Amazon finally admits giving cops Ring doorbell data without user consent

Ring video doorbells are used by more than 10 million people to watch what's happening outside of their homes. Privacy advocates are concerned about whether police should have access to Ring video doorbell recordings without user consent.

Ring revealed how often the answer was yes. There have been 11 cases in which Ring complied with police "emergency" requests in the last four years. Ring didn't let users know that police had access to their data in each case. There are many concerns about increased police reliance on private snooping, a practice that's been unregulated for a long time.

Ring only responds to urgent law enforcement requests for information in cases of imminent danger of death or serious physical injury. It's policy is to review any requests for assistance from police, then make a good-faith determination if the request meets the well-known standard, grounded in federal law, that there is imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requiring disclosure of information without delay.

It should be up to Ring and the police to decide when data can be accessed and how long it can be kept.

Matthew Guariglia is a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting civil liberties online. Ring and the police, both of whom don't have a great reputation, are the people who decide what constitutes exigent circumstances and what constitutes the kind of emergency.

In order to improve the situation, Guariglia wants regulators to lay more ground rules. Changing the doorbell's default settings to turn audio recording off and automatically store data to prevent the police and Ring from accessing it is one of the things he wants Ring to do.

Ring wouldn't commit to doing anything. Users with subscription plans can choose to use higher security settings if they so choose. Ring wouldn't say if 11 cases of sharing data without user consent was higher or lower than average, and the company supplied a previous statement pushing back against media reports that question Ring's judgement on when to share data with police.

Ring doesn't give anyone unrestricted access to customer data or video, as we have repeatedly made clear to our customers and others.

Ring's biggest critics seem to suggest in a statement that Ring might be sharing data with police in less high-stakes circumstances by referring to Ring's law enforcement policy as having an emergency circumstance exception. Changing Ring default settings would immediately improve data security for millions of users, according to the reply from Markey. The senator says Ring leaves its users open to threats, which could include invasions of privacy, self-surveillance risks, and surveillance of First Amendment activities.

It has become harder for the public to move, assemble, and converse in public without being tracked and recorded.