Neighborhood Watch Surveillance > Raising Alarms Again

One more report (following many earlier posts)

Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen

the Guardian |

"One in 10 US police departments can now access videos from millions of privately owned home security cameras without a warrant

 

In a 2020 letter to management, Max Eliaser, an Amazon software engineer, said Ring is “simply not compatible with a free society”. We should take his claim seriously.

Ring video doorbells, Amazon’s signature home security product, pose a serious threat to a free and democratic society. Not only is Ring’s surveillance network spreading rapidly, it is extending the reach of law enforcement into private property and expanding the surveillance of everyday life. What’s more, once Ring users agree to release video content to law enforcement, there is no way to revoke access and few limitations on how that content can be used, stored, and with whom it can be shared.

Ring is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen. An estimated 400,000 Ring devices were sold in December 2019 alone, and that was before the across-the-board boom in online retail sales during the pandemic. Amazon is cagey about how many Ring cameras are active at any one point in time, but estimates drawn from Amazon’s sales data place yearly sales in the hundreds of millions. The always-on video surveillance network extends even further when you consider the millions of users on Ring’s affiliated crime reporting app, Neighbors, which allows people to upload content from Ring and non-Ring devices.

Then there’s this: since Amazon bought Ring in 2018, it has brokered more than 1,800 partnerships with local law enforcement agencies, who can request recorded video content from Ring users without a warrant. That is, in as little as three years, Ring connected around one in 10 police departments across the US with the ability to access recorded content from millions of privately owned home security cameras. These partnerships are growing at an alarming rate. . .

More (from The Guardian) Data I’ve collected from Ring’s quarterly reported numbers shows that in the past year through the end of April 2021, law enforcement have placed more than 22,000 individual requests to access content captured and recorded on Ring cameras. Ring’s cloud-based infrastructure (supported by Amazon Web Services) makes it convenient for law enforcement agencies to place mass requests for access to recordings without a warrant. Because Ring cameras are owned by civilians, law enforcement are given a backdoor entry into private video recordings of people in residential and public space that would otherwise be protected under the fourth amendment. By partnering with Amazon, law enforcement circumvents these constitutional and statutory protections, as noted by the attorney Yesenia Flores. In doing so, Ring blurs the line between police work and civilian surveillance and turns your neighbor’s home security system into an informant. Except, unlike an informant, it’s always watching. . .

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24 March 2020

Ring-A-Ding Dong > Neighborhood Crime Data Doesn't Match Amazon's Ring's Sales Pitches

Here's we go again! . . . from the any-spin-necessary deptRing Continues To Insist Its Cameras Reduce Crime, But Crime Data Doesn't Back Those Claims Up
Tue, Mar 24th 2020 3:15am — Tim Cushing
" . . . Last month, Cyrus Farivar undid a bit of Ring's PR song-and-dance by using public records requests and conversations with law enforcement agencies to show any claim Ring makes about crime reduction probably (and in some cases definitely) can't be linked to the presence of Ring's doorbell cameras.
CNET has done the same thing and come to the same conclusion: the deployment of Ring cameras rarely results in any notable change in property crime rates. That runs contrary to the talking points deployed by Dave Limp -- Amazon's hardware chief -- who "believes" adding Rings to neighborhoods makes neighborhoods safer. Limp needs to keep hedging.
 . . . Worse for Ring -- which has used its partnerships with law enforcement agencies to corner the market for doorbell cameras -- law enforcement agencies are saying the same thing: Ring isn't having any measurable impact on crime.
. . . But maybe it doesn't really matter to Ring if law enforcement agencies believe the crime reduction sales pitch. What ultimately matters is that end users might. After all, these cameras are installed on homes, not police departments. As long as potential customers believe crime in their area (or at least their front doorstep) will be reduced by the presence of camera, Ring can continue to increase market share."
HEADS UP + LIKE SO MANY OTHER AREAS:
"Hitting the market when things are good and keep getting better makes for pretty good PR, especially when company reps are willing to convert correlation to causation to sell devices."
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Filed Under: crime, doorbells, ring, surveillance 

Source: TechDirt 03.24.2020

 

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03 September 2019

Neighbors or Not? That App Can Fuel A Vicious Cycle of Fear & Violence

You might want to count-to-10 before calling 911 if U ever want to "say something" "when you see something"  . . . Why?
Amazon-owned home security company Ring is pursuing contracts with police departments that would grant it direct access to real-time emergency dispatch data, Gizmodo has learned

Cops Are Giving Amazon's Ring Your Real-Time 911 Caller Data 

To wit, the company has positioned itself as an intermediary through which police request access to citizen-captured surveillance footage. When police make a request, they don’t know who receives it, Ring says, until a user chooses to share their video. Users are also prompted with the option to review their footage before turning it over.

