Hey Welcome to Camlense! Are you worried about your home security and need a security camera? Then we have here reviewed the Ring Camera and it’s security in case you have an issue that are Ring Cameras secure or not? Don’t worry, here we will explain all details about Ring Camera’s security.
Table of Contents
Are Ring Cameras Secure?
Yes, Ring Cameras are secure if you follow the Company’s guidelines carefully. You can further ensure your ring camera’s security by keeping its software updated, setting a strong password, and enabling dual-factor authentication.
How to Secure Your Ring Camera
If you are worried about your ring camera being hacked, then we have given a few suggestions below, by following which you can assure your security.
Update Software Regularly
If you have a Ring camera, ensure that the camera and programming are refreshed and updated with the most recent security programming from the company.
Set a Unique Password of Router
Make sure that the router, which provides internet to all the gadgets and devices in your home is password protected. The password must be strong which cannot be easily guessed by others should be updated regularly.
Set Different Passwords of all Accounts
Don’t use a single password for all of your accounts. In the event that one organization endures a data break in which the hacked passwords opened up to cybercriminals, at that point all of your records become helpless. You ought to have a different and hard-to-guess password or pin for every one of your online accounts.
It’s not as difficult as it appears to remember all your unique passwords. You can make a code like a word about your account and some specific symbols like “@” and “!” and also you can save all the passwords and usernames in a separate text file hidden on your PC.
Dual Factor-Authentication
Dual-Factor authentication is very important if you want to assure 100% security. Basically, what happens in dual-factor authentication is that the company sends a one-time code to your cell phone that must be used to access your account. Even if a hacker has your password, they would not be able to access your account as he would need the code sent to your email or phone.
Ring offers the option to use dual-factor authentication. In response to these increasing incidents of Ring cameras being hacked, Ring has stated that it will soon be making dual-factor authentication the default setting on all of its new devices rather than merely offering it as an option.
Source: SaturdayEveningPost.com
Ring Cameras Detailed Explanation
Hey, what’s going on, guys? Today, we’re going to be talking about the Ring Doorbell 2 if this is something, you’re interested in buying. I will be putting links below for you to pick this up on Amazon. So, let’s start with the basics.
If you look at it has a 1080p video resolution with two-way talk, motion detection, a lifetime purchase protection, and what that means is that if this gets stolen, the Ring will replace it for free. That’s pretty cool.
It has a quick-release battery, which only comes in the Video Doorbell, as of right now, and is Wi-FI connected. Flip it over to the back, this does have night-vision, connects to your existing Chime, which is nice. So when you push it, it’ll ring inside the house.
Cool Features of Ring Cameras
One cool thing about Ring and the doorbell is that it comes with a lot of different accessories. If you don’t have a good Wi-FI signal to your door you can get extenders for this. If for some reason you can’t connect this to your current Chime that you have in the house, you can also buy a box that would plugin, and this thing would through Wi-FI connect to that Chime.
When you push the button on here, it’s going to ring to the Chime in your house, or it can ring to multiple Chimes in your house. You could have one upstairs or downstairs. They also have built-in Wi-FI extenders to that so if your signal isn’t strong either, you can have a boosted signal too if you need to get to your doorbell.
Also, if you want to stick it somewhere other than your front door and you want to put it out by say a front gate or somewhere else or maybe at the back gate, you can use the extenders for that.
Another thing too, say if you’re running it out somewhere that doesn’t have power, is they also have solar accessories for this, too. So either a small solar panel that you can run or a little baseplate that goes around it that can absorb solar power. So, you can keep this thing charged and not have to worry about pulling that battery out every time it dies.
All right let’s take a look, at what’s in the box (devices clank). All right, so this is everything that we have in the box. If we take a look here is the camera right here with the silver faceplate. Inside is where the battery goes.
Ring Camera Accessories
We have got the battery with the quick release. Here is a plate. If you’ve got the old camera, you can use this to connect the new camera to it. We’ve got the other cover here.
The orange USB charger to plug into the battery, get that charged up. We’ve got the two angle plates. This is the one for side-to-side. This one here is for up-and-down. We also got a bag of screws and anchors in the toolbox.
Well, let’s look at what’s in the toolbox. All right, in the toolbox, we have got the screwdriver. So here we got a torch on one side, Phillips head on the other side here, another bag of screws and anchors. And in a bag here, we’ve got a mason drill bit.
