Amazon Ring Always Home Cam

Amazon’s Ring Always Home flying drone cam kinda feels creepy. To be fair, Amazon has seemingly taken steps to help protect users’ privacy with things like set flight paths and a dock the drone sits on when not in use that hides the camera and prevents recording, which is great. As a privacy researcher though, a drone that zooms around your home with the goal of surveillance feels pretty creepy. But feeling creepy doesn’t mean it is. Until you look a little deeper at Amazon’s Ring privacy track record.

Amazon’s Ring security cameras and video doorbells are the most widely used home video cameras in many parts of the world today. As one expert from US privacy org the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it, "Ring has steadily been becoming one of the largest surveillance apparatuses in the nation.” And as wise comic book prophet Stan Lee reminds us, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Has Amazon Ring lived up to that great responsibility? No, they haven’t.

Ring has a history of not protecting users' privacy. At one point they reportedly stored customer data--including video recordings--unencrypted on an Amazon cloud server and employees could access any of this data. There have also been reported data leaks and concerns that the Ring Doorbell app is full of third-party trackers tracking a good amount of personal information that Amazon Ring doesn’t disclose. They have gotten more transparent in their privacy and data deletion practices, which we appreciate. And they added two-factor authentication to help protect users in 2020, which was a great step forward. One we here at Mozilla pushed hard for.

Then there is the problematic relationship Ring has with law enforcement where questions of racism, warrantless surveillance, and police overreach still linger. While Amazon says they are distancing themselves from law enforcement access to users' video and requiring more transparency in the process, they are still facilitating law enforcement access with this product and the Neighbors app and that leaves us concerned. They also admitted in 2022 they still share video with law enforcement without users’ permission in some circumstances.

Amazon’s Ring and Neighbors app privacy policy says they can collect a whole lot of data (by the way, what’s up with the teeny tiny font on that privacy policy?). Everything from name, phone number, email, postal address, age, gender, the location of your mobile device, video and audio recordings, and potentially even every doorbell press and app interaction you have. And while it’s good Ring says they don’t sell your personal information, they do say they can share your information with a number of third parties for things like advertising, marketing, government and law enforcement requests, and with their business affiliates (which could potentially be a decent number of companies).

There is also the question of privacy violations of the neighbors of people who use home surveillance cameras -- not just Ring but all of home surveillance cameras. A recent court case in the UK highlighted this when a woman sued her neighbor for infringing on her privacy when his Ring security cameras were found pointed at her home. Not only could his cameras see her, they could also listen to her as well. She won her case and $137,000.

And then there are the safety concerns these video cameras raise. Does all this constant surveillance make us safer? Well, the story about the Ring users who opened fire upon seeing a neighbor drop off a misdelivered package at their door raises questions about that. Domestic violence advocates also raise concerns. And privacy experts keep shouting their concerns in places like the NY Times, Consumer Reports, and NBC News.

What’s the worst that could happen? Well, beyond the snooping next door neighbor, the trigger happy, paranoid surveillance junky, and the questionable law enforcement partnerships, there’s the big concerns about all this constant surveillance. In the United States where abortion has become illegal in a number of states, it is possible anti-abortion activists could use these surviellance cameras to spy on women who are pregnant to see if they carry their fetus to term. And if they don’t -- no matter the reason -- video from these cameras could potentially be used to harass, arrest, and potentially even prosecute women seeking reproductive healthcare, for whatever reason. This is bad. All in all, these security cameras raise too many questions about privacy, transparency, data protection, public safety and racism in our opinion. For this reason, we say they come with *Privacy Not Included.