Ring cameras may someday scan license plates and faces, leak shows

Amazon subsidiary Ring, which has partnerships with almost 1,200 law enforcement agencies nationwide, does not currently include facial-recognition or license plate scanning tools in its home surveillance line of consumer products. The company appears to be evaluating the feature feasibility of adding both tools, however, raising additional privacy concerns for its pervasive platform.

Ring last week distributed a confidential survey to beta testers weighing sentiment and demand for several potential new features in future versions of its software. According to screenshots shared with Ars, potential new features for Ring include options for enabling or disabling the camera both physically and remotely, both visual and audible alarms to ward off "would-be criminals," and potential object, facial, and license plate detection.

Such surveys usually include options a company is considering offering, though not necessarily actively planning to implement. The source who shared the survey with Ars, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, described these options as the "most troubling" of a much longer set of potential features described in the survey.

Media reports have for many months been indicating that Ring may integrate facial recognition into its product line. The company does not at this time use any such technology, including Amazon's own Rekognition platform, but in a January 6 letter to Congress (PDF), Amazon left open the possibility for adding it in the future.

"We do frequently innovate based on customer demand," the company said, citing competing products from Google, Tend, Netatmo, Wisenet, and Honeywell that include facial recognition capability.

"If our customers want these features in Ring security cameras, we will release these features only with thoughtful design including privacy, security, and user control, and we will clearly communicate with our customers as we offer new features," Amazon added.

The company has also not publicly discussed any plans for potentially deploying object detection or license plate scanning technology. In the same letter, lawmakers asked Amazon if employees had access to "any previously tagged information in video feeds that specifically identify a person or vehicle," including specific license plate data; to that question, Amazon answered simply "no."

Automatic license plate reader technology is widely used by local, state, and federal authorities nationwide—but not individuals. Amazon would have at least one competitor if it were to add that functionality to Ring, though: Rekor Systems began marketing a version of its plate-reader software to individual homeowners back in January for $5 per month.

"These features are not available on Ring devices, but are available on similar products from other device makers," a Ring spokesperson told Ars. "Like many companies, we regularly engage with our customers to better understand the types of products and features they might find useful. Privacy is foundational to us, and any products and features we develop include strong privacy protections and provide customers with privacy controls."

Police partnerships

Not only does Ring have access to all the data consumers capture—the police might, too. It's been less than a year since the scope of Ring's partnerships with local law enforcement agencies first began to come to light. Amazon agreed at the very tail end of August to make and keep updated a public list of those agreements going forward. At that time, there were 450 such arrangements.

Ring no longer indicates on what day the master list was last updated, only saying it updates the page "regularly." As of April 21, though, the map lists a total of 1,187 police departments—plus another six fire departments—with which it has arrangements.

The initial lack of transparency around the deals, particularly concerning how police accessed data and the incentives and marketing support law enforcement received, generated significant criticism from both civil rights groups and lawmakers.

To its credit, Amazon has recently taken steps to increase transparency about its police partnerships. Clicking any agency on the map now not only tells you when Ring's arrangement with that city or county began, but also how many requests for footage that agency issued in the first quarter of this year. (Here in the DC metro, for example, the Prince George's County Police Department apparently began working with Ring in February 2019 and issued 53 video requests between January and March 2020.)

Ring also now describes for users how video requests work. Agencies submitting a request must include an incident case number and specify a limited area and time range for footage, the company says. Police also cannot see which specific users were sent a request but do receive user information from anyone who does choose to share a video in response.

At the end of March, the company also published a tally of all requests for user content it received from local, state, and federal agencies—as opposed to requests partner agencies sent to consumers—in 2019. Last year, the company says, Ring received 162 subpoenas, nine court orders, 536 search warrants, 30 requests from agencies outside of the United States, and somewhere between zero and 249 national security requests for data.

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