Ring, Amazon’s smart home security brand, announced on August 26 that it’s rolling out a new default encryption system called TAKE — short for “Throw Away the Key Encryption” — designed to give users more privacy without switching off the AI features that make its cameras useful.
Here’s the problem TAKE is trying to solve. Fully end-to-end encrypted video is the most private option, but it also blocks Ring from processing footage in the cloud, which is what powers features like Smart Alerts, video search, and AI-generated descriptions of what a camera saw. TAKE is built as a middle ground: each camera encrypts footage with unique keys that rotate every five minutes, and a temporary copy of those keys is held in what Ring calls a secure cloud enclave. Ring can only use that copy to power the specific features you’ve turned on, and it permanently deletes its copy within 24 hours. After that, only the account owner — and anyone they’ve approved as a trusted Shared User — holds the keys, stored locally on their own devices.
Ring built the system on Messaging Layer Security, an open encryption standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force, rather than a proprietary approach. One notable side effect: because Ring no longer holds onto long-term copies of the keys, the company says it will have less video data to hand over in response to law enforcement requests going forward, limiting disclosures mostly to non-video account information and already-encrypted footage.
If you’d rather not use TAKE at all, full end-to-end encryption remains available as an opt-in setting, though turning it on still disables the cloud-dependent AI features. Ring is rolling TAKE out in phases starting this September, with plans to eventually make it the default encryption for every Ring customer worldwide. For existing users, that means many will see the change happen automatically rather than needing to enable anything themselves — worth watching for in your Ring app’s settings and privacy notices over the next few months.