Amazon's Ring security cameras have sent recordings to police without the permission of the people who own the cameras.
Amazon said in a letter that it has handed over private recordings to police 11 times in the next five years. The company said it was responding to an emergency request.
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.
Concerns have been raised about Ring cameras and how they coordinate with law enforcement. More than 1,300 police and fire departments joined Ring's Neighbors Portal program in the year 2020, according to Jess Joho. There are now 2,161 law enforcement agencies on Amazon's Neighbors Public Safety service, which allows them to request footage from Ring users. There is a good chance that cops will get footage from Amazon.
It has become increasingly difficult for the public to move, assemble, and converse in public without being tracked and recorded. This is not inevitable in our country. Increasing law enforcement reliance on private surveillance creates a crisis of accountability, and I am worried that the growing web of surveillance systems that Amazon and other powerful tech companies are responsible for could become central to the crisis.
Amazon wouldn't commit to never using voice recognition tech and wouldn't commit to stopping the practice of automatically recording audio when it takes video footage, even though they wrote a letter to the congressman. Ring said it doesn't hand over data in a careless way.
Ring denied to CNN that it gives anyone unfettered access to customer data or video.
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