The Monitoring Association, a security industry group, joined the chorus today calling for more transparency on Ring‘s police partnerships.
“This is pretty embarrassing for Ring, honestly,” said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future (she/her). “When an industry association that represents security and surveillance camera companies thinks that your practices are too invasive and lack transparency, that really says something. This should be setting off alarm bells for local elected officials in the hundreds of cities that already have these partnerships. Mayors and city councils should take immediate action to stop these for-profit surveillance deals and have real community dialogues before pursuing anything like this in the future.”
Q2 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc
This follows weeks of revelations into these worrisome partnerships:
- In June, CNET revealed over 50 Ring-police partnerships existed
- MotherJones in July discovered there’s 200 partnerships, days later Gizmodo found 225
- And today a student at the University of Illinois published a map with information of 231 Ring police partnerships
We are calling on people in these cities to contact their elected representatives and demand the pass an Ordinance banning these partnerships in cities. Amazon is building a privately run, for-profit surveillance state—and they’re getting local police to market it for them in exchange for VIP access to Amazon’s on-demand surveillance system.
The use of these technologies is particularly dangerous for low income people and communities of color that are historically over-policed. A recent study by Motherboard showed that Amazon Ring’s Neighbor App tends to encourage racial profiling.
If a police department wanted to install surveillance cameras on all of our front doors, they would have to get permission from elected officials and the public. Amazon has found the perfect end-run around the democratic process. But mayors and city officials have the power to stop police from entering into these partnerships, which is why we are calling on local elected officials to ban and stop these deceptive partnerships.
