The partnerships between Ring and police, and the terms of the agreements, have not been transparent to the general public.
In the pair of replies , Ring repeatedly deflects responsibility for the contents of captured footage to the consumers who capture it and the police departments that acquire it.
Police who work in partnerships with Ring have a companion app to Neighbors that allows them to request footage from users in a given geographic area when it's pertinent to an investigation.
Law enforcement departments set their own terms for record retention in accordance with the laws of their jurisdiction and can keep it as long as they see fit.
Amazon has repeatedly said throughout the year that Ring users must volunteer to share their footage in response to a police request.
In some neighborhoods, housing may be dense enough to effectively mask the identity of someone in a radius of a few blocks. But in lower-density neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes, it could be trivial for police to figure out which residence in a 0.025-square-mile radius is using a camera, regardless of if they share footage willingly, and which residents they may wish to talk to.
Amazon is also told to provide data on how many consumers own Ring devices; what kind of encryption Ring uses for the data; what data retention or deletion policy is used on the data; what employees, and where, have access to what content, and why; what consumer-identifying data might be included in that content; and what the company plans to do about facial recognition in the future.
Original article