Google, like Amazon, will let police see your video without a warrant

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

According to the owners of Eufy, Apple, and Wyze, they won't give authorities access to your smart home camera's footage unless you show a warrant. If you are wondering why they are specifying that, it is because they are allowing police to get this data without a warrant if there is an emergency.

Sean Hollister wrote about how Amazon, the company behind the smart doorbells and security systems, will allow police to look at customers' footage without a warrant. With the same carveout as Amazon, law enforcement can access data from its products without a warrant.

In most cases, authorities will have to present a warrant, subpoena, or similar court order before they'll hand over data according to the information request policies for the US. If they didn't they'd be breaking the law If a law enforcement submits an emergency request for data, they won't be able to get exemptions from those companies.

Amazon said earlier this month that it had fulfilled 11 requests. The company didn't respond to the request for comment on how many it had fulfilled.

This is what the information request policy says about requests for information.

If we reasonably believe that we can prevent someone from dying or from suffering serious physical harm, we may provide information to a government agency — for example, in the case of bomb threats, school shootings, kidnappings, suicide prevention, and missing persons cases. We still consider these requests in light of applicable laws and our policies

The company tries to give its users notice when it provides their data under these circumstances, but it does say that in emergency cases that notice may not come unless they hear that the emergency has passed Amazon didn't say whether it would let its users know that it allowed police to look at their videos.

The laws we have seen don't force companies to share if they believe there is an emergency. If the situation is really an emergency, the police should get a warrant, according to Arlo.

The company said that if a situation is urgent enough for law enforcement to request a warrantless search of Arlo's property then they should instead request an immediate hearing from a judge for issuance of a warrant. When law enforcement can quickly get and serve us with such a demand, Amazon does deny some emergency requests.

Apple and Eufy say that they don't have access to users' video because their systems use end-to-end encryption. Ring has partnerships with police, but you can still use end-to-end encryption for some of its products. The feature doesn't work with batteries-operated cameras, which is pretty much the thing people think of when they think of Ring. It isn't on by default and you have to give up a few features to use it. End-to-end encryption isn't offered by the company on its Nest cams.

Apple, Wyze, and Eufy have policies around emergency requests from law enforcement that don't mean they are keeping your data safe in other ways. Last year, Anker apologized after hundreds of Eufy customers had their cameras feeds exposed to strangers, and recently came to light that Wyze failed to alert its customers to gaping security flaws in some of its cameras that it had known about for a long time. Apple complies with other emergency data requests from law enforcement, as evidenced by reports that it, and other companies like Meta, shared customer information with hackers sending in fake emergency requests.