News/Commentary

Amazon’s Ring ditches feature that allows cops to request users’ doorbell camera footage

January 26, 2024 | | Print Article

If police want to get their hands on doorbell video footage captured by Amazon’s Ring, they will now have to obtain a search warrant.

In a Wednesday blog post, Ring announced that it is “sunsetting the Request for Assistance (RFA) tool.”

According to the company, “Public safety agencies like fire and police departments can still use the Neighbors app to share helpful safety tips, updates, and community events. They will no longer be able to use the RFA tool to request and receive video in the app.”

“Public safety agency posts are still public, and will be available for users to view on the Neighbors app feed and on the agency’s profile,” it stated.

The move follows pressure from “privacy watchdogs and anti-police activists” who have blasted the company for partnering with many of the nation’s law enforcement agencies, Blaze Media reports.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit dedicated to “defending civil liberties in the digital world,” according to its website, called the decision a “victory.”

“This is a victory in a long fight, not just against blanket police surveillance, but also against a culture in which private, for-profit companies build special tools to allow law enforcement to more easily access companies’ users and their data—all of which ultimately undermine their customers’ trust,” wrote EFF’s senior policy analyst, Matthew Guariglia.

“Years ago, after public outcry and a lot of criticism from EFF and other organizations, Ring ended its practice of allowing police to automatically send requests for footage to a user’s email inbox, opting instead for a system where police had to publicly post requests onto Ring’s Neighbors app,” he explained. “Now, Ring hopefully will altogether be out of the business of platforming casual and warrantless police requests for footage to its users.”

While Guariglia called Ring’s decision a “step in the right direction,” Guariglia said those at EFF “still believe the company must do more” to protect its users’ privacy.

“Ring can enable their devices to be encrypted end-to-end by default and turn off default audio collection, which reports have shown collect audio from greater distances than initially assumed,” he wrote. “We also remain deeply skeptical about law enforcement’s and Ring’s ability to determine what is, or is not, an emergency that requires the company to hand over footage without a warrant or user consent.”

Fight for the Future is a group that vows to “defend technology as a force for liberation, not tyranny.”

The group’s director, Evan Greer, said the removal of the RFA tool “only scratches the surface” of what Ring needs to do.

“Ring shutting down the ‘red carpet’ surveillance portal they offered to police is unquestionably a victory for the coalition of racial justice and human rights advocates that have been calling to end these partnerships for years,” Greer told CNN. “That said, this move only scratches the surface of addressing the harm done by Ring’s dystopian business model.”

“Ring has said it reserves the right to hand over camera footage to law enforcement in an emergency and without a warrant and disclosed in 2022 that it had done so at least 11 times in the first half of that year alone,” CNN notes.

“Critics allege that Ring’s doorbell cameras have contributed to racial profiling and invasions of privacy,” the outlet reports.

On X, that “woke” argument fell flat.

“But isn’t this one of the big reasons people buy the Ring, so they can record people stealing or breaking in?” one user asked. “So now the police have to jump through loops to get the footage even with the homeowner’s permission? Stupid.”

Melissa Fine
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