Police can get your Ring doorbell footage without a warrant, report says

Enlarge / Ring video doorbell. (credit: Ring)

Hundreds of police departments around the country have partnerships with Amazon's home surveillance brand Ring. The relationship benefits both sides: the company provides tech and software to law enforcement, and the cops both provide data to Amazon and also help sell the product to local homeowners. That alone raises troubling issues, but according to a pair of new reports, Ring also gets access to real-time 911 data, and the company helps police work around a need for search warrants when looking for footage.

Gizmodo reported late last week that Ring is tapping directly into real-time 911 dispatch data, which it then uses to "curate" crime news for its Neighbors app.

Ring confirmed to Gizmodo that, in many jurisdictions, it has access to computer-aided dispatch (CAD) data from the emergency response systems their law enforcement partners use. It uses an API call to pull in the address or GPS coordinates of a call, the incident time, and a description of the incident.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments