In a world where people have access to some pretty amazing and useful devices, there will occasionally be problems, especially when so many of these are IoT gadgets.
Owners of the Ring Doorbell Pro were in for a little confusion recently, when one such mishap occurred right on their doorsteps. The Ring Doorbell Pro allows home owners to see who is at their door from anywhere, at any time, and respond.
See also: Widespread IoT adoption requires good user experience
When home owners checked their “smart” gadgets, they saw visitors standing outside of homes that belonged to other people, instead of themselves. The doorbell system had shared video feed from other users.
From a security standpoint, this little fluke wasn’t the most awful thing that could have happened, but it did cause some owners to question the system. However, it was not really possible for anyone to tell from whose address they were seeing the imposter video feed. All they could really see was strangers at random locations.
Ring, the company that produces the Doorbell Pro, claims there were only 10 times that this video switch occurred, out of the millions of times this doorbell is used a day. However, this is still a problem that can’t happen if consumers are going to bring connected devices into their lives 24/7.
Ring hears its users’ knocks
According to Ring, the company has performed due diligence and taken the appropriate measures to make sure that this problem will not happen again.
As stated by Ring, “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 affected Ring Video Doorbell Pro users, not users of our other products, Ring Video Doorbell and Ring Stick Up Cam.”
