In 2019, Ring launched the Peephole Cam, a camera that fits over existing door peepholes to record goings-on outdoors, in apartment building hallways and so on. Priced at $199, the Peephole Cam failed to catch on, leading Ring to discontinue it in 2021.
But now, Ring’s giving it another go — the Peephole Cam made a return this morning at CES 2023. The model is the same but now starts at $129 and ships with software that brings its capabilities in line with the rest of Ring’s product portfolio.
“After removing the Peephole Cam from our inventory, we heard from a number of customers who still were interested in this device and wanted to secure their front door with a Ring Doorbell but were not able to install one of Ring’s existing doorbells,” Ring CTO Josh Roth told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We are pleased to be able to offer the Ring Peephole Cam at a lower price than before to better serve our customers.”
The Peephole Cam — which Ring insists can be installed without permanent modifications to a door — offers motion detection, a doorbell button, 1080p video, two-way talk, real-time streaming video and Privacy Zones (areas users can designate to black out from their camera’s field of view). Exclusive to the Peephole Cam is an adjustable impact sensor to detect when a door is being “physically interacted with”; when the Peephole Cam senses vibrations, it’ll alert that someone’s knocking on the door and will begin recording.
Predictably, the Peephole Cam works with Alexa, letting owners send announcements or sound effects to Alexa-enabled devices when a knock, motion or doorbell ring is detected. A Peephole Cam-detected knock or motion can also be set to trigger smart home routines — for example, switching on connected lights and closing motorized window blinds.
When asked about the Peephole Cam’s privacy features, Roth noted that the doorbell has built-in cover slides to prevent a passerby from looking through the peephole and a toggle for audio recording. But that probably won’t allay the fears of consumer advocates who’ve argued that the company’s devices are a security threat. As TechCrunch previously reported, Ring has a history of sharing footage with the government without users’ permission, working closely with police departments around the U.S. and being generally reluctant to disclose its connections with law enforcement.
https://techcrunch.com/
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to data.ai’s “State of Mobile” report. However, […]
It’s time to start changing your passwords assword manager giant LastPass has confirmed that cybercriminals stole its customers’ encrypted password vaults, which store its customers’ passwords and other secrets, in a data breach earlier this year. In an updated blog post on its disclosure, LastPass CEO Karim Toubba said the intruders took a copy of […]
Thoma Bravo, the private equity and growth capital firm, today announced that it would spend $1.8 billion CAD (~$1.34 billion) to acquire Magnet Forensics, a Waterloo-based company making software used by defense forces and businesses to investigate cybersecurity threats. Magnet Forensics will be purchased by a newly created corporation controlled by Thoma Bravo, Morpheus Purchaser Inc., which […]
Leave a Reply