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Geofencing makes its long-awaited debut with Ring’s products

Geofencing is a powerful tool for home automation that enables certain actions when you come within a certain distance of your home. Today, Ring announced its latest feature — Geofence. It will be available to all Ring users and will automatically send reminders to homeowners to arm their video doorbells, cameras, and alarms, enable users to snooze motion alerts when they’re inside the range, and more. This means fewer unnecessary false alerts, especially when you’re already at home.

All of these settings can be enabled or disabled from within the Ring app. Geofence adds more convenience to your life and takes the guesswork out of home security. With this feature, you won’t have to remember to arm your system — it will remind you when you leave home.

When you first enable Geofence, you create an invisible boundary around your home or your business. It tracks the location of your phone with relation to this boundary; when you cross it, either entering it or leaving it, Ring will send an alert to your device or perform a pre-determined task.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

This means that you can automatically turn off motion alerts when you enter your home, rather than pulling up your phone, dismissing previous alerts, and disabling the system. Geofence makes using your Ring security setup easier and more streamlined.

Your privacy is protected, too. Ring doesn’t store GPS data related to your movements, and the Ring app only identifies when you cross the boundary based on the automations you have enabled.

The Geofence feature (and geofencing in general) are essential to true smart home security. The feature removes the human element from the equation, so even if you are forgetful your home will still be protected because the system will still be armed. For now, the only two features available through Geofence are the Arm and Disarm reminders and the Auto Snooze function, but it is highly likely more will be added in the future.

Geofence begins its rollout on all Ring devices today and is free to all users. It’s even available on the new Ring Video Doorbell Wired, the company’s newest and most inexpensive video doorbell to date. Combined with the new Smart Responses feature that launched last week, Ring is stepping up its home security game in a big way.

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Patrick Hearn
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Patrick Hearn writes about smart home technology like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, smart light bulbs, and more. If it's a…
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