and demanding refunds.
What’s interesting is that just four days later, Ring aborted its planned partnership with Flock Safety. Flock itself had been dealing with a lot of controversy over its surveillance technology being used by police departments to track individuals.
Ring didn’t cite the ad backlash as the reason for killing the Flock deal, instead blaming integration complexity. However, it is not difficult to connect the dots. The backlash and the Flock cancellation happened just four days apart.
Then, in June 2026, Charles Sigwalt sued Amazon in a class-action lawsuit seeking $5 million in damages. Charles, who never owned a Ring camera, was scanned by Familiar Faces when he visited friends’ or family’s homes with Ring doorbells. He alleged that Ring had collected and stored his biometric data without his consent.
What started with Familiar Faces quickly led to a domino effect, fueled by the Super Bowl ad gone wrong and then the lawsuit in June 2026. All of this might have contributed to the introduction of TAKE.
That said, Ring’s tryst with controversies runs much deeper, going all the way back to 2019, when a report claimed that Ring employees could access customers’ recorded videos, and some U.S. staff were allegedly able to access live camera feeds.
In 2023, Amazon agreed to a $5.8 million FTC settlement after a former Ring employee was found to have viewed thousands of videos belonging to female customers, while hackers exploited security weaknesses to access more than 55,000 U.S. accounts.
Then, in 2024, Ring did away with warrantless footage requests through its Neighbors app in response to years of criticism, with concerns that Ring had essentially become an arm of police surveillance.
But in 2025, it brought police footage requests back through a new partnership with Axon, reigniting fears over the same surveillance network.
Amazon’s new TAKE encryption practice addresses public fears that Ring cameras could become surveillance tools. With this, Ring can only access doorbell footage for a 24-hour period inside a secured vault, with no way to reconstruct the encryption keys once they are deleted.
That said, the timing of this feature update is rather swift compared with what one might expect from Ring. It’s quite possible, then, that the latest wave of controversy, including the backlash over Familiar Faces and the Super Bowl ad, has contributed to this significant development.
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