Amazon Ring will no longer allow law enforcement to request users’ doorbell footage through the associated Neighbors app. This is a positive development for millions of Ring users in the U.S. — and the tens of millions of others who appear in Ring recordings.
Amazon Ring will now stoke less fear, paranoia, and over-policing, especially among marginalized communities.
Mozilla has been demanding this action for years. Mozilla is a loud and consistent critic of Ring for its partnerships with law enforcement, arrangements that lead to disproportionate levels of police surveillance among marginalized communities. So are our allies, including Color of Change, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, the Athena Coalition, and other racial justice and civil rights organizations.
Amazon Ring will now stoke less fear, paranoia, and over-policing, especially among marginalized communities.
Nicholas Piachaud, Director of Campaigns, Mozilla
Further, in 2020, we successfully lobbied Amazon to make two-factor authentication mandatory for all Ring users. And in 2023, we urged Amazon to fix a Ring vulnerability that Mozilla and Cure53 exposed during a penetration test. Amazon’s consumer tech products also regularly rank poorly in our *Privacy Not Included buyers guide.
While this week’s news is encouraging and shows the power of consumer pressure, it is not a total win. Ring still has hundreds of partnerships with law enforcement across the U.S. In other regions like the UK and across Europe, police agencies can still request Ring data, but they typically need to go through more legal channels/processes compared to U.S. law enforcement.
In the months and years ahead, Mozilla will continue to demand better safeguards to stop tech companies from handing people’s personal data to the authorities without their express consent.