From September, the encryption setting on your Ring cameras changes without you touching anything. Amazon has announced TAKE, short for Throw Away the Key Encryption, and says it will roll out in phases from next month before becoming the default for every Ring customer worldwide. Existing end-to-end encryption does not disappear, but it stops being the privacy ceiling most people are steered toward and becomes an opt-in you have to go find.
What Ring TAKE encryption actually changes
Ring video is already encrypted in transit to the cloud and at rest once it is there. TAKE changes what happens in the middle, when Ring’s servers need to look at a clip to run a cloud feature. Under TAKE, each video is protected with unique, rotating keys, and a copy of those keys sits temporarily in what Amazon describes as a secure enclave in the cloud — a sealed vault that hands Ring the key only under strict, limited conditions, then deletes it. TechCrunch, citing Amazon’s white paper, reports those keys are deleted within 24 hours of processing, and that the whole scheme is built on Messaging Layer Security, an open standard from the Internet Engineering Task Force.
The practical result is that features which need the cloud to see your footage keep working. Smart Alerts, which tell you a person, vehicle or package is in frame, is the example Amazon leads with. So do Shared Users, video search and video descriptions.
TAKE is not end-to-end encryption, and that is the point
This is where Amazon’s framing needs reading carefully. The company’s own analogy is a house key:
“Think of it like house keys. The company that made your lock doesn’t keep a copy of the key.” — Amazon, in its announcement of TAKE
That is true only in the sense that the copy is temporary. Under TAKE, Amazon does receive a usable key to your video, on a schedule and under conditions it defines, in order to run features on its own servers. Under genuine end-to-end encryption, it never has one at all. Those are meaningfully different threat models — for a court order, a breach of the enclave, or a future change in what counts as an “active feature,” a key that exists for 24 hours is not the same as a key that does not exist. Amazon is upgrading the floor for everyone, which is a real improvement over the status quo for the large majority of Ring owners who never turned E2EE on. It is not an upgrade for anyone who had.
Ring says E2EE remains available and points out it was, by its own account, the first major smart home security provider to offer video end-to-end encryption back in 2021. The catch is unchanged and Amazon states it plainly: with E2EE enabled, Shared Users and cloud-based features are not available, while live view, playback and video sharing continue to work. That is the same tradeoff at the centre of Apple’s encryption fight in the UK — cloud convenience on one side, keys the vendor cannot produce on the other.
What Ring owners should do
- If you never enabled E2EE: you get stronger default encryption in September with no action and no feature loss. Nothing to do.
- If you did enable E2EE: check the setting after the rollout reaches you. Amazon says encryption can be managed at any time in the Ring app on a per-device basis, so verify each camera rather than assuming an account-wide state carried over.
- If you are deciding: the question is whether Smart Alerts and Shared Users are worth Amazon holding a temporary key. There is no in-between setting.
- Key recovery under TAKE: per TechCrunch, you can recover keys on a new phone by authenticating near your Ring cameras, or via a passphrase, cloud backups, another approved device, or passkeys.
Timing is vague by design: Amazon says only that TAKE rolls out in phases starting in September and becomes the worldwide default once fully rolled out, with no completion date and no per-region schedule. The announcement also lands while Ring is under pressure over Familiar Faces, its facial recognition feature — a class action filed in June accuses Amazon of storing images of passersby without consent, as TechCrunch notes. A better default on video keys does not address who ends up in the frame in the first place.
Sources: Amazon, TechCrunch
