, 11 May 2021

More often than not, great convenience comes with great privacy implications

Video doorbells used to be a thing only rich people had — but not so in 2021. These days, you can buy an Amazon Ring doorbell for the reasonable price of $59.99. The convenience of being able to see who’s at your door and even answer it from your phone — plus, record if you want to — is very tempting for many homeowners. Plus, sixty bucks? That’s crazy affordable. Even the top end ones come in at $349.99, which isn’t pennies but certainly isn’t Bruce Wayne-level expensive, either.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned through the course of writing What Does the Internet Know About Me?, it’s that with great convenience usually comes great privacy implications. And so while I don’t actually have a Ring myself (apartment living, y’all), I decided to take a closer look. Here’s what I found.

What does Ring track?

Ring is, first and foremost, a surveillance tool. It’s marketed as helping you surveil your surroundings, but don’t forget that it’s keeping track of you and your family as well. Ring — and Amazon, its parent company — knows your name, email, postal address, and phone number. It also knows the geolocation of your phone, information about your Wi-Fi network and signal strength, and your product’s model, serial number, and software version. If you use Facebook or another third-party login, it also can “obtain information” from that third party. 

And of course, if you go to their website, it also tracks with cookies, web server logs, web beacons, "and other technologies.” According to their Privacy Policy, any information gathered on their sites or social media may be used for advertising.

Finally, Ring videos and photos are stored on Amazon’s servers for up to 60 days. 

If I lived in Europe and had a Ring, I could also potentially be liable to stay in compliance with the GDPR if the camera covered more than my own space. The law is still a little wobbly on this one, but there’s a possibility you’d have to inform passers-by that you’re recording and comply with any access requests.

What does Ring do with my data?

Ring uses your data to provide the services you’ve paid for — in other words, a video doorbell — and while they don’t “sell” your data, they do say in their Privacy Policy that they might “share” it with “service providers who perform services” for them — including marketing. In other words, your data is likely shared with data aggregators in order to serve you ads. Additionally, we all know that Amazon loves to get their hands on as much information about customers as possible, which means Ring data goes into that big aggregated pool Amazon has on you.

Amazon will share information captured by your Ring with law enforcement when they’re compelled to do so. They also have created partnerships with law enforcement agencies across the US, allowing Ring customers to sign up to share their surveillance footage with the police. (And they often offer rebates to incentivize people to sign up for this registry.)

Ring already overtly collects a lot of information, but there are things they could figured out based on the content of your videos and photos. Things like: when you’re home, how many packages you get, information about your neighborhood and neighbors, and so on.

And while there’s no evidence so far that Amazon is viewing those videos and photos, they do have access to them and could theoretically watch them. (In fact, Amazon let workers in the Ukraine annotate Ring videos without consent.) They also have demonstrated that they’re more than willing to comply with police: they reportedly complied with 57 percent of requests from law enforcement in 2020 and 68 percent in 2019, after Ring owners refused to give over footage themselves. 

There are also reports that Amazon is testing out facial recognition technology on their Ring cameras, which opens up a whole other can of scary privacy concerns, especially when you take Amazon’s police partnerships into account. One only has to look to the use of facial recognition by law enforcement in the UK to see how quickly that situation can be used to oppress citizens. 

And then there’s the issue of security. While Amazon is pretty good on that front, users generally aren’t. Anything from an unsecured network to a weak or stolen Wi-Fi password could let malicious actors gain access to the very sensitive information on your Ring. So if you do choose to get on, make sure it’s protected by following strong password best practices and updating regularly.  

Is Ring worth it?

For me, it’s a no — Ring isn’t worth it. Amazon is one of the worst offenders in Big Tech when it comes to sucking up user data and using it for advertising and other similar activities. I also don’t like their cooperation with law enforcement, nor do I think that it’s good for us as a society to literally be surveilling each other in this way. For me, the tradeoff between security and privacy here just isn’t worth it.