Today we speak with EFF's Matthew Guariglia about the creepy new partnership between Amazon's Ring Doorbell division and local law enforcement. Recent disclosures reveal that Amazon has partnered with over 400 police agencies to market their product and share surveillance footage. While these footage requests can supposedly be refused by the Ring owners, there appear to be circumstances where Amazon will provide footage without consent. The marketing of Ring has changed from convenience to an automated neighborhood watch program, where the police have been coached in how to drum up interest in the product and to assuage fears over sharing their private footage.

Matthew Guariglia is a policy analyst for surveillance and privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is also a visiting research scholar at the University of California-Berkeley and holds a PhD in U.S. history. His work focuses on the relationship between race, immigration, policing and government surveillance in the past and present. You can find his writing in the Washington Post, VICE, and the Freedom of information-centered outlet MuckRock. To find his writing you can follow him on Twitter at @mguariglia or visit MatthewGuariglia.com.

Further Info

EFF's Street Level Surveillance : https://www.eff.org/issues/street-level-surveillance Protecting Civic Spaces: https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/2852/protecting-civic-spaces