Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey sent the retail giant a letter last month requesting that it agree to a batch of ethical reforms and “clarify Ring’s ever-expanding relationship with American police,” with whom the company has increasingly intimate ties, according to a report by The Intercept. Amazon responded to Markey’s letter on July 1. In an open letter, the company skirted commitment to any of Markey’s proposed reforms, including never accepting financial contributions from police agencies and never allowing immigration enforcement agencies to request Ring recordings. It also admitted to having shared users’ camera footage with the police 11 times without a warrant.
Picking this issue apart requires a bit of background. As much as we’d like to say otherwise, Amazon’s frequent exchanges with law enforcement aren’t particularly new. Civil rights organizations have been imploring government officials to investigate Ring’s close relationship with law enforcement since 2019, a year after Amazon acquired the home security brand. Up until a change to its footage request policies last year, Ring allowed hundreds of law enforcement agencies to quietly request and gain access to users’ footage without needing to consult the user whatsoever. While the change has since required police to publicly request access to footage from the actual user, there have of course still been ways in which law enforcement could skip this polite process altogether: subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants included.
(Photo: Aaron Doucett/Unsplash)
But according to Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, even those so-called requirements have often gone ignored. It only takes “an exigent or emergency” circumstance to bypass the need for a subpoena, court order, or warrant. Such a circumstance has only ever been described by Amazon as any that involves “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person;” in fact, the company has refused to elaborate further on how it determines whether a situation meets these conditions. It has, however, responded to such exigent or emergency circumstances with unchecked releases of customer footage—which might depict the exterior or interior of someone’s home, depending on how a camera is used.
“So far this year, Ring has provided videos to law enforcement in response to an emergency request only 11 times,” Huseman’s letter reads. “In each instance, Ring made a good-faith determination that there was an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to a person requiring disclosure of information without delay.” No other details were provided surrounding the circumstances of each release.
Those who have already invested in a Ring system might want to enable end-to-end encryption, Matthew Guariglia, policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept. Users can do this in the Control Center section of the Ring app, where the Video Encryption settings lie. (It’s worth noting that one of Markey’s proposed reforms was making end-to-end encryption the default setting, which Amazon declined to do.)
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