If you have an Amazon Ring smart ringtone, you need to know something. An increasing number of fire and police departments are interested in your ringing – or to be honest, in the camera images – especially if they think it can help them in their investigations. In fact, there are now 2,014 departments in the program in every U.S. state, except Montana and Wyoming.
According to a recent report from Financial times, the number of departments in the Amazon Ring program doubled last year, when the company added 1,189 departments. The program allows law enforcement officials to contact Ring users in a specific area and ask them to provide images from their cameras that may be relevant to local investigations.
The Times reported that in 2020, departments collectively requested videos related to more than 22,335 incidents.
The police don’t I need a warrant to request videos, and owners may refuse to provide images of their ring. However, the scenario changes when subpoenas, court decisions and search warrants are involved, according to the Times, as Amazon may be required to comply with these legal requirements. requests and provides images and “identification data” even if the ringtone owner has denied access.
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Gizmodo contacted Ring to request confirmation of the number of police officers and fire departments in the Ring program, as well as to comment on the report. We did not receive specific answers to our questions. A Ring spokesman pointed to Gizmodo to the Ring Map of the active agency, which the company updates quarterly with video request numbers “so that Ring device owners, Neighbors users and the general public have a better perspective on how public safety agencies use Neighbors to get involved in their communities”
Regarding requests for information from law enforcement users, a Ring spokesman pointed to Gizmodo to a blog on the subject published by the company earlier this month.
“Like many other companies, Ring receives and responds to legally binding law enforcement requests for information about users that is not too broad or otherwise inappropriate. At Ring, we are committed to being transparent about our privacy and security practices, ”said the Ring spokesman.
Into the blog post, Ring detailed the law enforcement requests it processed in 2020, which included subpoenas, court orders, search warrants, non-US requests, and national security requests. Of the 2,149 requests made, Ring provided a “complete answer”, meaning that it provided all the requested information, at 919 requests, of which 830 were search warrants. Search warrants were also the most common request received, worth 1,610 applications in 2020.
Ring also provided a “partial response” or provided only some of the information requested in 171 requests. He did not provide “any reply”, which means that he did not provide any of the information requested in 810 cases.
According to the report, one of the departments that used the Ring program the most was the police department in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It made 431 applications in the second half of 2020, which was more than any other department in the country. Police officials interviewed by the outlet cited the high number of homicides in the city – Milwaukee broke it annual homicide record in November last year at least 184 crimes“And hundreds of.” shots.
Milwaukee police are “making” videos to investigate many of these incidents, officials said.
While the Ring held that his program provides law enforcement with more resources for solving crimes, critics accuse him of building a “Private for-profit surveillance network”. In the meantime, meequal experts and privacy advocates worries that the network and the program could threaten civil liberties and turn Ring users into police informants. It could also cause innocent people to suffer unnecessarily supervision.
[Financial Times]