That was how there came to be a Ring video doorbell mounted next to Gemma Smith’s front door. Meanwhile, civil liberties groups have raised concerns about how Ring’s cameras and app may lead to racial profiling, excessive surveillance by police, and a loss of privacy-not just for the consumers who purchased the cameras and opted in to Ring’s privacy policies, but also for every passerby caught on a camera.Īs these doorbell cameras have become more widespread, law enforcement agencies have experimented with using them in more targeted ways, including to address one of the most intimate and complicated of crimes: domestic violence. After its first pilot project in an upscale neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2015, Ring said the presence of its cameras had reduced burglaries in the neighborhood by 55 percent from the previous year, but the figure could not be replicated by independent analysis. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the chair of the House Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, wrote in a June 2020 letter to Amazon (PDF).ĭespite the company’s focus on police partnerships, it’s unclear how much the cameras actually help in deterring or solving crimes. Ring’s partnerships with many police forces give the participating departments a “much wider system of surveillance than police legally could build themselves,” as Rep. use the Neighbors app, along with more than 360 fire departments. Today, more than 1,800 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. Until June 2021, the company also provided a special Neighbors portal that let law enforcement request access to footage from Ring owners, even if they had not posted it publicly.
Ring gave free devices to individual officers as well as entire departments from 2016 to January 2020, often in exchange for promoting the cameras and their accompanying social network and app, Neighbors by Ring. The company’s acquisition by Amazon in 2018 has further expanded Ring’s reach, as have its close partnerships with law enforcement agencies.Īs a result of these partnerships, police forces around the country are awash in Ring cameras. Many consumers are drawn in by Ring’s central marketing pitch: that the cameras can reduce crime by making it easy to keep an eye on people’s front porches, driveways, and-often-passersby. Now Ring has it cornered: In 2020, the company sold an estimated 1.4 million devices globally-as much as the next four competitors combined, according to a report by the business intelligence company Strategy Analytics.
When Ring launched eight years ago with a crowdfunding campaign, the market for home surveillance cameras and video doorbells barely existed.