Don’t be fooled by Amazon’s claims that Ring video doorbells give you freedom and security

Mass surveillance, and legislation supporting it, is on the rise in the Western world. We have seen examples in the Australian Surveillance Devices Act, the French Intelligence Act, and the American PATRIOT Act. At the FSF we also regularly receive reports of threats to privacy. To pick only one example: the number of surveillance cameras in Romania has massively increased in all kinds of places, including stairways of apartment complexes, private and public parking lots, roofs of corporate and government buildings, government buildings, hospitals, metro stations, public parks, churches, schools, kindergartens, and universities, trains and buses and pedestrian road crossings. Some of these cameras upload their video footage to websites, where one can watch the public space 24/7.

Sadly, this growing issue in Romania is a well-established standard in the US. With fifty million Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras (i.e. a system with surveillance cameras transmitting their signals to monitors or recorders), the US ranks second by number of CCTV cameras, surpassed only by China. To break this number down, the US has about one camera for every 4.6 people. While publicly-owned cameras certainly make up a significant portion of cameras in the US, privately-owned cameras also contribute significantly to the growing mass surveillance issue.

Ring doorbells, one of the most popular privately-owned cameras in the US, has some parts of the source code published under the Expat license, which may come across as an ethical effort, but make no mistake: Amazon's (the proprietor of Ring doorbells) intentions should never be confused as ethical or free as in freedom. All videos recorded by Ring doorbell are forcibly uploaded to an Amazon-owned server, and can only be accessed by the user through payment of a monthly subscription fee. Amazon is in full control of the videos taken by all Ring doorbells, and with it the power to access, save, and share video recordings, not the users who put these cameras up. If the Ring doorbells were made with user freedom in mind, it would put you in control.

Because Amazon controls access to these videos instead of the users, it also has the unjust power to exploit these private videos as it sees fit, including providing a plethora of customers' personally identifiable information to whoever asks. Amazon has been criticized by several social justice organizations, including Fight for the Future, for partnering with at least 200 law enforcement agencies to carry out surveillance via its Ring doorbells. In 2022 , Ring revealed that it had been giving videos obtained through Ring doorbells to police without warrants or user consent if it was an "emergency", as defined by Ring and the police. While police had lost this access for a few years, earlier this year the company reintroduced the ability for police to request footage directly from Ring users, and is now looking into integrating Ring with police surveillance technology from Axon to stream 24/7 live videos from Ring devices, only if "customers" allow it, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported recently.

We should have control over our software, not some unethical proprietary provider.

Just to be clear: there are many other proprietary camera systems and video doorbells that are just as bad or even when worse when it comes to privacy — Ring doorbell is just an example. Regardless of the proprietary camera, mass surveillance puts many freedoms at risk, including software freedom. So what do you do if you want to install a camera in your home for security or to keep an eye on a pet, but not contribute to mass surveillance? Set up your own security cam or video doorbell by using a simple webcam, making sure that the camera only records your house and not surrounding homes, and store the video footage on a server under your control. Ideally, keep the data in a secondary location in case the first location is compromised. Give a trusted friend access to the server in case you are unable to retrieve the footage.

A DIY system or going low-tech are the only ethical options with regard to software freedom and the voluntary mass surveillance trend, since there is unfortunately no libre commercial option. We are well aware that not everyone can set up a DIY system. We also note that without an off-site storage video solution, a DIY system unfortunately does not match the features of most of the commercial, nonfree systems. However, before you pay a great amount of money for a subscription to a company like Amazon or Apple, we ask you to consider setting up your own DIY system or paying someone to set a libre system up for you. The more of us that can reduce use or completely stop use of proprietary or privacy-violating software that robs us of our rights, the stronger we as a collective become to fight for those who can't.

"Gobierno Espía Ojo." © 2022 by Gibrán Aquino. This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.