THOUSANDS of Ring doorbell users have been warned after it emerged that Amazon’s home surveillance company provided footage to police without owners’ consent or warrants.
Ring has shared homeowners’ footage with law enforcement without their knowledge at least 11 times this year, a new report by Politico has found.
Amazon’s home surveillance company Ring has provided footage to police without owners’ consent or warrants.[/caption]
The incidents were described in a letter Amazon sent to Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) on July 1.
Markey, who questioned Ring’s surveillance practices in June, shared the letter with the public on Wednesday.
In the letter, Amazon said that under its policies, Ring “reserves the right to respond immediately to urgent law enforcement requests for information in cases involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person.”
Amazon also noted that police are required to fill out a special “emergency request form” if there is an urgent need to access homeowners’ footage.
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In all of the 11 known cases this year, Amazon’s VP of Public Policy Brian Huseman said that police requests met the imminent-danger criteria.
Huseman also revealed that Ring is currently partnered with 2,161 law police departments and 455 fire departments that can request surveillance data from Ring doorbells.
In light of this new information, scrutiny of the doorbell company – which is already facing major criticism from lawmakers – will likely increase.
“As my ongoing investigation into Amazon illustrates, it has become increasingly difficult for the public to move, assemble, and converse in public without being tracked and recorded,” Markey said in a statement.
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“We cannot accept this as inevitable in our country. Increasing law enforcement reliance on private surveillance creates a crisis of accountability, and I am particularly concerned that biometric surveillance could become central to the growing web of surveillance systems that Amazon and other powerful tech companies are responsible for,” he added.
Ring’s biometric surveillance
Last year, Ring patented 17 new features that had privacy campaigners worried.
The new features employed artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition systems that could identify strangers and perform other tasks that some found dystopian.
Several privacy organizations, including Charity Privacy International, quickly vocalized their concerns about this type of biometric recognition.
And just months later, Ring’s facial recognition service falsely associated 28 members of Congress with criminal mugshots in 2018, per Politico.
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Meanwhile, in early 2021, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission entertained the idea of taking Ring to court for alleged privacy and data security violations.
However, the legal proceedings were halted due to undisclosed reasons.
