While there have still been reports of police brutality and other touchy matters during 2020, it seems like a certain household product could be tapped by the American justice system and other government agencies to hand over information they need. Amazon Ring is the device in question as of the moment.
Amazon Ring police
According to an article by Mashable, over 1,189 local police as well as fire departments have joined Ring's very own Neighbors Portal program back in 2020 alone. This came from a report by the Financial Times. It was stated that now, a total of a whopping 2,014 government agencies now have access to one of the largest private surveillance networks around the country.
The total number of departments that were added some time last year did more than just double the previous 703 that joined back in 2019. This was an even bigger increase compared to the previous 40 back in 2018. The numberof participating agencies now span all across almost the entire United States only excusing Montana and Wyoming.
How does Amazon Ring work with police?
Ring's very own Neighbors Portal program would allow the law enforcement to officially request surveillance footage. The footage is captured on the users' cameras, which are also programmed to automatically start whenever there is motion being detected.
There are a lot of things about this particular Ring program that still remain a mystery up to today. This is also due to Amazon only recently admitting to having certain secret agreements along with the cops just as of 2019, after a certain Motherboard report.
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Amazon Ring handed footage to the police
In 2020, it was said that the department had actually requested Ring footage for more than 22,335 incidents. Amazon is still trying to defend the Neighbor program noting that users can have the option to opt-out of receiving certain requests from cops. However, it was still noted that although users would deny cops the access to their data, they can still be forced to give it up through subpoenas, court orders, or even search warrants.
In fact, the disclosures coming from the official Amazon Ring itself had revealed that the law enforcement in 2020 had used these tactics in order to make about 1,900 requests for the data and footage that users had explicitly denied them access to. Amazon still has the ultimate decision as to whether they will comply with the cop's request and reportedly did so about 57% of the time recorded last year.
This is about a little lower compared to the 68% of different requests that Amazon had reportedly complied with back in 2019. However, this also means very little when it comes to the number of forcible requests going up by a whopping 150% back in 2020.
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This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Urian Buenconsejo
