The company reverses decision to allow law enforcement direct access to user footage
Amazon Ring has announced that US law enforcement must now obtain a warrant to access doorbell footage from individual users. In a blog post, the company stated that it would no longer permit law enforcement to directly request doorbell footage from users via its social networking app, Neighbors. This reversal marks a significant change from Ring’s previous policy, which had been a source of contention among civil liberties and privacy advocates.
In a blog post discussing new features for Ring users to share “heartwarming or silly” videos on the Neighbors app, Amazon revealed the removal of its “request for assistance” (RFA) feature. This feature previously allowed public safety agencies, including the police, to ask users to voluntarily share video footage from their Ring cameras instead of obtaining warrants to access that data from Amazon.
According to the blog post, public safety agencies such as fire and police departments can continue to utilize the Neighbors app to share beneficial safety tips, updates, and community events. However, they will no longer have access to the RFA tool for requesting and receiving videos within the app.
For a while, civil liberties experts have been vocal in their criticism of Amazon’s close ties to law enforcement and its willingness to assist in police investigations without warrants by providing easy access to private security footage from people’s homes. In response to this criticism, the company previously discontinued the practice of allowing police to privately request video footage from Ring users, instead requiring them to make public posts on the app for such requests. Now, police can only access Ring footage through a warrant. Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, commented that while this is a positive step, there is still much more that can be done.
“In the future, Ring will hopefully cease the practice of facilitating informal and warrantless police requests for footage from its users,” stated Guariglia. “While Ring has made significant concessions, we maintain that these devices should feature default end-to-end encryption and disable default audio collection, which has been reported to capture audio from greater distances than originally thought.”
The company has faced criticism in the past regarding its broader privacy policies related to accessing users’ footage. In May 2023, Amazon reached a $5.8 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over a 20-year period. As part of the settlement, Amazon was required to disclose to its customers the extent of its access to their data. According to the FTC filing, Amazon’s lenient privacy policies allowed employees and contractors to view, download, and transfer sensitive video data from customers for their personal use. Additionally, in 2022, Amazon admitted to providing police with video footage without customer consent or a warrant on 11 occasions, citing these instances as “emergencies.”
We maintain significant doubts about law enforcement’s and Ring’s capacity to discern whether a situation warrants the company handing over footage without a warrant or user consent,” Guariglia stated.
