Product Not yet confirmed elsewhere 1 publisher2 min readPublished Aug 26, 2026, 7:08 AM PDT

Ring's New Default Encryption Puts a Clock on What It Can Hand Police

Ring's new TAKE encryption deletes its own copy of video keys within 24 hours, reshaping what law enforcement can legally obtain from the cloud.

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Photograph accompanying Ring's New Default Encryption Puts a Clock on What It Can Hand Police — Photo: theverge.com

What happened

Ring is making its new TAKE encryption the default for all customers, subscription or not, starting with a gradual rollout in September.
TAKE rotates the encryption key covering Ring footage every five minutes rather than using one static key.
The rollout comes after a year of scrutiny over Ring's law enforcement ties and the privacy concerns raised by its Search Party AI feature.

Why it matters

exposure Legal requests for footage older than 24 hours now return only encrypted files that Ring itself says it can no longer decrypt, since key copies are deleted daily with no backups.
precedent Making TAKE the default for every customer, not just subscribers, sets a public technical benchmark other cloud-connected home camera services will now be measured against.
cost Customers who exhaust every recovery option, from phone backup to passphrase to camera-based recovery, permanently lose access to their own footage under the no-backup design.

The mechanism matters more than the name. TAKE is built on Messaging Layer Security, an open IETF standard ^[6]. Under that design, a single camera's footage cycles through 288 separate five-minute keys over one day ^[4]^[14], each one purged by a database that keeps no backups ^[8]^[17].

That timing, not the encryption itself, is the real shift. A request that reaches Ring within a day of recording could in theory still be paired with a live key, but a request for footage from last month arrives at an encrypted file with no key anywhere left to open it, according to Ring ^[8]^[17]. Ring's own framing acknowledges the limit: the company says it will hand over only non-video information and encrypted files, according to spokesperson Sam McGee ^[3], while conceding this does not fully remove the privacy trade-off of a cloud-based camera ^[13]. It is not end-to-end encryption, because Ring temporarily holds a copy of every key inside an AWS Nitro Enclave, unlocked only when its own attestation process confirms a request came from software it approved ^[5]^[15]^[16]. Key delivery is push only, so Amazon's servers cannot pull a key from a device without the customer asking first ^[9].

The commercial logic behind the compromise is plain. Before TAKE, Ring decrypted footage in the cloud to run its smart features after encrypting it only in transit and at rest ^[12]. Ring wants to keep selling AI powered search, package alerts and video descriptions, features that still require the cloud to process footage ^[1]. Full end-to-end encryption, which Ring already offers on newer cameras ^[7], breaks those features outright because Ring never holds a key at all. TAKE lets Ring claim it limits police access while keeping the processing pipeline its subscription business depends on.

Making TAKE the default for every customer, subscription or not, sets that compromise as the baseline for the largest home camera network with direct law enforcement partnerships ^[2]^[11]. Any other cloud video product now making a similar privacy claim has a concrete bar to clear: a stated deletion window and a documented enclave, not just a promise.

What to watch

Whether independent security researchers can verify Ring's AWS Nitro Enclave and attestation claims beyond Ring's own white paper.
Whether law enforcement agencies test the 24-hour deletion window by requesting older footage and how Ring responds in practice.
Whether Amazon extends TAKE-style key deletion to other cloud video products, such as Blink, given the privacy benchmark it now sets.

Clarity's read

What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption22
Hype gap+24
Incentives78
Confidence52

Why these scores

Claim ledger

Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.

[1]
TAKE still supports smart alerts for people and packages, AI-powered video search, and video descriptions.
ReportedSupported2 sources— create a free account to open them View cited source
[2]
Ring's new TAKE encryption is rolling out gradually starting in September and will become the default encryption for all Ring customers, regardless of subscription.
ReportedSupportedView cited source
[3]
Ring says that under TAKE it will only be able to provide non-video information and encrypted video files in response to requests.
ReportedSupportedSource: Ring spokesperson Sam McGee, in an email to The VergeView cited source
[4]
With TAKE, content encryption keys change for every five minutes of footage.
ReportedSupportedView cited source
[5]
TAKE is not end-to-end encryption; unlike E2EE, where Ring never has the keys and cannot process video, Ring temporarily holds copies of the keys under TAKE.
ReportedSupportedView cited source
[6]
TAKE was developed using Messaging Layer Security, an open standard from the Internet Engineering Task Force.
ReportedSupportedView cited source
[7]
Newer Ring cameras that encrypt on-device support both TAKE and full end-to-end encryption and let users switch between them; older cameras that encrypt at cloud ingress only support TAKE.
ReportedSupportedView cited source
[8]
Each key is permanently deleted after 24 hours, a window Ring's Sam McGee said allows for processing current cloud-based features, and no backups are kept.
ReportedSupportedView cited source
[9]
Ring says key delivery is push only, meaning Amazon's servers cannot force devices to hand over keys remotely; only the customer can request one, and viewing older footage requires an authorized device to send the keys back to Ring for that session.
ReportedSupportedView cited source
[10]
If a customer loses access to their device, Ring offers recovery methods accessible only to the customer, including cloud backup via phone, a passphrase, a passkey, another authorized device, and camera-based recovery; if all fail, the encrypted content cannot be accessed.
ReportedSupportedView cited source
[11]
TAKE arrives during a year of intense scrutiny for Ring driven by its ties to law enforcement and the privacy implications of its AI-powered Search Party feature.
ReportedSupportedView cited source
[12]
Before TAKE, footage captured by Ring cameras was encrypted in transit to the cloud and at rest, then decrypted for Ring to process for smart features.
ReportedSupportedView cited source
[13]
Ring's new encryption does not completely eliminate the privacy trade-off of cloud-based cameras.
ReportedSupportedView cited source
[14]
A single Ring camera's footage cycles through 288 separate five-minute encryption keys over a 24-hour period.
DerivedSupported1 source— create a free account to open them
[15]
Ring's copy of the keys is managed inside an AWS Nitro Enclave, with Ring's access restricted by access controls, cryptography and hardware isolation; Ring claims there is no persistent storage and no way for a Ring employee to access it.
ReportedInsufficient2 sources— create a free account to open them View cited source
[16]
The stored keys can only be unlocked through cryptographic attestation proving the enclave is running the exact software image Ring approved, and the enclave releases a temporary key only when an enabled service requests it.
ReportedInsufficient2 sources— create a free account to open them View cited source
[17]
Ring's white paper describes deletion as continuous: as each key ages past 24 hours, the Cloud Member Management Service ratchets the key derivation hierarchy forward and discards the original, the CMMS database is configured with no backups, and the deletion is designed to be irreversible.
ReportedInsufficient2 sources— create a free account to open them View cited source

