AMAZON has urged Ring doorbell owners to check three key things to make sure their homes are protected.
Ring products are pretty “low maintenance but need a little help from their owners from time to time”, the company said.
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One easy trick is to make sure your battery is charged to 100% for six to eight hours – or until the light turns from amber to green.
Due to shipping regulations, Ring cannot package the lithium batteries for its products fully charged.
Even if your battery doorbell is wired or fitted with a solar charger – its main power source is the battery.
While simple, to do – it’s an easy task to forget. But it is critical to having your Ring doorbell up and running.
WiFi woes
Where your WiFi router is located in your home is also important.
All Ring devices use WiFi – which can be unpredictable at times, particularly in more rural areas.
Making sure your Ring doorbell is always connected to WiFi means you can continue to receive updates via your phone.
To keep Ring connected, the company has told users to make sure their WiFi box isn’t blocked by a sofa or tucked away in a cupboard.
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“Even moving your router off the floor onto a coffee table gives it a better chance of staying connected to your doorbell,” the company explained.
Users must also know how to reconnect their device to WiFi, otherwise they won’t receive notifications on their phone while they are away from home.
To reconnect to WiFi, users must go onto the Ring app and tap the three lines on the top left.
Then hit Devices > Select the image of your doorbell > Device Dashboard > Device Health > Reconnect to WiFi.
Ring risks
While Ring doorbells help keep your home protected, they do come with risks, experts told The Sun.
Footage recorded by Ring can be distributed without your consent, and even hacked into if users aren’t careful.
Amazon, which bought Ring in a deal reportedly worth more than $1billion (£830million) in 2018, keeps all footage on its servers.
And if it is requested by police, or anyone else, Amazon can then choose to give it away.
By enabling the opt-in end-to-end encryption feature, recordings made by Ring devices can be kept safe from being shared by Amazon without your consent.
To set it up, owners must make sure their Ring app is updated on the version 5.34 or higher.
Next, you go to Control Centre > Video Management > Advanced Settings > End-to-End Encryption and tap Got it on the disabled feature list.
If your WiFi connection is not private, the risk of your Ring doorbell being hacked is far higher.
Chris Hauk, consumer privacy advocate at cyber protection blog Pixel Privacy, told The Sun: “When setting up any camera like the Ring doorbell camera, make sure to use a secured connection to your WiFi network.
“If the doorbell is not connected to the network via a secure protocol, outsiders can tap into the Ring’s video feed, download video from your Ring storage, or use the Ring to tap into your network.”
You may even want to go a step further, and create a separate Wifi network for your Ring device.
If you can create a second secure Wifi network from your router, it could protect your other devices such as phones and laptops if you have a security breach through your smart home device.
It might also limit access to other information on your network.
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