ring, dinged –
Account security for Ring is much improved, but privacy concerns still abound.
Two-factor authentication of some kind is now mandatory for all accounts, Ring announced today . Every device owner and authorized user will have to enter a one-time, six-digit code, sent through email or SMS, in order to log in to a Ring account.
While email and SMS are not necessarily the most secure forms of two-factor authentication out there, either is a sight better than what Ring had been mandating before, which was nothing. The ease with which bad actors were able to access huge numbers of Ring cameras, take control of them, and harass homeowners with them was in large part due to weak security on those Ring accounts.
In Houston, police estimated that Ring footage has been used in perhaps out of that city’s 18, 0 burglaries in the past year. Even if the footage from a Ring camera is clear, it may not result in a positive identification, a Houston police spokesperson told NBC: “You have a video of one unknown person in a city of 2.5 million people! … Our limiting factor is not evidence, we have more solvable evidence than we have investigators. ”
Property crime has been on a decline in recent years for most of the country anyway, NBC notes, and that holds up in several jurisdictions that partner with Ring. “We don’t have any research data showing that Ring has a correlation to a reduction,” a spokesperson for the Carlsbad Police Department told NBC. “Our residential burglary rate began decreasing before Ring gave us access to their portal. There are more than likely many factors that have led to this decrease.”
Instead, anecdotal evidence seems to support a theory that Ring is best for the most time-honored neighborhood tradition of all: being nosy.
Writer Max Read recently
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