SANTA MONICA, Jan. 7 — Ring, the Amazon-owned doorbell and camera vendor, said Wednesday that end-to-end video encryption will be enabled by default for all new customer signups beginning immediately — ending a multi-year period in which the privacy feature was offered as opt-in and was disabled in the default configuration.
The announcement is the most significant policy change Ring has made on consumer privacy since 2023, when the company entered into a $5.8 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over employee access to customer video. Ring said in a blog post that existing customers can enable end-to-end encryption from the Control Center menu in the Ring app and that the company will run a multi-month communications effort to encourage migration.
“Making end-to-end encryption the default state for new customers reflects what we have been hearing from customers over the last several years,” said Mateo Iversen-Park, Ring’s chief product officer, in an interview with Consumer Tech Wire. “The feature has been available since 2021, but adoption has been concentrated in a more privacy-aware customer segment. Making it the default is the right answer.”
What is and is not encrypted
Ring’s end-to-end encryption protects video and audio content stored from Ring cameras and doorbells: encryption keys are generated on the customer’s mobile device, and Ring’s servers cannot access the content of stored video. The feature is compatible with all current-generation Ring devices and a substantial fraction of the historical Ring lineup, with the notable exceptions of the original Ring Doorbell, the Stick Up Cam (first generation), and the Spotlight Cam Battery (first generation), which lack the on-device cryptographic capability the feature requires.
End-to-end encryption disables several Ring features that depend on server-side video processing, including the Smart Alerts package-detection feature, the Pre-Roll motion-history clip, and the Rich Notification thumbnail attached to motion-event push notifications. Customers must accept these tradeoffs to enable the feature, and the company said it will surface the tradeoffs in the new-customer onboarding flow.
Regulatory context
The change comes against a backdrop of sustained regulatory pressure on consumer-camera vendors. The FTC’s 2023 settlement with Ring, which included specific findings on employee video access and on Ring’s law-enforcement-data-sharing practices, set requirements that have shaped Ring product policy through the current rollout. The European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act, which entered into application in 2025, includes specific requirements for “secure-by-default” configurations on connected consumer devices that several privacy researchers said are difficult to satisfy without end-to-end encryption.
“The Ring move is overdue, but it is the right move and it sets a benchmark the rest of the consumer-camera category should be measured against,” said Catalina Brennan-Kowalski, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Eufy, Wyze, Arlo, Blink — the question is whether they follow.”
Ring said it has not changed its existing law-enforcement-disclosure policies, which require a search warrant or other legal process for the company to provide stored video to law enforcement except in narrowly defined emergency-disclosure circumstances. End-to-end encrypted video is not technically accessible to Ring even with a warrant, the company said.
Reginald Rosenberg-Vance is editor in chief of Consumer Tech Wire.