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Starting next week, the company will turn off Request For Assistance, a program that allowed law enforcement receive recordings from users' smart doorbells and surveillance cameras. In the future, services must obtain and provide a formal warrant to use this data, Bloomberg reports.
- In 2016, the American company Ring opened the R&D center Ring Labs in Kyiv, which works in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision and data analysis. In February 2018, the startup Ring was bought by Amazon for $1 billion, and in January 2019, a scandal erupted online involving employees of the Ukrainian office of Amazon Ring being accused of having unlimited access to video from Ring Video smart call cameras Doorbell. Amazon eventually agreed to pay $5.8 million to settle the complaint.
Meanwhile, the company's practices of allowing police almost unfettered access to recordings from Ring smart doorbells or security cameras have also come under criticism. At the beginning, the company sent letters to users asking them to voluntarily share videos with the police, and in 2021 it required law enforcement officers and firefighters to make these requests public through a separate Neighbors program. Now access to the video will be provided only with an official warrant.
Ring, meanwhile, says it will “devote its resources to new products and programs in Neighbors,” an app that provides real-time crime and safety alerts from neighbors and local law enforcement.
The company was also criticized because recordings from Ring devices often appeared on the Internet. In 2022, Amazon and MGM even announced a TV show, Ring Nation, featuring viral videos captured by smart doorbells and cameras. Last December, Google also said it would change the location history feature in Maps, eliminating the ability for police to request details of anyone who was near a crime scene.
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