We’ve got some extender wires with nuts. Also, have a level here. Then inside of this bag here, we have a diode if you have a digital Chime in the house.
Ring Camera Setup
Let’s go through the setup of what you need to do.
Step 1: Charge the Battery
First things first, you are going to need to charge the battery. Pull the charger out. You’re going to plug one side into USB and the other side is gonna go into the battery.
Now, this battery takes a long time to charge. I think mine was going on five-six hours plus by the time I went to bed, and it was still charging. Once the battery is charged up, you are just going to put it at the bottom here. Snap it in, and the device is going to power on.
Step 2: Download Ring Camera App
Next, we are going to download the app and start the setup process. Now, the setting up process is easy. You’re just gonna follow the instructions. Took me a few minutes here, and I was connected and good to go. We are now going to remove the old doorbell and get this one installed.
Step 3: Setup Security Camera
The first thing we did is I went outside, and I turned off the breaker to the doorbell. I pulled the doorbell out of the mount that I have for my setup for me, since the way my doorbell is positioned; I wanted to use one of the angle brackets.
What I did is I set the level on top, I marked the holes that I needed, and then I took the drill bit and drilled this thing into place. Now, once the angle bracket was in place, I loosened the screws on the back of my doorbell. I connected the wires. One thing to note is that it does matter which side you put the wires on. I tightened them down and then screwed the doorbell into the mount.
Once the doorbell was securely in place, we put the cover on the front. I used the torch a bit to tighten it up, and good to go. One thing I wasn’t sure about is I wasn’t sure if my wiring would charge the battery or if my battery is something, I’m gonna be needing to charge, I think it said every four to six months.
If you go into the app, you can see here that it shows the battery indication. If you click on the battery, it will say hard-wired if it is pulling power. If not, it’ll show battery. Luckily for me, it was saying hard-wired, So I didn’t have to worry about the battery losing charge.
One thing I really like about the Video Doorbell 2 that I thought was pretty appealing is that it does have this built-in battery that you could remove when you need to charge it, but it allows you to put the doorbell essentially anywhere you want to.
You don’t have to put it where your doorbell is. If you want, you could screw this right to the middle of your door One thing I noticed is that in a lot of the advertisements for the Video Doorbell, it shows that this is face-level for everybody, and it’s got great lighting and a great picture, and I didn’t find that to be the case where my doorbell was.
It was low It wasn’t getting necessarily the best angles of people like it does in all the advertisements. But, I guess, you could just screw this to the middle of your door. Put it right at face level and get the same results that they’re getting from all the pictures that you guys are seeing online and in their commercials.
Another idea for this is that if your front yard is gated off and you’ve got a gate upfront and say don’t want people to walk up to your front door, you can install one of these at the front gate. Because this doesn’t require any hard-wiring It only requires a strong Wi-FI signal.
So essentially you could put this where ever you want. All right, now that this thing is installed, let’s test it out. Diving into the app! One cool thing that I liked right out of the gate is that they have their own built-in community called Neighbors. It’s a way for you to see the action that’s happening around your neighborhood.
If people are getting packages stolen or just seeing something weird going on, you could essentially share your footage in this community tab and show your neighbors what’s going on.
In return, you can see what’s going on in your neighborhood I thought that was a really cool feature to kind of bring in a community of Ring users together. If we take a look I’m gonna go ahead and click on the Ring doorbell here.
Now that we’re here in the app, one thing you may want to look into doing is setting up Live View, this will allow you to access your camera anytime you want to see if there’s any activity going on, you can just hit that and be able to see the live view.
Step 4: How to Enable Live View
Now, by default that was turned off for me when I wanted to check Live View, I wasn’t able to do that. But one thing to keep in mind is if you want to turn Live View on, if I enable it here, I get a pop-up that says this won’t take effect until the Ring doorbell detects motions and turns itself on.
When I was at work, and I turned this feature on, it didn’t actually take effect until I got home and walked in front of the camera to turn it on. So keep that in mind.
Step 5: Setup Motion Zone
The next thing in the step here is you’re gonna want to set up your motion zone. If we go into motion setting, click on motion zones, it’s gonna ask us a couple of different questions. Do I face a street? I’m gonna say no.
