Limits placed on use of Ring doorbell camera videos by police

Our Take

Credit to CBS Chicago's Jermont Terry for flagging a real, if narrow, win for privacy: Amazon's Ring will no longer let police departments send blanket video requests through the Neighbors app. That feature turned millions of private doorbell cameras into an informal, opt-in surveillance network police could tap without a warrant. Killing it removes one shortcut cops used to build a footage dragnet out of homeowners' front porches.

But let's not pop the champagne. This is a doorbell camera policy tweak from one company, not a systemic fix. Meanwhile, Flock Safety's automated license plate readers are doing something far more comprehensive and far less voluntary: silently logging every car that passes a fixed point, building location histories on people who never opted into anything, and sharing that data across agencies and states with little oversight. A homeowner can decline a Ring request. You can't opt out of a Flock camera on the road you drive every day.

The lesson here isn't that surveillance companies are cleaning up their act — it's that public pressure and scrutiny occasionally force a retreat, even a small one. That's exactly why tracking these systems matters. Check our map to see what's actually watching your streets, and hit take action if you want to push back on the ALPR networks that make Ring's old feature look quaint by comparison.