Amazon’s own letter confirms Ring gave police your footage without a warrant

In June 2022, Senator Ed Markey sent Amazon a formal list of questions about Ring’s data-sharing practices with law enforcement. Amazon’s written response, dated July 1, 2022, confirmed that Ring had disclosed user footage to police eleven times in 2022 without a warrant and without notifying or obtaining consent from the device owner. Amazon’s stated justification in each case was that the company made a good-faith determination that there was imminent danger of death or serious physical injury requiring disclosure without delay.

Critically, that determination is made entirely by Amazon. No judge, court, or independent party reviews it before the disclosure happens. As EFF policy analyst Matthew Guariglia noted at the time, the public has no visibility into how many requests law enforcement made in total, how many were approved versus rejected, or what standard Amazon actually applied.

The same letter disclosed that more than 2,161 law enforcement agencies and over 450 fire departments were enrolled in Ring’s Neighbors Public Safety Service platform as of mid-2022, a more than fivefold increase from the roughly 400 agencies enrolled in late 2019. Through this platform, police could post public requests directly into users’ Neighbors app feeds asking them to voluntarily submit footage from a specified time and location, a mechanism separate from the warrantless emergency disclosures.

In January 2024, following sustained scrutiny, Ring announced it would discontinue the Request for Assistance feature that let police solicit footage directly from users through the Neighbors app, effective that February. Ring stated public safety agencies could still post general safety information on the platform, but could no longer use it to request footage from specific users. Amazon has not committed to ending warrantless emergency disclosures, and has stated it reserves the right to continue providing footage to law enforcement without a warrant in circumstances it independently deems an emergency.

This establishes, in Amazon’s own written admission to a sitting US Senator, that a private company disclosed private camera footage to police without a warrant and without the device owner’s knowledge or consent, based solely on the company’s own internal judgment, and that this occurred at least eleven confirmed times in a single year with no independent review process disclosed.

What this does not establish is the total number of law enforcement requests Ring received, including those it declined, since Amazon’s letter discloses only confirmed disclosures, not total request volume. It also does not establish that this practice has ended. The 2024 change eliminated one specific request mechanism. Amazon’s letter itself, and its public statements since, confirm the underlying warrantless emergency disclosure practice remains in place.