Amazon’s Ring is Partnering With Police Departments to Collect Crime Data | NBCLX

Our Take

Credit to NBCLX for digging into how Ring has been quietly opening pipelines between millions of private doorbell cameras and local police departments. It's the same story we've been covering with Flock Safety's ALPR network, just wearing a different hat: a private company builds a mass surveillance system, then sells access — or in Ring's case, gives it — to law enforcement, and suddenly there's a de facto dragnet with none of the oversight, warrants, or public debate that's supposed to come with government surveillance.

The pattern matters because it normalizes the idea that private cameras owned by regular people can become an extension of the police without those people fully understanding what they signed up for. Ring users think they're protecting packages. Flock's ALPR hosts — cities, HOAs, businesses — often think they're just tracking stolen cars in the neighborhood. In both cases, the data ends up feeding into much bigger networks that can track your movements, your visitors, your daily patterns, often searchable by any department that gets access, with minimal transparency about how long it's kept or who else can see it.

If Ring's police partnerships bother you, Flock's automated license plate readers should bother you more — they're purpose-built to log every car that passes, license plate cameras are popping up on streets nationwide right now. Check our map to see what's already installed near you, and hit up our take-action page if you want to push back on either system in your own community.