One of Ring’s main selling points to police is that Neighbors can be used for “community building.”

However, Apps can fuel a vicious cycle of fear and violence

> These apps foment fear around crime, which feeds into existing biases and racism and largely reinforces stereotypes around skin color, according to David Ewoldsen, professor of media and information at Michigan State University.

> As Steven Renderos, senior campaigns director at the Center for Media Justice, put it, “These apps are not the definitive guides to crime in a neighborhood — it is merely a reflection of people’s own bias, which criminalizes people of color, the unhoused, and other marginalized communities. . . And in the digital age, as police departments shift towards ‘data-driven policing’ programs, the data generated from these interactions including 9-1-1 calls and arrests are parts of the historic crime data often used by predictive policing algorithms. So the biases baked in to the decisions around who is suspicious and who is arrested for a crime ends up informing future policing priorities and continuing the cycle of discrimination.”

Apps didn’t create bias or unfair policing, but they can exacerbate it

“To me, the danger with these apps is it puts the power in the hands of the individual to decide who does and doesn’t belong in a community,” Renderos said. “That increases the potential for communities of color to come in contact with police. Those types of interactions have wielded deadly results in the past. . .

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Amazon’s Ring Is a Perfect Storm of Privacy Threats

DEEPLINKS BLOG

By Matthew Guariglia August 8, 2019

Doors across the United States are now fitted with Amazon’s Ring, a combination doorbell-security camera that records and transmits video straight to users’ phones, to Amazon’s cloud—and often to the local police department. By sending photos and alerts every time the camera detects motion or someone rings the doorbell, the app can create an illusion of a household under siege. It turns what seems like a perfectly safe neighborhood into a source of anxiety and fear. This raises the question: do you really need Ring, or have Amazon and the police misled you into thinking that you do?

Recent reports show that Ring has partnered with police departments across the country to hawk this new surveillance system—going so far as to draft press statements and social media posts for police to promote Ring cameras. This creates a vicious cycle in which police promote the adoption of Ring, Ring terrifies people into thinking their homes are in danger, and then Amazon sells more cameras. . . "
Go deeper > Electronic Frontier Foundation

 

Police partnering with Ring are encouraged to conversate with its users, who are encouraged in turn to share “tips” about activity in their neighborhoods.

Police can follow posts and receive updates via email as new tips (or complaints) roll in.

Through its police partnerships, Ring has requested access to CAD, which includes information provided voluntarily by 911 callers, among other types of data automatically collected.

CAD data is typically compromised of details such as names, phone numbers, addresses, medical conditions and potentially other types of personally identifiable information, including, in some instances, GPS coordinates.

In an email Thursday, Ring confirmed it does receive location information, including precise addresses from CAD data, which it does not publish to its app. It denied receiving other forms of personal information.

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"The California-based company is seeking police departments’ permission to tap into the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) feeds used to automate and improve decisions made by emergency dispatch personnel and cut down on police response times.

 

Ring has requested access to the data streams so it can curate “crime news” posts for its “neighborhood watch” app, Neighbors.

 

 

“In an effort to provide relevant and reliable crime and safety information to our neighbors, one important source we rely on is CAD,” the company told Gizmodo.

Neighbors is an app through which users can share suspicions about alleged criminal activity in their neighborhoods. They can also post video captured by their Ring doorbell cameras, if they have one. Using Neighbors does not require a Ring device, however.

An internal police email dated April 2019, obtained by Gizmodo last week via a records request, stated that more than 225 police departments have entered into partnerships with Ring. (The company has declined to confirm that, or provide the actual number.) Doing so grants the departments access to a Neighbors “law enforcement portal” through which police can request access to videos captured by Ring doorbell cameras."

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HOW TO SEE IF POLICE ARE USING RING DOORBELLS TO MONITOR YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD?

There's a map for that >

Active law enforcement agencies on the Neighbors app. Last updated 8/29/19.

608,423 views

 

 

 

 

Emily Price writing on https://lifehacker.com had this to say on Sunday 02 Sept 2019

"This week, Amazon posted a blog post about its work with law enforcement agencies, specifically detailing the 405 different law enforcement agencies that currently work with the company on the Neighbors Portal.

The  named law enforcement agencies might be involved as far as viewing and commenting on public posts, or they might submit a request for a video recording taken by someone’s Ring doorbell of an incident.
Along with that post, it also posted a map of all the law enforcement agencies involved. You can see a screenshot of it below, and zoom in and out on an interactive map here.

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