Then, it says to adjust your motion depending on the slider I’m gonna slide it up and down here.to see what I actually want to get in there. We want to say get this walkway but nothing further. Then it’s gonna ask which areas I want on and off. Okay, now that we’ve got the configuration done on the phone, let’s talk about the experience of it.
At first, I didn’t like how often I was getting notified that people were coming to my door I guess being at work all day, ignorance is bliss. You think, nobody’s at your front door.
You’re not home, nobody’s at your door. But between salesmen coming to your door and solicitors dropping off little business cards and packaged deliveries, I don’t know. It was kind of eye-opening.to see how much activity is actually happening at my house when I’m not here.
Once I got used to it though and passed it, I kind of liked knowing what was going on. I liked that I was constantly getting notified when something was happening at my door.
I felt a little more secure that if somebody saw that I had the doorbell if there was anything shady going on, they probably would’ve just turned and walked away.
Now I wanted to test the device out for myself to see what it was like as somebody at the front door and also somebody in the house. So being somebody that’s at the front door and pushing the button.
Because my doorbell is connected to the inside Chime, when you push the button, not only does the inside Chime ring, but it also rings at the door.
There is a blue circle that starts spinning indicating that a connection is trying to be made,(doorbell rings)- (child laughs)-(adult laughs). When I get the pop-up on my phone saying somebody’s at the door and I answer it, the connection’s pretty quick and smooth. I really enjoyed it.
There didn’t seem to be a whole lot of lag that I could tell I could hear the person on the other side fine. Now being somebody who’s outside the door and using the device itself, I thought the same thing.
The audio sounded good I was able to understand what the person who was on the phone talking to me, standing at the door, was saying. So I was very impressed with that.
Video Resolution of Ring Cameras
Now go over some things that I didn’t really like about the camera. I didn’t think the picture quality was that great. I wasn’t that impressed with it. Considering this device boasts to be a 1080p camera, it was all right.
I mean, it was nothing amazing I was kind of hoping that once I downloaded the video to my phone that maybe the quality would be a little bit better and that maybe the quality loss was just because I was over Wi-Fi I didn’t find that to be the case.
When I downloaded it to my phone, it was the same quality as me watching it live. I was kind of disappointed there I guess my bar of 1080p is a little bit higher. I mean, thinking that my phone shoots 1080 video, and comparing that to this, there’s no comparison.
The camera on this is okay. I already mentioned that I didn’t like some of the settings, you either have to walk in front of the camera or push the button.
I thought that was weird. Hopefully, it’s something that can be fixed in future software updates. The last thing that I didn’t really like with this camera, and maybe I’m just spoiled with the Arlo-System that comes with seven days of free cloud storage, is that this one doesn’t come with any included cloud storage.
I think you get 30 days free of you being able to save clips and clips being recorded to the cloud so you can watch them on your phone, but after the 30 days, you have to get a subscription.
Why Ring Subscription
Now, the subscription’s not that much. I think the subscription is like three dollars a month or you pay 30 bucks for the whole year. But essentially, you’re gonna be paying that for the entire life of the device. You can run this without the subscription, but if you don’t have the subscription, you only have the benefit of viewing live footage or taking a live call.
You can’t go back and watch anything recorded or download anything because nothing’s being recorded. If I’m working or if I’m doing something or if I miss a call, I can’t go back and look at that footage.
If somebody shady comes up to my house, I can’t go back and look at that footage. Or if I even answer the call and see that somebody shady is at the house, I don’t have that footage I don’t like that I wish that they would’ve included, even if was just a day.
Give me a day, give me two days, that if something weird was going on, and I checked that footage, that I could keep that footage I could record it. I could save it and give it to the police if needed. I don’t like that I must have a continual subscription and now pay for this thing.
But maybe I don’t like that because I, for one, am spoiled with Arlo. And, for two, I didn’t realize when I bought it that you essentially had to have a subscription. Knowing that going into the purchase probably wouldn’t have been that bad Anyway, guys, I think I covered most of the things for the Ring Video Doorbell 2.
Conclusion
Here we are concluding our article and hope that we helped you in solving your question regarding the security of ring cameras. Also, we have provided steps to maximize your Ring Camera Security. Most importantly if you are using Dual-Factorization and updated software, then don’t worry, Your Ring Camera is secure.
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