If you have an Amazon Ring doorbell, there is something you need to know. A growing number of fire and police departments are interested in your doorbell – or to be honest, in its footage – especially if they feel it can help them in their investigations. In fact, there are now 2014 departments in the program of every U.S. state except Montana and Wyoming.
According to a recent report in the Financial Timeshas more than doubled the number of departments in Amazon’s Ring program last year, when the company added 1,189 departments. The program enables law enforcement officers to contact Ring users in a certain area and ask them to provide footage of their cameras that may be relevant to local investigations.
The Times reports that by 2020, the departments had jointly requested videos related to more than 22,335 incidents.
The police do not need a warrant to request the videos, and owners may refuse to provide their ring material. The scenario nevertheless changes when subpoenas, court orders and warrants are involved, according to the Times, because Amazon may be forced to comply with these legal provisions. request and provide footage and “identifying information” even if the doorbell owner has denied access.
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Gizmodo issued Ring to confirm the number of police and firefighters in the Ring program, as well as to comment on the report. We did not receive specific answers to our questions. A spokesperson for Ring pointed out Gizmodo to Ring’s Active agency card, which updates the company quarterly with video request numbers “so that Ring device owners, Neighbor users and the wider public have greater insight into how public safety agencies use Neighbors to engage with their communities.”
A Ring spokesman pointed out Gizmodo on a blog about the topic the company published earlier this month.
“Like many other companies, Ring receives and responds to legally binding requests for law enforcement for user information that is not too broad or otherwise inappropriate. At Ring, we are committed to being transparent about our privacy and security practices, ”said the Ring spokesperson.
In the blogpos, Ring outlined the law enforcement information requests it processed in 2020, which include subpoenas, court orders, warrants, non-US requests and national security requests. Of the 2149 requests given, Ring provided a ‘complete answer’, meaning that it provided all the information, to 919 requests, of which 830 were search rights. Search orders were also the most common request received 1,610 requests in 2020.
Ring also gave a ‘partial response’, or provided only some of the requested information to 171 requests. It gave ‘no answer’ in 810, which means it provided no information incidents.
According to the report, the Milwaukee, Wisconsin Police Department was one of the departments that used the Ring program the most. It made 431 requests in the second half of 2020, which was more than any other department in the country. Police officers questioned by the outlet mention the large number of murders in the city – Milwaukee broke it annual murder record last November with at least 184 murders—And the hundreds shooting.
Milwaukee police are recruiting videos to investigate many of the incidents.
While Ring maintained that the program offers law enforcement more resources to solve crimes, critics accuse it building a “Private oversight network for profit.” Meanwhile, the lboth experts and privacy advocates be worried that the network and the program could threaten civil liberties and turn Ring users into police informants. It can also cause innocent people to suffer unnecessarily supervision.
[Financial Times]