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Amazon's Ring to Allow Police to Request live-stream Access to People’s Home Security Devices.
- Kerry Hammer
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is back at the helm of the surveillance doorbell company, and with him is the surveillance-first-privacy-last approach that made Ring one of the most maligned tech devices. Not only is the company reintroducing new versions of old features which would allow police to request footage directly from Ring users, it is also introducing a new feature that would allow police to request live-stream access to people’s home security devices.
This is a bad, bad step for Ring and the broader public.
Ring is rolling back many of the reforms it’s made in the last few years by easing police access to footage from millions of homes in the United States. This is a grave threat to civil liberties in the United States. After all, police have used Ring footage to spy on protestors, and obtained footage without a warrant or consent of the user.
It’s the second recent deal bringing the Amazon Ring security tech into the law enforcement market in new ways, with Ring also recently announcing a similar effort with Axon Enterprise
Flock, a direct Axon competitor, works with an estimated 6,000 communities and 5,000 law enforcement agencies, and sees a “long tail” for the tech in the public safety sector with an estimated 17,000 cities across the U.S., according to its CEO and founder Garrett Langley.
The Ring Community Requests feature will be available for use with the FlockOS and Flock Nova platforms that are contracted by local public safety agencies. That will enable law enforcement officers to directly request video evidence from Ring cameras, but citizens will make the decision whether to share video. Police requests will go into what is called the Ring Neighbors feed, which pings camera users within an area identified as relevant to the crime, and camera owners can then share video, which is kept in a secure environment and can only be used for the single crime investigation. Basically you can allow the police department to live stream your home camera network into their office, effectively making your home a police surveillance outpost.
The law enforcement technology market, and surveillance cameras in particular, are by their nature controversial, with concerns about privacy, racial profiling, use of surveillance information for unapproved purposes, and weak security protocols. This is not the first attempt by Ring to more broadly distribute video footage. A previous incarnation of this type of technology, Ring Request for Assistance, was shut down in 2024. According to Consumer Reports, that tool was used by at least 2,500 police agencies. Ring has also worked directly with law enforcement in the past to distribute cameras in communities.
After years of serving as the eyes and ears of police, the company was compelled by public pressure to make a number of necessary changes. They introduced end-to-end encryption, they ended their formal partnerships with police which were an ethical minefield, and they ended their tool that facilitated police requests for footage directly to customers. Now they are pivoting back to being a tool of mass surveillance.
Why now? It is hard to believe the company is betraying the trust of its millions of customers in the name of “safety” when violent crime in the United States is reaching near-historically low levels. It’s probably not about their customers—the FTC had to compel Ring to take its users’ privacy seriously.
Langley said there is a key difference between RFA and the new Community Requests feature. “RFA was inside the Ring data app. There was no chain of custody,” he said. “In this case, while the request goes out in the Ring app, any footage shared by users goes into the Flock platform, which is fully secure,” he said. “This is what we do every day for businesses and municipalities,” he added. In addition to public agency work, Flock has contracts with an estimated 1,000 private sector organizations for its technology.
For years, privacy advocates have warned against companies like Flock.
This week, US Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter [PDF] to Flock CEO Garrett Langley saying that ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the Secret Service, and the US Navy’s Criminal Investigative Service have had access to footage from Flock’s license plate cameras.
“I now believe that abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable and that Flock is unable and uninterested in preventing them,” Wyden wrote.
In August, Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, wrote that “Flock is building a dangerous, nationwide mass-surveillance infrastructure.” Stanley pointed to ICE using Flock’s network of cameras, as well as Flock’s efforts to build a people lookup tool with data brokers.
Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Ars via email that Flock is a “mass surveillance tool” that “has increasingly been used to spy on both immigrants and people exercising their First Amendment-protected rights.”
If you're like me and don't like the idea of police officers or federal agents being able to watch a live feed of your security cameras inside and outside your home, it might be time to say goodbye to Ring and look into different, more privacy oriented home security options.
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