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Around the country, local police are teaming up with Amazon and its subsidiary Ring to push people to install doorbell cameras outside their residences, leveraging this technology into a new kind of surveillance network. What should we think about this trend, both as consumers who might be contemplating a doorbell camera purchase and as human beings who don鈥檛 want to live in a Big Brother world?

Pushing fear and surveillance

First of all, it鈥檚 spooky and disconcerting to see one of our largest and most prominent companies teaming up with law enforcement to push surveillance technology on American communities. Recent reporting has that Amazon helps police departments give free or discounted Ring cameras to residents, gives police a portal for requesting video and special access to their social app 鈥淣eighbors鈥� (which helps neighbors share video clips), and on how to get users to agree to turn over the footage. In turn, some police departments have agreed to promote Ring cameras and the Neighbors app and, according to a document obtained by Gizmodo, even to give the company the right to what police departments say about Ring. Amazon has contracts with around the country. (Ring has released of those departments.)

Police officers are public servants 鈥� and not just any public servants but ones entrusted with enormous powers including, in certain situations, the power to ruin people by invading their privacy. Allowing officers to as a de facto sales force for a company selling surveillance devices is a betrayal of police departments鈥� duty to serve the public first. It is also a betrayal to allow that company to shape how departments communicate with the public about their technology programs.

Crime rates today are at . As the Brennan Center , Americans are 鈥渟afer than they have been at almost any time in the past 25 years.鈥� Yet Ring has used fear-mongering advertising and information campaigns to drum up sales. As points out, 鈥淎mazon's promotional videos show people lurking around homes, and the company recently posted a job opening for a managing news editor to 鈥榙eliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbors.鈥欌�� Amazon also police departments to give the company special real-time access to emergency dispatch (911) data so that it can pump out these crime alerts all the more efficiently, giving people an sense of crime in their community. (This is also another example of a weirdly close interconnection between police and this giant company.) The result is that, as the puts it, the 鈥淣eighbors feed operates like an endless stream of local suspicion.鈥�

Let鈥檚 be clear: individuals have a First Amendment right to take photographs of things that are plainly visible in public places, including government facilities, infrastructure, and police officers in public (all of which rights we at the ACLU have defended in court after individuals were illegally arrested). They certainly have a right to photograph their property in front of their front door.

All that said, more pervasive private cameras do erode our privacy, and it is dismaying to see two powerful institutions in American life (Amazon and law enforcement) so actively and concertedly pursuing their mutual interest in saturating American communities with surveillance cameras.

Centralizing video in the cloud

When they first began to proliferate, we pointed out that distributed private surveillance cameras are better than centralized government surveillance networks for privacy and civil liberties. Distributed and isolated private cameras, we reasoned, deprive the government of suspicionless mass access to footage and the ability to do mass face recognition, wide-area tracking, and other analytics on that footage. They also place a middleman between the government and surveillance recordings, not only requiring police to go through a process to access particular footage, but also make it possible that, if the police try to request footage for abusive or unclear purposes, at least some owners may decide not to comply. (If the police have probable cause to believe that a camera contains evidence of a crime and the owner refuses to turn it over, they can go to a judge and get a warrant.)

However, the rise of cloud-connected cameras threatens to reverse the advantages of decentralized surveillance by re-centralizing the video collected across a community and removing the intermediary role that residents can play in checking surveillance abuses. Police officers have been quoted in press accounts as saying that when residents won鈥檛 agree to share video with the authorities, police can go to Ring and 鈥渏ust bypass them.鈥� Amazon that its is not to share video with police without user permission or a valid search warrant. But that鈥檚 Amazon鈥檚 policy according to Amazon, which leaves customers dependent on their policies and promises.

Unlike with video stored at home, a Ring customer never really can be sure with whom cloud-stored video is being shared. We know that Ring gave workers in the world together with customer details. Other companies offering similar services have also granted such access including , , , and .

Ring鈥檚 Neighbors App has also issues of racial profiling, for example when individuals use the social app to circulate video to their neighbors of people who they deem suspicious because of their race. (鈥淭here鈥檚 somebody in our neighborhood who doesn鈥檛 belong.鈥�) That can have the effect of intensifying the effects of and raises the question of how and whether police account for that racism in how they interact with the platform.