Sources

1 independent publisher whose own reporting we read for this story.

theverge.com
1 article · August 26, 2026
Ring says its new encryption limits what it can give police

Ask Clarity

Have a question this piece left open? The answer comes from its reporting and claim ledger — nothing else.

Clarity analysis

How the coverage leans and what the record actually supports. Read the methodology

Perspective Coverage

How much of the coverage speaks to builders, operators and investors. It measures emphasis, not whether the story is right.

Builder

For builders, the interesting payload is the architecture, not the branding: Messaging Layer Security as the group-keying substrate, content encryption keys rotating every five minutes (288 per day), cloud-side key custody inside an AWS Nitro Enclave gated by cryptographic attestation to an approved software image, push-only key delivery, and a Cloud Member Management Service that ratchets intermediary secrets forward through a one-way KDF with a no-backup database. That is a reusable pattern for 'we need cloud inference on user data but want a hard ceiling on our own access,' and Ring is publishing it in a white paper. The caveat builders should carry: every property is vendor-asserted in a single document, the device-tier split (on-device encryption versus cloud-ingress encryption) determines whether real E2EE is even available, and recovery design collapses to unrecoverable content if all customer-held factors fail.

Reality

Evidence, adoption, hype gap, incentives and confidence, each read independently from the current record on the scale shown beneath it. How these are measured.

Evidence58: 0100
Detailed primary disclosure, single outlet, no external verification
The cluster rests on one publisher, but that publisher works from two primary artifacts: a same-day Ring white paper quoted directly on key rotation, enclave attestation and ratcheting deletion, plus on-the-record spokesperson statements about the 24-hour window and legal-process scope. Specificity is high and internally consistent. What is missing is any independent check: no third-party audit, no security researcher, no adversarial testing of the no-employee-access or irreversible-deletion assertions, which is why two of the load-bearing technical claims are marked insufficient.
Adoption22: 0100
Announced default rollout, no deployment evidence yet
Adoption evidence is announcement-stage only. The rollout is described as gradual and starting in September, i.e. after publication, and default-on status means uptake will be pushed rather than chosen. There are no installed-base figures, no share of cameras migrated, no opt-out rates, and no third-party confirmation that TAKE is live on any device, so this scores low despite the broad eventual scope.
Hype gap+24: −100 understated0 aligned+100 overstated
Vendor framing overstates key exclusivity; reporting partly corrects it
Ring's promotional language - 'leaving you with the keys and full control of your videos' and 'only you retain the keys to your video' - overstates the guarantee relative to the disclosed mechanics, since Ring holds key copies for up to 24 hours, can receive them again whenever a customer views older footage, and continues to decrypt footage in the cloud for feature processing. The gap is modest rather than severe because the same article states plainly that TAKE is not E2EE, that E2EE remains the stronger option, and that the cloud trade-off persists.
Incentives78: 0100
Self-reported architecture from a vendor under active privacy scrutiny
Every technical property in this story originates with Amazon-owned Ring - its own white paper and its own spokesperson - and lands during a year of criticism over police partnerships and the Search Party feature, giving the company a direct reputational and commercial interest in how the design is characterized. Ring also states its main reason for building TAKE rather than expanding E2EE is to preserve cloud-processed features, which are the same features that anchor its cloud and subscription product. No independent party in the reporting has an incentive to test the claims.
Confidence52: 0100
Moderate - strong primary detail, no corroboration or usage data
Confidence is capped by structure rather than sloppiness. The reporting is specific, quotes primary documents, and flags its own limits, which supports the descriptive claims about what Ring says and ships. But there is one publisher, zero independent verification of the cryptographic guarantees, and no post-rollout evidence, so claims about real-world key destruction and real-world limits on law-enforcement production cannot yet be held with high confidence.

Topics and entities

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Topics

Entities

Ring Follow
TAKE (Throw Away the Key Encryption)Follow
Amazon Follow
AWS Nitro EnclavesFollow
Messaging Layer SecurityFollow
IETF Follow
Cloud Member Management ServiceFollow
Sam McGeeFollow
The Verge Follow
Ring Search PartyFollow
Ring EdgeFollow
ReolinkFollow
Eufy Follow