If you have an Amazon Ring smart doorbell, there is something you should know. An increasing number of firefighters and police departments are interested in your bell – or to be frank, in your filming – especially if they think you can help them in their investigations. In fact, there are now 2,014 departments in the program for every state in the U.S. except Montana and Wyoming.
According to a recent report in the Financial Times, the 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 given area and ask them to provide images from their cameras that may be relevant to local investigations.
The Times reported that in 2020, departments collectively requested videos related to more than 22,335 incidents.
Police not need a warrant to order the videos, and the owners may refuse to provide the footage of their rings. However, the scenario changes when subpoenas, court orders and search warrants are involved, according to the Times, because Amazon may be forced to comply with these requests and provides footage and “identification data”, even if the bell owner has denied access.
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Gizmodo contacted Ring to ask for confirmation about the number of police and firefighters in the Ring program, as well as to comment on the report. We do not receive specific answers to our questions. A spokesman for Ring pointed Gizmodo to Ring’s Active Agencies Map, which the company updates quarterly with video request numbers “so that Ring device owners, users of neighbors and the general public have a greater sense of how public security agencies use neighbors to engage with their communities” .
Regarding requests for information from law enforcement users, a spokesman for Ring pointed Gizmodo to a blog on the subject that the company published earlier this month.
“Like many other companies, Ring receives and responds to legally binding requests for compliance with user information that are not overly broad or inappropriate. At Ring, we are committed to being transparent about our privacy and security practices, ”said a Ring spokesman.
At the blog post, Ring detailed requests for law enforcement information processed in 2020, which included subpoenas, court orders, search warrants, requests from outside the U.S. and national security requests. Of the 2,149 requests made, Ring provided a “complete response”, which means that it provided all the requested information, for 919 requests, 830 of which were sent for search and seizure. Search and seizure warrants were also the most common request received, in the amount of 1,610 applications in 2020.
Ring also provided a “partial response”, or provided only some of the information requested, for 171 requests. He provided “no answer”, which means that he did not provide any of the requested information in 810 cases.
According to the report, one of the departments that used the Ring program the most was the Milwaukee, Wisconsin police department. 431 requests were made in the second half of 2020, more than any other department in the country. Police officers interviewed by the vehicle cited the high number of homicides in the city – Milwaukee broke annual homicide record last november with at least 184 murders– and the hundreds of shootings.
Milwaukee police are “collecting” videos to investigate many of these types of incidents, officials said.
While Ring kept that its program gives law enforcement more resources to solve crimes, critics accuse it of building a “Profit private surveillance network”. Meanwhile, Iegal experts and privacy advocates concern that the network and the program can threaten civil liberties and turn Ring users into police informants. It can also cause innocent people to submit to surveillance.
[Financial Times]