Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Give your neighbors some privacy
Ring Video Doorbells have a range of features, from setting up Home and Away modes for more automation, to changing your motion settings. One of the features well worth knowing about however, is Privacy Zones.
Ring Privacy Zones allow you to designate a specific area within your doorbell or camera’s field of view as off limits. A Privacy Zone will mean the area, or areas, you have chosen won’t be seen in Live View and they can’t be recorded or monitored for motion either.
It’s something Blink offers on its Mini 2 camera too, and it allows you to give your neighbors some privacy, as well as yourself depending on where you have installed your camera or doorbell. This feature covers how to setup a Privacy Zone on Ring and what a Privacy Zone does.
What you’ll need
- The Ring app
- Your Ring device
- A smartphone or tablet
The short version
- Open the Ring app.
- Tap on the three lines in the top left.
- Select Devices.
- Pick your Ring device.
- Tap Device Settings.
- Tap Privacy Settings.
- Tap on Add Privacy Zone.
- Drag the black circles to create the zone.
- Name your Privacy Zone.
- Press ‘Done‘.
- Press ‘Save‘.
Ring’s Privacy Zones are available across a number of its devices, allowing you to black out areas of a cameras’s field of view that you don’t want to appear in Live View, or video recordings. This could be a neighbor’s apartment window or door, or perhaps even your own bedroom if you have a camera on the landing, for example.
When you have setup a Privacy Zone, the Ring app won’t display anything in that area in the Live View in the Ring app, and there will be no video recording of that area either. That also means that anything that happens in the Privacy Zone can’t be viewed or recovered so remember that when you are setting it up.
A Privacy Zone will appear as a black rectangle in the Ring app and on video and you can create up to two Privacy Zones per device. If you move your device, then the Privacy Zones you have created will also move so keep that in mind.
That’s it! Once you have saved, the snapshot you see of your camera or doorbell’s view will have a black box over where you created a Privacy Zone.
FAQs
All Ring devices support Privacy Zones, except the flowing models:
Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam
Stick Up Cam with Pan-Tilt Mount
Stick Up Cam (1st Gen)
Video Doorbell (1st Gen)
You can set up two Privacy Zones per Ring device. Each Privacy Zone has a minimum size of around 15% of the screen.
