Amazon-owned Ring makes 'TAKE' default worldwide, will delete keys after 24 hours

Ring, the Amazon-owned home security company, said Wednesday that it will make a new system called TAKE the default encryption for customers worldwide, marking a significant shift in how it handles access to home-security video. Ring said the phased rollout will begin in September, and that under the new model it will keep its own copy of video-decryption keys only temporarily before deleting them after 24 hours.

“TAKE (Throw Away the Key Encryption) will become the default encryption for all Ring customers worldwide when fully rolled out,” Ring said in an announcement published Aug. 26. The company did not provide a final date for worldwide completion in the announcement or an accompanying technical white paper dated the same day.

The change matters because Ring is moving stronger protections into the default setup for a global customer base, rather than leaving them as a niche opt-in setting. At the same time, Ring said TAKE is meant to preserve cloud-based features that depend on the company being able to process video, a balance its older end-to-end encryption option does not make.

According to Ring’s white paper, TAKE uses unique, rotating encryption keys. Ring said it temporarily stores a copy of those keys in a cloud secure enclave — a protected computing environment — and then removes them. “Ring permanently deletes its copy of the keys after 24 hours,” the white paper said. Under TAKE, Ring said the lasting copies of those keys remain with the customer and any Shared Users the customer explicitly authorizes, on enrolled devices such as a phone, tablet or browser.

Ring said TAKE is inspired by end-to-end encryption, but is not the same as the company’s existing E2EE mode. The company said the technical foundation for TAKE is Messaging Layer Security, or MLS, a standard for securing shared access across multiple devices and users.

The distinction is important because Ring’s current E2EE setting remains more restrictive. In that mode, Ring says it cannot decrypt customer video at all, even temporarily, which limits features that rely on cloud processing. “E2EE will remain an optional setting,” Ring said. By contrast, Ring said TAKE is designed to keep the full Ring experience, including features named in the white paper such as Video Search, Video Description and Shared Users, which can be limited or unavailable under E2EE.

Ring said TAKE applies to videos captured by supported Ring cameras and stored in Ring’s infrastructure. The company also said that when users explicitly share videos through existing workflows, those copies may then be handled under the recipient’s security framework rather than remaining solely under Ring’s storage protections.

Ring’s published law-enforcement guidelines remain in place alongside the new encryption model. Those guidelines say authorities must use legal process to seek user content, allow for emergency disclosure procedures, and say Ring can preserve requested information for up to 90 days, with extensions available. Ring’s materials announcing TAKE did not outline any separate change to those policies.

Ring first introduced opt-in video end-to-end encryption in January 2021, so this is not its first encryption product. The notable shift is that stronger protections are now being positioned as the default for mainstream users, while the stricter E2EE option remains available for people who want Ring to have no decryption access at all. That change lands against the backdrop of earlier privacy and civil-liberties criticism of Ring’s law-enforcement partnerships and video-sharing ecosystem. For now, Ring has said the rollout starts in September, but it has not given a final timetable for when TAKE will be fully in place worldwide.