Privacy and security experts worry that a partnership between Amazon’s smart doorbell service Ring and the surveillance camera company Flock Safety could result in footage being used for inappropriate surveillance by law enforcement agencies.
The business relationship, unveiled in October, allows law enforcement with access to Flock’s software programs to directly request doorbell footage through Ring’s Community Request program.
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When submitting a request for footage, law enforcement must include information such as a specific location, time frame and details about an alleged crime, Ring says. Users within the designated area will then receive a notification about the request, which also appears on the app’s public Neighbors feed.
Ring says that camera owners, who must opt-in to the program, can decide whether to share their footage or ignore the notification. Those who ignore a request will remain anonymous and unknown to the law enforcement agency.
Ring discontinued a similar program for sharing video with law enforcement in 2024 over privacy concerns.
Although the partnership has been touted as an enhancement to public safety, critics say the program could lead to abuses and data breaches.
“Given Flock’s history of misconfigurations resulting in data leakage as well as access control issues, the opportunity for both Flock and Ring data being accessed by an unauthorized party greatly increases,” Jon “GainSec” Gaines, a hacker known for discovering dozens of vulnerabilities in Flock’s cameras, told Straight Arrow News.
Last month, Gaines contributed to research that found more than 60 of Flock’s Condor PTZ cameras, which use artificial intelligence to track individuals, were exposed to the open internet. The researchers, using a simple search engine query, were able to access archived footage and live feeds from cameras placed in locations such as a children’s playground.
Stephen Perez, program and communications director at the civil liberties organization Restore the Fourth, agrees that the partnership raises red flags given Flock’s previous security issues.
“Flock claims that the requests for Ring footage on the Neighbors app are localized, meant only for specific criminal investigations, and are packaged securely and sent to the requesting agency if Ring customers voluntarily decide to share their footage,” Perez told SAN. “However, Flock’s track record of lax security and poor oversight means that I can’t take them at their word.”
In remarks to CNBC in October, Flock Safety CEO and founder Garrett Langley defended the partnership by stating that “it is clear and obvious we have a crime problem in America.”
“We are focused on businesses and cities, and Ring is definitely a leader in home security,” he said. “Being able to partner with them [Flock] will lead to much safer communities, and doing it in a way that allows the public to opt in.”
Broader surveillance feared
Flock, known primarily for its AI-powered license plate reading technology, is facing backlash across the country because its cameras have been rolled out with little to no oversight from the public. More than 80,000 Flock cameras are said to be in use throughout the U.S.
The company shares its data with an estimated 5,000 law enforcement agencies. Flock also has an estimated 1,000 corporate customers, including FedEx and Lowe’s.
“Flock’s default agreement with police departments gives them the right to share data with federal and local agencies for ‘investigative purposes’ even if a local department chooses to restrict data to its own officers,” Perez said.
“It is a very real possibility that voluntarily granted Ring video footage meant for one criminal investigation will be shared with federal agencies like ICE or HSI for another purpose,” he added, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations.
Flock faced criticism in May after it was discovered that police departments across the country were performing immigration-related searches of data captured by Flock’s license plate reading cameras on behalf of ICE.
“We know from previous reports that Texas police used Flock’s National Lookup Tool to track down a woman who had an abortion and left the state,” Perez said. “What’s stopping police from sharing always-on Ring footage to monitor a protest or track immigrants under the pretense that it is meant for a single, localized criminal investigation?”
Sean O’Brien, founder of the Yale Privacy Lab and creator of PrivacySafe.app, described the partnership between Flock and Ring as “truly terrifying.”
“Flock already makes it possible to track people’s movements at scale just by following license plates, and Ring has trained people to hand over video to police because it feels neighborly or helpful, not because a warrant was shown,” O’Brien said. “When you put those two systems together, it becomes much easier for law enforcement to piece together detailed timelines of where someone went, who they were near and what they were doing.”
“That can happen without a warrant, without probable cause and without the public really understanding how much surveillance is taking place,” he added.
‘Dragnet’
Ring is no stranger to controversy either. In May 2023, the Federal Trade Commission charged the company with invading its customers’ privacy by allowing any employee or contractor to access private videos. The commission also accused Ring of “failing to implement basic privacy and security protections, enabling hackers to take control of consumers’ accounts, cameras, and videos.”
Ring’s history of security issues are even more alarming, Perez said, given that the company began upgrading its cameras last month with facial recognition abilities. The feature, known as “Familiar Faces,” allows users to receive alerts that contain the names of specific visitors.
“The Flock and Ring partnership is a dangerous and massive expansion of an already wide-reaching surveillance dragnet,” Perez said. “The dangers are compounded by Ring camera’s facial recognition capabilities.”
