Be careful out there, especially with your smart doorbells.
A big part of using any kind of connected security system is trusting the company you're paying to keep your information private, and a handful of owners recently found that trust had been compromised. Notifications started coming from other Ring Doorbell Pro owners, with video feeds attached that were not from the right house.
Seeing someone else's house in your security app isn't cool, but knowing that there's a distinct likelihood someone else is looking through the camera mounted on your door frame is more than a little unsettling. After receiving a tip from a reader who was understandably concerned, we reached out to Ring for a little clarification on this. Brand Manager Yassi Shahmiri offered an explanation.
Security is at the core of our company and this is something Ring takes very seriously. Here's what happened:
We use random numbers to generate a call ID from Ring products. We did a very robust Beta test of the new Ring Video Doorbell Pro on experimental software, and when we moved it out of Beta for the commercial launch, some customers' numbers were in two different databases. As a result, those call ID numbers were overwritten. We believe, based on all the data we have analyzed, that this caused less than ten instances - out of more than 4 million calls per day and over 84 million calls in total - where video recordings overlapped for Ring Video Doorbell Pro users only. We are in the process of merging those databases so this will no longer occur. This issue only effected Ring Video Doorbell Pro users, not users of our other products, Ring Video Doorbell and Ring Stick Up Cam.
While it's nice to see Ring address the issue quickly, and it seems true that this only affected a small group of users, it's a scary thing to have happen. If you were one of those affected by this Ring Doorbell Pro issue, shout out in the comments below!