Check Your Ring Settings NOW! Privacy at Stake
The short version: The Lab Tech Show flags that Ring's Community Requests feature ships on by default, quietly opening doorbell footage to police and tying into the wider Flock/Axon surveillance web.
Our Take
Credit to The Lab Tech Show for digging into a setting most Ring owners never even knew existed. "Community Requests" sounds like a neighborly feature, but what it actually does is let law enforcement ping your camera directly through the Neighbors app and ask for footage tied to an investigation, opt-in by default, buried deep in a menu nobody checks. That's the same playbook we've documented with Flock Safety: normalize data-sharing quietly, make opting out the burden on the resident, and call it community safety.
The bigger story here is convergence. Ring doorbells, Flock's ALPR network, and Axon body cams are increasingly interoperable, meaning a patchwork of private driveway cameras and public license-plate readers can now feed the same investigative pipeline. That's a de facto surveillance grid stitched together from gear homeowners bought for package theft, sold to police as a force multiplier, with almost none of the oversight a government-built camera network would require.
If you own a Ring camera, go turn that setting off today. And if you want to see how far this network already extends in your own neighborhood, check our map of known Flock ALPR locations, then head to our take-action page for concrete steps to push back on local surveillance expansion.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The Lab Tech Show, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.