Ring / Amazon Admits Giving Police Video Without Consent

Hope your brother is.

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Every now and then I’ll call dispatch and have the officer come over and collect the video :slight_smile: I live in a very quiet neighborhood and even seeing an officer around here is fairly rare. Last time I saw an officer in the area I invited them.

I got home the other day to see an officer had a motorcycle pulled over down the street. So upon checking my camera I found out there was a Chase. With my job I’m currently in contact with dispatch quite often and I called them to contact the officer and let them know I had additional evidence if he wanted it for the prosecutor Zach.

He stopped over and we chatted for a little bit and he said even if the prosecutor wouldn’t entertain it he would use it to let his wife know how his day went. This was a sergeant who generally isn’t on the road but picked up some shifts so some officers could have the day off.

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I work with law enforcement and thought I can chime in, part of the tasks I am involved with have search warrants and subpoenas.
Can only speak as a customer/user of Wyze and regulations that apply to my local county and state.

There are a couple types of data I believe I could get, if I wanted Wyze to directly give me what they have without the user’s consent and after a judge signed off on a request to view someone’s data.

  • Videos stored in the cloud. Since this is on Amazon AWS servers actually, the technicality is it the data is stored by Amazon but accessible only by Wyze, therefore Wyze would have to hand over that data (we’re talking past data, not present streaming)

  • Account information, IP addresses, device history, logs, etc. there is no way Wyze cannot provide it in the event of a court order.

I am not a criminal defense attorney, so I can’t speak on the specifics of legality of this, but if anyone is doing full-time recording onto MicroSD cards, I do not believe they are property of Wyze (as an IP or any type of property) - they are physically yours and only yours.

Therefore if you denied access to a police officer who questioned you to see a recording captured in the SDcard, he would have to come back with a signed order by a judge that you have nothing else you can do but comply.

There are also Federal laws (911) the feds might use for access, however typically I think 9/10 times it would be purview of your local jurisdiction.
Typically, streaming live video is more of a wiretap/surveillance type of court order and not the same as looking at past recordings.

Wyze seems like fairly relatively new and coming product and isn’t as widespread as Ring has been, so I pictured that type of privacy terms have not been fully etched in the user agreement for those scenarios yet.

Hope that helps.

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Just an opinion, 55 requests per a day to Ring is a relatively low count.

The number of (Amazon) package thefts, thefts from businesses, homes burglarized into in the nation exceeds probably 100 in any major city on any day, and it is unknown how many of those have Ring cameras. Volume wise, this translates to thousands of crimes per day that never had a resolution - the police never looked at the video and therefore have no idea who the criminal was.

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The point was that these are the ‘share your content and data with us’ request numbers that operate completely outside the judicial oversight system in place for legally obtaining such content. These are the requests that circumvent every users right to and expectation of privacy without their knowledge. And, these are not the demands for content obtained thru judicial oversight.

It is also important to realize that this is also not the true number of requests to which Ring complied. They will not release that number.

What it does spotlight is the trend of law enforcement to directly request the information knowing there is no judicial oversight and the iOT company will possibly give it to them based on user agreement indemnification clauses that diminish user privacy.

While Law Enforcement and Ring have a voice in deciding on the release of this content, the one person being willfully excluded is the only one for which privacy matters… The user.

The entire practice is systematically designed to erode the privacy rights of the user and indemnify the participatory agencies from any wrongdoing.

It is, in the most basic terms, an end run around the Constitution.

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Father: Son, law is kind of arbitrary. Mostly for show.
Son: Then why do they call it ‘law?’
Father: Because it’s legal.

There is little or no debate that they should comply with court orders. The question is whether they should and/or do “hand over the data” without such an order.

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Thanks for adding your insights this way. :+1:

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The requests discussed within the article and those within this thread do not meet this basic criteria. In the case of this article and these discussions, there is no Judge involved. No judiciary involvement whatsoever.

This is content handed over only on the evaluation of necessity by the iOT provider based on the need presented by Law Enforcement.

The article does not speak to these items or the content thereon. It only speaks to content stored on the host server.

I believe you are on the money here. I would welcome more detailed and definitive language in the user terms as it pertains to cloud content.

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