Another problem is that many people are not going to feel like they can say no to law enforcement. A police 鈥渞equest鈥� of a resident to voluntarily turn over video footage will never be entirely uncolored by coercion and will often come across as a demand. Ring鈥檚 asking customers to share video, for example, sounds much more like a directive than a request. It includes 鈥淎 message from Detective Smith鈥� declaring, 鈥淭his is a time-sensitive matter, so please review and share your Ring videos as soon as possible.鈥� Besides, some police departments have, in return for camera giveaways, required recipients to agree to turn over any camera footage on request. (Amazon says it does not support such agreements, but it鈥檚 unclear how much say the company has on the matter.)

Localities should reject agreements between Ring and their police departments. And, at a minimum, residents should scrutinize those arrangements closely and ask hard questions about what kind of community they want to create, with how much surveillance, and how a Ring partnership will play into that vision. As always, we also recommend that communities enact a law requiring their police departments to be transparent about, and receive permission for, any police use of surveillance technology (which agreements with Ring).

Do you really want a doorbell camera?

Should you buy a doorbell camera? This is an individual decision and no doubt it can be a handy device for some people. But if you鈥檙e thinking about installing one, you should go in with your eyes wide open 鈥� especially if you鈥檙e considering a camera that is connected to the Internet.

• Consider the risks. People often buy cameras because they are seeking empowerment and control over what happens in their homes. But consumers need to be aware that such power can be flipped against you. Internet-connected home cameras carry all the risks of other 鈥淚nternet of things鈥� devices: the risk of exposing elements of your home life to the government, to the company that makes your device, and to hackers. Researchers have already found a (now fixed) in the Ring doorbell. And keep in mind that while a doorbell cam will record others at your front door, it will also record your own comings and goings and 鈥減attern of life鈥� and those of your family members.
• Be clear on what you want a doorbell camera for. Do you just want a tool to tell you who is or was at your door? Or do you want an app that has been conceived, designed, and marketed as a police-empowering 鈥渃rime-stopping mission鈥�? Ring, for one, is clear that it aims to be the latter: company founder Jamie Siminoff in grand terms of crime reduction being a 鈥渃lear and enduring鈥� mission for his company. Ring also describes its anti-crime mission using worrisomely militaristic rhetoric of 鈥�.鈥� You may want a camera for personal convenience or security, but do you also want to contribute to the creation of a broad surveillance infrastructure in your community that may be used in abusive ways?
• Consider whether you want cloud storage. As the saying goes, 鈥淭here is no cloud; it鈥檚 just somebody else鈥檚 computer.鈥� When you take video and store it on a device in your home, you have total control over it: how long it鈥檚 kept, whom it鈥檚 shared with, and when (unless the police come knocking with a warrant signed by a judge). But once you store that video in the cloud, you reduce your own physical and legal control over your camera and increase the power of companies and government. Ring鈥檚 cameras allow owners to view live video but do not let them review, share, or save videos unless they get a . If you choose to buy a camera, consider buying one with local storage of video data, which indicate is just as cheap and easy-to-use as cloud-based cameras.
• Consider the ethical issues. If you choose to install a camera, where you point your camera and what it records. Do you need to record public areas like sidewalks and streets? Some cameras allow you to virtually block out parts of a field of view so they are not recorded. Some people install the cameras using a wedge to control the direction it points. Don鈥檛 record your neighbors鈥� property. And when and if capabilities such as face surveillance and video analytics become available, consider not deploying those. Amazon has already applied for a patent revealing the company is at a minimum thinking about how to combine their Ring camera infrastructure with their Rekognition face surveillance infrastructure, and Ring has also such efforts.

Surveillance is always a matter of power. Generally speaking, it increases the power of those doing the surveillance at the cost of those who are subject to it. People buy cameras because they want to empower themselves by seeing who is at their door 鈥� a legitimate aim. But as with all power, consumers should use the power of surveillance responsibly 鈥� and beware that the tool doesn鈥檛 get turned on them and end up empowering somebody else.