Ring Cameras Just Blocked the Police

Our Take

Credit to The White Hatter for breaking down what Ring's "Extreme Privacy Mode" actually does: it makes footage mathematically inaccessible to Amazon and police unless the homeowner hands over the keys. No more "emergency request" loophole, no more quiet backchannel handoffs during a supposed exigent circumstance. That's a real, structural win for a company that spent years cozying up to law enforcement partnerships and normalizing warrantless footage requests.

Here's why this matters beyond doorbell cams: it proves consent-based, encrypted-by-default surveillance tech is technically doable when a company decides your privacy is worth more than a law enforcement partnership press release. Compare that to Flock Safety's ALPR network, which does the opposite on purpose — indiscriminately logging every plate that passes a camera, storing location data for weeks, and sharing it across a national network with zero consent, zero encryption-by-default protections, and often zero judicial oversight. Ring just showed the industry a blueprint for opt-in security. Flock is still selling blanket surveillance as a public safety mandate.

If Ring can flip a switch to protect its customers from warrantless access, there's no excuse for ALPR vendors and the police departments buying their gear to keep operating in the dark. Check our camera map to see if Flock has already wired up your town, and hit up take action if you want to push back before it does.