Security Worries Cause Ring to Add Privacy Dashboard

Authored by: Support.com Tech Pro Team

1. The New Ring Privacy Dashboard

While the Ring Video doorbells are great for notifying you of who's at your door and making sure porch pirates don't take off with your latest order, they've been in the media lately not for what they're good at but what they're lacking. And what they can allow into your home.

Security Breaches

Users of Ring devices have been reporting strange voices and threats through the speakers. At best these incidents are scaring children and at worse they're threatening physical harm and trying to blackmail the owner of the accounts.

The reason Ring has been able to be so easily hacked is due to their lackluster security features allowing you to reuse passwords that have been already compromised. Unless you dive into settings, Ring will never show you 2-factor authentication or prompt you to use it. And without 2-factor enabled you'll never get a message about someone else logging into your Ring account.

Once they have access not only can they control and communicate with the device, they also have access to all of your videos recorded with the service.

Sharing Videos with Law Enforcement

While Amazon said the Neighbor Portal could be used to opt-out of sharing your videos with local law enforcement, it wasn't publicly known that you could do this until recently. Until you opted out, anyone who passed in front of your Ring camera, including yourself, was unwittingly involved in local law enforcement investigations if they needed your face.

This practice also allowed them to amass a library used for facial recognition. 

Needless to say this violates civil liberties as you're not only unaware of your recording, but you couldn't give permission either.

The New Privacy Dashboard

To combat these issues Ring has added a new feature to its app. The Privacy Dashboard or Control Center will put security settings all in one place, as well as add a few new ones late January.

From here you can opt out of allowing law enforcement to use your camera for surveillance and enable 2-factor authentication.

Users who are already members of Ring will be encouraged to switch to 2-factor but not forced to. New users will need to use 2-factor authentication to continue making their account.

When this new update is rolled out you'll be brought to the New Features page of the app. From here you can tap on a new feature and be brought right to it.

If You Still Need to Install the Ring App

• How to Install the Ring App