If you have an Amazon Ring smart doorbell, there is one thing you should know. A growing number of fire and police departments are interested in your doorbell – or to be fair, the camera images – especially if they think it can help them in their investigation. In fact, there are now 2014 chapters in the program of every US state except Montana and Wyoming.
According to a recent report in the Financial timesthe number of departments in Amazon’s Ring program more than doubled last year, when the company added 1,189 departments. The program allows law enforcement officers to contact Ring users in a specific area and ask them for footage from their cameras that may be relevant to local investigations.
The Times reported that by 2020, the departments jointly requested videos related to more than 22,335 incidents.
Not the police need a search warrant to request the videos, and owners may decline to provide their Ring images. Nevertheless, the scenario changes when it comes to subpoenas, court orders and search warrants, according to the Times, as Amazon could be forced to comply with these legal requests and provides images and “identifying data”, even if the doorbell owner has denied access.
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Gizmodo contacted Ring to request confirmation of the number of police and fire departments in the Ring program and to comment on the report. We have not received specific answers to our questions. A Ring spokesman pointed Gizmodo to Ring’s Active agency card, which the company updates quarterly with video request numbers “so that Ring device owners, Neighbors users, and the wider public can better understand how public safety agencies use Neighbors to interact with their communities.”
Regarding requests for information about police users, a Ring Gizmodo spokesperson pointed to a blog on the topic the company published earlier this month.
Like many companies, Ring receives and responds to legally binding requests from law enforcement authorities for user information that is not overly broad or otherwise inappropriate. At Ring, we are committed to being transparent about our privacy and security practices, ”said the Ring spokesperson.
In the blog postRing detailed the information requests from law enforcement officials it processed in 2020, including subpoenas, court orders, search warrants, non-U.S. Requests and national security requests. Of the 2,149 requests submitted, Ring provided a ‘complete response’ meaning it provided all the requested information, of 919 requests, of which 830 are search warrants. Search warrants were also the most commonly received request, which amounts to 1,610 requests in 2020.
Ring also provided a “partial response” or provided only part of the requested information to 171 requests. It provided “no response,” meaning that in 810 it did not provide any of the information requested cases.
According to the report, one of the departments that used the Ring program the most was the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Police Department. It made 431 requests in the second half of 2020, more than any other department in the country. Police officers interviewed by the outlet cited high homicide rate in town – Milwaukee broke it annual murder trial last November with at least 184 murders– and hundreds shootings.
Milwaukee police are “investigating” videos to investigate many such incidents, officials said.
While Ring has maintained that its program gives law enforcement more resources to solve crimes, critics accuse it a …. build “For-profit private surveillance network.” Meanwhile legal experts and privacy advocates to be worried that the network and the program could threaten civil liberties and turn Ring users into police informers. It can also make innocent people redundant supervision.
[Financial Times]