Murderers. Rapists. Thieves. These are the people I have captured on video after owning a Ring video doorbell for two weeks.<\/p>\n

Just kidding. So far I’ve captured video of trucks driving past my house, three visitors, construction workers across the street using the Porta-Potty, two Amazon deliveries, and several videos of Susan and I trying out the doorbell.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Like most gadgets, I bought a Ring doorbell not because I needed one, but because I thought it would be neat. If reporters are to be believed, our homes (and cars) are constantly being probed by scary criminals, checking to see if we are home. And, as an Amazon Prime member who orders more than his fair share of stuff, I am acutely aware of the threat of “Porch Pirates,” thieves who steal delivered packages from front porches. The Ring doorbell seemed like a good defense against all of those things. Additionally, the front door of our new house came with no peephole or window. Our front windows offer a clear view of the front porch, but it works both ways, and peeking through the blinds is pretty obvious. My hope was that the video feed from the Ring doorbell might work as an alternative solution.<\/p>\n

Up until recently, there were three models of Ring doorbells — the original Ring ($99), the Ring 2 ($199), and the Ring Pro ($249). Amazon recently put the Ring 2 on sale for $139, which made my decision easier. According to reviews, the Ring 2 corrects several of the original’s shortcomings. (From this point forward, any reference to “the Ring” refers to the Ring 2, the model I purchased.)<\/p>\n

Installing the Ring 2 doorbell took 20-30 minutes, and I could do it a second time in about 10. Inside the box, customers will find everything needed to install the Ring. Along with the device itself, there are two additional mounting brackets (one that angles to the side, another that angles downward), a screwdriver, a drill bit (for those installing the Ring on brick), and a bevy of screws and wall anchors. <\/p>\n

Both the Ring and Ring 2 run off of batteries. The Ring 2’s battery is better than the original, and can be constantly charged by the wires that ran to your previous doorbell, which means you should never have to remove your battery to recharge the device. A fully charged battery claims to run the unit for an entire year, so temporary power outages should not affect the device. (That being said, the Ring requires an internet connection, so if your wireless network and\/or internet connection go down, all video capabilities go away.)<\/p>\n

Using the Ring requires the Ring app. Connecting the doorbell to my wireless network was quick and easy. Ring recently issued an update that stops the doorbell from passing your wireless password in plain text when joining your network. The odds of anyone actually exploiting this in reality is pretty low, but it’s bad practice regardless, and I’m glad they fixed it.<\/p>\n

Once wired into your original doorbell wires, pressing the button on the front of the Ring will cause your original doorbell to ring. (The Ring is also compatible with “digital chimes,” but the installation is slightly more complex.) The real magic comes in the Ring’s alerts, and there are two: “someone rang your doorbell” and “Ring has detected movement.”<\/p>\n

When someone rings the Ring doorbell, an alert immediately pops up on your phone. After opening the app, you are able to see through the Ring’s camera. The fisheye lens offers a complete view of my entire porch. Using buttons on the screen, you are able to turn on\/off a microphone on the porch, and turn on\/off the microphone on your handset, allowing you to chat with anyone on your front porch. The video is automatically saved to your Ring cloud storage account. (First month’s free; it’s $30\/year after that.)<\/p>\n

Now’s as good a time as any to talk about the Ring’s WiFi signal requirements. Ring says that you’ll want to place your Ring doorbell as close as possible to your wireless router. They’re not kidding. My Ring is on the outside of my house (obviously), which means the signal has to travel through a layer of brick before hitting my router, which is literally 10′ away. In that configuration, my Ring barely<\/i> meets the minimum signal requirements. Suggested solutions included moving my wireless router, removing obstacles between the Ring and the router (there are none), or adding additional wireless signal boosters near the Ring doorbell. My signal is good enough for it to work, but if your wireless router is in the rear of your home, I can see signal strength being an issue.<\/p>\n

I’m not the type of guy who always has his phone in his hand, which means each time someone rings my doorbell I have to (a) find my phone, (b) open the app, and (c) connect to the Ring doorbell. Each of these steps takes several seconds, and when you know someone is waiting on your front porch, those seconds seem like hours. <\/p>\n

