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During its annual hardware event today, Amazon announced a host of new Ring-branded devices for homes and cars of all shapes and sizes. It launched Ring Car Cam, a new dash cam that the company says works with 99% of vehicles, and Ring Always Home Cam, a miniature drone that flies through rooms to keep an eye on everything that is happening.
Always Home Cam is by far the most intriguing addition to the Ring line. The $ 249 quadcopter glides along preset routes in search of noise and records 1080p video when in motion, automatically landing on a dock when it runs out of battery. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, speaking to The Verge, says that the obstacle-avoidance, closed propeller camera Always Home Cam took years to develop and builds a house map for you to follow, allowing users to ask you specific points of view like cooking. or bedroom. It can be commanded to fly on demand or programmed to fly when a linked ring alarm system detects a disturbance.
On the side of the car, there’s Car Cam ($ 199), which plugs into a standard OBD-II port, connects via Wi-Fi or LET, and has a traffic stop detection feature that alerts drivers. family members and begins recording when the driver stops. finished. Car Cam monitors the interior of the car with a second camera to accomplish this; users can say “Alexa, I’m being stopped” to activate cameras and save images to the cloud. Car Cam also incorporates a siren and uses LTE to send notifications, with support for Amazon’s recently launched Sidewalk wireless network and car accident recognition.
Amazon says there are a number of built-in privacy features, such as a physical camera shutter and the ability to electronically disable interior video and audio recording. This, along with the other Ring products announced today, will be available starting next year.
There’s also a new car alarm device called the Ring Car Alarm ($ 59), which supports Ring Car Connect, an API for automakers to incorporate Ring into their existing security systems. Tesla will support Car Connect to the extent that customers can view images, receive event alerts and check if the doors are locked or unlocked on their Tesla 3, X, S and Y model from the Ring app, according to Amazon. As for the car alarm, it will detect theft and towing attempts and collisions on whatever car it is installed in.
In somewhat related news, Amazon also announced that all Ring products will get end-to-end encryption for live and recorded video footage. (Amazon expects it to be available by the end of the year, although the company declined to provide a time frame.) It follows the launch of Control Center, a component of the Ring app that gives customers greater control over devices, services, and more, which was in some ways a direct response to criticism from advocacy groups like Fight for the Future. and Electronic Frontier Foundation. They accused Ring of using its cameras and the Neighbors app (which offers security alerts) to build a private surveillance network through law enforcement associations. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in particular, has singled out Ring for its marketing strategies that foster fear and promote a “vicious cycle” that spurs sales, and for “[facilitating] reports of so-called ‘suspicious’ behavior that actually amounts to racial profiling. “
