Last week Amazon unveiled a range of new products including updates to the Amazon Echo and Echo Dot smart speakers, their Fire TV streaming device, and some new Blink outdoor security cameras. Another product which they showed off and announced would be coming in 2021 was the Ring Always Home Cam. 

This is going to be an autonomous drone with an attached camera which can fly around your home to monitor activity in different rooms. The device is stored in a dock and then takes flight after an activation, or a request to monitor a certain area of the house. The device then flies to the desired location in the home whilst recording live video and then that video is streamed to your mobile device for live viewing. It’s certainly an interesting product to say the least and it could be a curious fork in the road.

The linked promotional video from Ring shows the prototype device in action around a home. In the example shown it shows an unwanted person getting through a door and activating an alarm. At this point the alarm takes flight and travels to the room in which the unwanted guest activated the alarm, recording footage and streaming this back to the home owner’s mobile device. This is what you might call a reactive activation, whereby there has been an external action which has triggered the device into operation. The device can also be programmed to fly on demand in what I would term a ‘sentry mode’. As a long time Metal Gear Solid fan, it’s not difficult to see comparisons between the Ring Always Home Cam and the drone cameras called Cyphers that were present in the sequel game on Playstation 2. In the Sons of Liberty game, these Cyphers were fitted with camera systems and at times were often weaponised, in order to take lethal action on uninvited guests to the site they were guarding.

I draw comparisons to this because I wonder, once these home security cameras get into homes at affordable prices, how long is it before certain owners decide to customise the devices into something which takes more offensive action to any breaches of security? 

Another thing to ponder is just how secure is the video that is recorded by these devices? Just last year we saw both Amazon and Apple come under fire for a controversy involving their smart speakers and virtual assistants: Alexa and Siri. It was found that Amazon and Apple analytics teams had access to conversations which had been recorded by their respective devices after the owners had thought the devices had stopped listening and recording. I believe the reasons given were that Amazon and Apple were using the conversations and data to improve their voice recognition software and systems. Bearing this in mind, how much should we trust that a device like the Ring Always Home Cam is not snooping around the home without our knowledge whilst we are not there? 

The Ring Always Home Cam is an interesting device with clear innovations, however I’m not sure a majority of consumers would feel comfortable like having a device like that saunter through their home, possibly whilst they are unaware. It could be at the forefront of autonomous security systems or on the tipping point of privacy paranoia in an already anxious world. Time will tell, and it will be interesting to see the ongoing reaction to this contentious product.