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Courtesy: Ring
(Courtesy: Ring)
Amazon ring tones help police set up surveillance networks in neighborhoods across the country.
More than 50 local police departments have partnered with Ring over the last two years and have promoted their products to citizens – mainly by building neighborhoods with security cameras, a report released Wednesday by the website of the CNET technology.
"Our community is now fully covered by cameras," Capt Vincent Kerney, Detective Bureau Detective at the Bloomfield Police Department in New Jersey, told the website. "Every neighborhood in the city we have, there are Ring cameras."
When cops work in partnership with Ring, they have access to a law enforcement dashboard, where they can geographize an area and request footage shot at specific times. They can only get the video if the resident chooses to send it, otherwise they would need to assign Ring.
However, some police departments have organized gifts on Ring – sometimes using taxpayer money to buy Amazon products – with the warning that recipients of smart bells must deliver images on demand, according to The report.
Ring said that he would start cracking down on the strings attached.
"Ring does not support programs that require recipients to subscribe to a recording plan, or that Ring device sequences are shared as a condition of receiving a particular device. We are working actively with our partners to ensure that this is reflected in their programs, "Ring said in a statement.
The Ring's Neighborhood app, which is essentially a social network where residents can share feeds from their cameras, interests them the most.
"We are encouraging residents of Mountain Brook to purchase this type of technology and use the application," said Ted Cook, chief of police in Mountain Brook, Alabama. "We see this as an attempt to create neighborhood digital surveillance."
Police said the app helped them solve crimes because locals often sent them pictures of suspicious cars driving into the neighborhood or someone slipping a package outside their door.
But lawyers say the police's partnerships with Ring would allow the cops to monitor unprecedented citizens.
"What we have here is a perfect marriage between the forces of law and order and one of the largest companies in the world, creating conditions for a society that few people would want to be part of," he said. Mohammad Tajsar, attorney at ACLU Southern California.
This story originally appeared in the New York Post.
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