The other alert users can set up is motion detection. The Ring app does a decent job of guessing how sensitive to set its motion detection based on a few questions it asks you during installation. “Does your house face a busy street?” was one of the questions. For the most part I haven’t experienced a lot of false alarms, although it seems large slow-moving trucks are enough to trigger the motion detection while cars passing by at a normal clip do not. That being said, there is no way anyone walking up my sidewalk or standing on my front porch would not trigger the device, at which point it begins recording, and continues to do so until no more motion is detected.<\/p>\n

In the past two weeks I have captured three separate visitors. The first of which were two kids raising money for their basketball team. The second were two members of our home owner’s association stopping by. Part of the “fun” (I suppose) is being able to see what happens on the other side of your closed door. For two whole minutes before they rang my bell, those two kids took a load off their feet by resting on my porch furniture. No harm, no foul. As for the other men, you can clearly hear them rehearsing our names (“Rob and Susan, Rob and Susan”) before knocking on the door. I suspect that most people assume the device isn’t activated until they press the button. <\/p>\n

The third visitor was a stranger. I don’t know who he was, or what he wanted. He knocked, stood around for a bit, and left. Was he there to steal my Amazon packages? To ask for donations? To invite me to church? I don’t know. Does it matter that I know this man stopped by my house and rang the doorbell while I was away at work? I don’t know that, either.<\/p>\n

Hang on to your Big Brother hats, because now I’m going to talk about Ring’s videos.<\/p>\n

The Ring app has another feature, called Neighborhood. When I installed the app, it used my phone’s GPS to pull up a map of my neighborhood and the location of my house. After confirming where I live (it didn’t seem to be optional), Ring showed me some of its additional options. If I determined something was “suspicious” (like the stranger who rang my doorbell) I can flag it as such and send a notification (including the video) to every Ring user within my neighborhood’s radius (the default setting I believe was five miles). I haven’t flagged any videos, but some of my neighbors have. I’ve received two notifications since installing the Ring. “Someone was checking my car doors at 4:45 a.m.,” said one alert, complete with night-vision video. The other was of a man standing on someone’s front porch. “This guy rang my doorbell and stood there for a long time,” says the post. Others have commented. “Looks like he’s on drugs,” said one.<\/p>\n

Here’s where things get a little sketchy. The Ring doorbell itself does not store any of your video data. Instead, it is transferred through your wireless signal to Ring’s cloud storage. You can view it and you can download it… but I’m not sure who owns it. According to a Washington Post article, Ring has partnered with 400 police departments<\/a>, offering them access to Ring data. According to the article, police departments are supposed to ask nicely to view your videos. My only knowledge comes through reality television programs, but I’m not sure I love a system that depends on me trusting (a) someone else owning my videos, (b) them not releasing them unless I say so, and (c) police departments asking nicely and taking “no” for an answer. Orwell would get a chuckle, for sure.<\/p>\n

In a follow up article<\/a> the number of police departments working with Ring rose to 600. In this article, Ring also claims that they do not knowingly collect videos of children or random people walking on public property (i.e. walking down the sidewalk). They say it is up to Ring owners to make sure the devices don’t collect those images — which, as an owner, I can tell you is 100% impossible. Installing the device so that it does not collect video of the street in front of your house is literally impossible. I suppose placing a sign at the end of my driveway warning children not to approach my house might stop the latter, although I suspect all it would really do is provide me with videos of kids egging my house in crystal clear 1080p resolution.<\/p>\n

Even after buying and installing the Ring doorbell, I’m still morally on the fence. The ominous black box with the glowing blue LED ring will, I hope, dissuade Porch Pirates and other no-gooders from targeting my home. On the other hand, I can see how videos collected from devices like these could be (and probably is being) misused, and I don’t feel great that I paid $139 to contribute to that web.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Murderers. Rapists. Thieves. These are the people I have captured on video after owning a Ring video doorbell for two weeks. Just kidding. So far I’ve captured video of trucks driving past my house, three visitors, construction workers across the street using the Porta-Potty, two Amazon deliveries, and several videos of Susan and I trying out the doorbell. Like most gadgets, I bought a Ring doorbell not because I needed one, but because I thought it would be neat. If reporters are to be believed, our homes (and cars) are constantly being probed by scary criminals, checking to see if… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12244,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[144,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-computers","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12242"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12249,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12242\/revisions\/12249"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}