Privacy group calls on Amazon to drop Ring deal with police

Ring doorbell with video surveillance (courtesy Ring)

A privacy advocate contends Amazon's Ring video doorbell system, which gives access to police, violates constitutional rights.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said Amazon "must end its dangerous partnerships with police."

Citing the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the organization said: "This is a historic moment of reckoning for law enforcement. Technology companies, too, must rethink how the tools they design and sell to police departments minimize accountability and exacerbate injustice. Even worse, some companies profit directly from exploiting irrational fears of crime that all too often feed the flames of police brutality."

EFF said it is calling on Amazon Ring, describing it as "one of the worst offenders," to end agreements with the estimated 1,300 police departments that now have access to its images.

Separately, Amazon has released a statement saying it stands "in solidarity with the Black community."

"And yet," EFF argues, "Amazon and other companies offer a high-speed digital mechanism by which people can make snap judgments about who does, and who does not, belong in their neighborhood, and summon police to confront them."

"This mechanism also facilitates police access to video and audio footage from massive numbers of doorbell cameras aimed at the public way across the country — a feature that could conceivably be used to identify participants in a protest through a neighborhood. Amazon built this surveillance infrastructure through tight-knit partnerships with police departments, including officers hawking Ring’s cameras to residents, and Ring telling officers how to better pressure residents to share their videos."

Through these methods, Ring is "enabling and perpetuating police harassment of Black Americans," EFF contends.

The spy camera network "plays an active role in enabling and perpetuating police harassment of Black Americans. Ring’s surveillance doorbells and its accompanying Neighbors app have inflamed many residents’ worst instincts and urged them to spy on pedestrians, neighbors, and workers."

EFF explained the privacy issues with the Ring system.

"To start, Ring sends notifications to a person’s phone every time the doorbell rings or motion near the door is detected. With every notification, Ring turns the pizza delivery person or census-taker innocently standing at the door into a potential criminal. And with the click of a button, Ring allows a user to post video taken from that camera directly to their community, facilitating the reporting of so-called 'suspicious' behavior. This encourages racial profiling—take, for example, an African-American real estate agent who was stopped by police because neighbors thought it was 'suspicious' for him to ring a doorbell," EFF said.

The police access to the images and video means officers potentially have a "one-step process for requesting footage of protests to identify protesters."

"If a Ring camera captures demonstrations, the owner is at risk of making protesters identifiable to police and vulnerable to retribution. Even if the camera owner refuses to voluntarily share footage of a protest with police, law enforcement can go straight to Amazon with a warrant and thereby circumvent the camera’s owner," EFF warned.

Amazon's relationship with police undermines the public's trust, and some Ring features, such as integrated facial recognition, "would enable the worst type of privacy invasion of individuals."