![]() Citizen-on-citizen surveillance, which Isaacs calls “lateral surveillance,” lacks scrutiny. ![]() “When police are relying on private devices like Ring devices, it creates a democratic deficit, because now police can greatly expand their surveillance capabilities,” Isaacs says. “We see a lot of risk in having police responding to calls about homeless people or low-level drug use,” says Max Isaacs, a staff attorney with the Policing Project and a coauthor of the audit. (Ring provided data to the audit’s authors about how the service functions.) The report details concerns that Ring could exacerbate police bias against Black and brown communities and notes a lack of transparency around how Neighbors works. In December 2021, researchers at New York University’s (NYU) Policing Project released an audit of Ring’s relationship with law enforcement and the way its Neighbors app works. For the six months between January and June 2022, Ring says it had more than 3,500 law enforcement requests in the US. Government officials could include any “regulatory agency or legislative committee that issues a legally binding request for information,” Rall says. Rings’ terms of service say that the company may “access, use, preserve and/or disclose” videos and audio to “law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or third parties” if it is legally required to do so or needs to in order to enforce its terms of service or address security issues. “There is nothing mandating Ring build a tool that is easily accessible and helpful to police,” Guariglia says. Documents have shown how Ring also controls the public messaging of police departments it has partnered with. By the start of 2021, Ring had partnered with more than 2,000 US law enforcement and fire departments. For years, the company has partnered with law enforcement agencies, providing them with cameras and doorbells that can be given to residents. Ring’s deals with police forces-both in the US and the UK-have proved controversial. “We would provide additional notice or get permission as needed,” Rall says. Its privacy policy includes the ambiguous statement: “We also may use the personal information we collect about you in other ways for which we provide specific notice at the time of collection and obtain your consent if required by applicable law.” Ring spokesperson Sarah Rall says this could apply if the company added features or use cases that are not already covered by its privacy policy. It lists 14 ways the company can use your data-from improving the service Ring provides and protecting against fraud to conducting consumer research and complying with legal requirements. Ring’s privacy policy and terms of service allow it to use all this information it collects in multiple ways. (There are rules about what people are allowed to post.) Ring can also keep videos shared to its Neighbors’ app-an app where people and law enforcement agencies can share alerts about “crimes” and post their videos of what is happening around the homes. “Deleted Content and Ring Protect Recordings may be stored by Ring in order to comply with certain legal obligations and are not retrievable without a valid court order,” the privacy policy says. The company says people can log in to the service to delete the videos, but the company may ultimately keep them anyway. ![]() Ring’s privacy policy says it can save videos of subscribers to its Ring Protect Plan, a paid service that provides an archive of 180 days of video and audio captured. “We are in danger of increasing surveillance of everyday life in a way that is not consistent with either our expected views or really what’s best for society.” In October 2021, a British woman won a court case that said her neighbor’s Ring cameras, which overlooked her house and garden, broke data laws. “We operate with a sense of obscurity, even in public,” Dellinger says. Jolynn Dellinger, a senior lecturing fellow focusing on privacy and ethics at Duke University’s school of law, says recording audio when someone is on the street is a “serious problem” for privacy and may change how people behave.
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