A nearly real-time dashboard of the over 1,000 partnerships Amazon Ring has with local law enforcement.
Amazon Ring, maker of smart video doorbells, is currently partnered with over 1,400 police departments across the U.S., enabling local law enforcement to request video footage from users' Ring devices—often without a warrant. Once videos are accessed, police can store this footage indefinitely, use it to target protestors, or freely share this data to other agencies like ICE or the FBI.
These partnerships have been criticized by over 30 civil rights groups, as well as Senator Ed Markey (MA), who said these partnerships “could easily create a surveillance network that places dangerous burdens on people of color and feeds racial anxieties in local communities.”
Amazon recently imposed a moratorium on police use of its facial recognition software, in response to concerns that the software, which regularly misidentifies Black and Brown people, exacerbates biased policing. Yet despite similar concerns that Ring fuels racist profiling and policing, Amazon has added over sixty new partnerships since June 1.
Moreover, new partnerships are often added with minimal announcement or public input—meaning most Americans will never know they are being surveilled. The goal of this dashboard is to make this data more publicly accessible, with the hope that it will increase transparency and accountability over Amazon's police partnership program.
This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more detail.