Amazon's Ring Police Portal For Mass Surveillance

I found this dropbox link to Ring's marketing video for Police Departments to use their smart video cameras for mass surveillance. This was made before Amazon acquired them. At the end of the demo the CEO states that their facial recognition search feature will be available soon.

This software is made in Ukraine and the hardware is manufactured in China. There was no private company contract bid - Ring is just giving this to cops for free and offering customers a discount for letting their video surveillance from their home / doorbell be shared with the police in this portal.

over 50+ local police departments are now partners.

There is no encryption. There is no 2FA. There is no legal protection for privacy of citizens face's caught in these cameras and added to their facial recognition algorithms.

Ring Ukraine is hiring aggressively, they grew from 10 engineers to 500 in two years. It's one of the top image processing R&D labs in Eastern Europe. Based on their job descriptions.... the facial recognition search being deployed in the police portals of Ring is pretty advanced.

for more on Ring Ukraine www.ring-ukraine.com

I got this ring marketing video from officer.com / a website for police industry news.

Here is an example of Ring partnering with a police department - Orlando - to offer discounted video surveillance IoT devices to citizens, with caveat that they can share their videos with cops to fight crime.

Orlando police department was called out for civil rights violations when they partnered with Amazon's facial recognition technology. The thing about Ring is it's marketed to consumers as a cheap camera....not a hard core image processing face rec AI tool for policing built by Ukraine's biggest tech company.

Every single security article you read about Ukraine's cyber attacks warns about IoT and russian intelligence officials penetrating the private sector. Do american police forces even care about the vulnerability of having this portal app on their phones? Again, nothing is encrypted.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/orange/os-orlando-ring-...

I really dislike this. I bought Ring so I can better track when packages arrive at my door and to use as a digital peephole since my door did not have one. This was prior to the Amazon acquisition, I never would have bought it had I known they were going to own it.

I'm sure Ring has had this up their sleeves for a while, but I really don't trust them, the police, and especially Amazon with the data. Pretty soon they will start selling live feeds of everyones device. Save time patrolling the streets with our neighborhood ring live crime watch.

Additionally with Amazon I'm sure they track when I come and go from my house, who knows, they'll probably start pushing me shopping ads based on what I'm wearing that day. Not to mention it has built in voice recording.

My neighbor has such a doorbell. My facial data is captured every time I come over or walk by with my dog. When was I given an opportunity to consent to this?

Just another example of the utter amorality of the silicon valley mindset–which has been exported globally. Everybody cares about what they can achieve technically, while virtually no one cares whether they should or not.