Ring in September of 2020 introduced its new surveillance solution to the world, a small drone that flies about your home hunting down the intruders in your house or just helping you keep an eye on your dog from time to time. Amazon’s Ring comes up with home security solutions that include motion-detecting cameras or the Ring video doorbell. It hosts the Neighbors app in which the users can share the captured clips or footage. This device was introduced in the Amazon hardware event 2020. On September 28th, 2021 Amazon have started taking pre-orders and opened its waiting list for the same. It is called the Always Home Cam and is a drone attached with a camera on it. You can set the predetermined path for the camera to travel to capture the video and on activation, it will only travel the predetermined distance and route and nothing more. However, this has raised a lot of questions relating to the privacy of the users and the internet is unquestionably is talking all about this being be the avalanche of privacy worries.
The Ring Drone camera costs around $250 and comes in a dock which is where the drone is placed when not surveilling around. Imagine not at home but being notified about someone breaking in at your place and you need to see if this was another false alarm that was started by your cat or is there a burglar at your place right now. Here comes Ring Always Home Cam, with the flying ring security camera drone you just need to turn this on and it will be your eyes around the house. It will walk around the path that you have asked your device to look after for you and it will do the same. But the question that arises here is that if this is all worth it? Is the thought of your data being online all over the cost of having an extra technological set of eyes at your place for the in-case situation that might never arise?
There also has been news where Amazon has admitted an employee, or few, were involved in checking one of the user’s video footage. If this is not scary what is. However, it is also important to mention that the device only monitors when it is out of its dock. Its camera is shut down when inside the dock, so to sum up it sleeps around most of the time and can only be your eyes to watch around when you awake it.
From the time when the moment Ring publicized its Always Home Cam, they have been functioning on filtering and redefining what the device could do and what it stands for. The device has come a long way from when its prototype was launched which was 2020. Jamie Siminoff, Ring Founder, mentions that the device has already been rolling in his house and is working successfully. These Amazon drones are now available for regular people but not all, as there is only a waiting list for now. How the world accepts this device is what will tell us how future products will look like.
Amazon has started an invite-only program and this way they allow the users to give them constant feedback to progress on the functionality of the device. With the constant changes in the device’s programming, the device still is the same when it originated to the routine uses as was introduced back in 2020. The ring security drone is a drone that can only fly only indoors and is attached with cameras and bounded propellers. The Amazon Ring camera started with 1080p resolution at the time it was first announced, however is now increased to 1400 x 1400 HD. The drone comes with a sensor to avoid bumping into hindrances but its shrouded propellers will anyway avoid any damage being caused to the device.
Let us get to the technical cons now, the battery life is not a very impressive one when it comes to the drone. It can only record 5 minutes as the drone cannot fly for more than 5 minutes. Siminoff justifies this feature by saying that one does not need to watch a door being ajar for two hours. Moving on the next, the device is only made to move around within the same floor and is not compatible to do multi-floor navigation, but Siminoff says they are walking around on the possibilities of multi-floor navigation and might soon be implemented. The idea of this technologically created set of eyes constantly keeping an eye on you and your house sounds like a story straight from some dystopian novel or some sci-fi web series but to think of it in a practical way it might make sense to some as your new security solution.
