Police Obtained Ring Camera Footage Without Owners' Consent 11 Times in 2022
Don’t assume the footage on your Ring video doorbell will never be shared with police, even if you refuse to do so. The vendor gave law enforcement access to Ring camera footage without the owner's consent 11 times this year.
The information comes from a letter(Opens in a new window) that Ring’s parent company Amazon sent to US Senator Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), who’s concerned about the police accessing Ring camera footage to conduct surveillance.
Per the vendor’s own policy(Opens in a new window), Ring requires law enforcement to present a search warrant to obtain data from a user’s camera without their permission. However, Ring can also share the data with the police for emergency cases “involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person.”
“So far this year, Ring has provided videos to law enforcement in response to an emergency request only 11 times,” the company wrote to Sen. Markey. “In each instance, Ring made a good-faith determination that there was an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to a person requiring disclosure of information without delay.”
However, Markey is still concerned with Ring’s so-called “emergency circumstance exception,” citing how the data was given up without the user’s consent. “Increasing law enforcement reliance on private surveillance creates a crisis of accountability,” he said in a statement(Opens in a new window), “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.”
In the letter, Amazon also disclosed that 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments have enrolled in Ring’s Neighbors app,
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