Ring founder Jamie Siminoff on default encryption and AI privacy

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**Megan McCarty-Corino** (0:31)
Ring moves to make its video footage more private. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.
Amazon's popular brand of video-enabled smart home and security devices, Ring, is adding a new encryption system called TAKE, short for Throw Away the Key Encryption. It allows users to encrypt all video their home cameras capture, while keeping advanced AI-enabled capabilities and security features active. The company already offered traditional end-to-end encryption, but that disabled advanced security features processed on the cloud that required Ring servers to maintain access to the video. Ring's founder, Jamie Siminoff, says the new take encryption works by changing, or throwing away, the encryption key so Amazon servers don't have permanent access.

**Jamie Siminoff** (1:36)
We've had end-to-end encryption as an option for people. We've, of course, architected our systems to be secure, but people want the assurance of that end-to-end encryption, that sort of key-based encryption.
But they also want to share their videos with others. They want AI features. They want all these other things that, and by the way, we still have them that you expect with a ring when you buy it, all these fun, great features that you get. So we were able to take end-to-end, build a variant of it called Take, which gives you a similar, like the encryption of a key-based encryption, but now around the environment of a home, so you can still enjoy having things like shared users.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (2:14)
And this is on by default in the new rollout?

**Jamie Siminoff** (2:19)
Yeah. So before we had our standard architecture of safety and security, and then you had end-to-end as an option if you really wanted to go the extra mile. Now you'll have that key-based encryption as a default to every single user.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (2:35)
So why have you added this now?

**Jamie Siminoff** (2:37)
I mean, we've actually been working on it. We would have added it a long time ago. It's just there's a lot of invention around doing this end-to-end encryption, which is on the iPhone, WhatsApp. You'll see it in other places, is a one-to-one. That's a very solved thing in cryptography, like that one-to-one. What's not solved and what we invented and I think is now going to become a new standard is this take, where if you think about it, it's like a lock for your front door of your house.
If you only had one key and it was attached to you, that would not be a very good home experience, and that's what end-to-end did. With take, we invented the ability to have multiple keys out there that you can still control, but you can also give them out to others and still enjoy, again, how a home is used.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (3:20)
Over the years, there's been a lot of back and forth over access to footage by law enforcement. Would take limit what footage Amazon can provide to law enforcement?

**Jamie Siminoff** (3:34)
Yeah, with take and it being on by default, you have the key to unlock your videos. We've always been pushing very hard around this idea of community requests, where police ask for, you know, if something happens, there's a car stolen in your neighborhood, we'd love to have footage. And they ask, it's anonymous if you don't respond. Like, yeah, you can respond and you can sort of take your key out and unlock it. And that's what we've certainly come to now.

**Megan McCarty-Corino** (4:01)
If a user does give permission for their footage to be used by, say, you know, their local police department, I'm curious how that footage is sort of governed from there. Can it, for instance, be accessed by a federal agency like ICE?

**Jamie Siminoff** (4:17)
I mean, if you decide to share your footage with, you know, local police, which is, by the way, the community request is only from local PD, it would then, you know, go into the laws governing around how that jurisdiction would do things, which is, I think, varies by even county, let alone state. But, you know, you should, it's with take, you are making that decision of do you want to share or not? You have control of it. And so we do see, though, you know, there's a lot of reasons why people want to share video. We have Fire Watch, which, you know, we just had in Spokane, Washington and near Dallas, fires where people shared their videos to help build a map that was more accurate for the fire resources to go fight the fire. You know, so there's lots of reasons why people do want to share, people do want to help when there is a crime in their neighborhood. People, I think, do want security.