Amazon Finally Admits Giving Cops Ring Doorbell Data Without User Consent

Expand Smith Collection/Gado / Contributor | Archive photos

Over 10 million people rely on Ring Video Doorbells to monitor what's happening right outside their front door. The popularity of the technology has raised a question of concern to privacy advocates: should police have access to Ring Video Doorbell recordings without first obtaining user consent?

Ring recently revealed how many times the answer to this question has been yes. The Amazon company responded to an investigation by U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), confirming that there were 11 instances in 2022 where Ring complied with police "emergency" requests. In each case, Ring handed over private recordings, including video and audio, without informing users that the police had access to their data and potentially downloaded it. This raises many concerns about the police's increased reliance on private surveillance, a practice that has long gone unregulated.

Ring says it will only "respond immediately to urgent law enforcement requests for information in cases involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person." Its policy is to review any request for assistance from the police and then "determine in good faith whether the request meets the well-known standard, based on federal law, that there is an imminent danger of death. or serious bodily harm to anyone requiring disclosure of information without delay."

Critics say it shouldn't be up to Ring and the police to decide when data can be accessed or how long that data can be stored.

“There will always be situations where it might be good for public safety to be able to bypass some of the usual infrastructure and get images very quickly,” says Matthew Guariglia, policy analyst for Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting civil liberties online. "But the problem is that the people who decide what constitutes an emergency and what constitutes the type of emergency, all of these very important safeguards, are Ring and the police, who to my knowledge have not an excellent reputation when it comes to deciding when it is appropriate to acquire a person's data."

To improve the situation, Guariglia wants regulators to establish more ground rules limiting the extent to which police can rely on private surveillance. He also wants companies like Ring to take more steps to protect users from potentially illegal surveillance by changing the doorbell's default settings to disable audio recording and automatically store data to prevent third parties, including including the police and Ring, to access it.

Ring declined to commit to either. The company says it only stores data from users with subscription plans, and those users can easily choose to use higher security settings if they want. In response to Ars' request for comment, Ring did not indicate whether 11 instances of data sharing without user consent in 2022 were above or below average; the company provided an earlier statement pushing back against media reports that question Ring's judgment on when to share data with police:

"It is simply wrong for Ring to give anyone unrestricted access to customer data or video, as we have repeatedly made clear to our customers and others. The law allows companies to such as Ring to provide information to government entities if the company believes that an emergency situation involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person, such as a kidnapping or attempted murder, requires disclosure without delay. Ring faithfully applies this legal standard."

Markey is counted among Ring's biggest critics, appearing to suggest in a statement that Ring may share data with police in lesser circumstances by referring to Ring's law enforcement policy as having a "so-called" emergency circumstance exception. '" In his response, Markey agreed with Guariglia that changing Ring's default settings would immediately improve data security for potentially millions of users...