About 18% of Americans now own a video doorbell. That means a significant and growing slice of American neighborhoods are under a form of intermittent surveillance. If the surveillance video and associated data were the exclusive property of individual homeowners, it might not be of much concern.
However, that’s not the case. For example, Ring, the company behind the top-selling brand, maintains a vast database on its users and their cameras. Ring is an Amazon subsidiary, thanks to the tech giant’s 2018 purchase of the company for over $1 billion.
Ring says it doesn’t sell its customers data, but sometimes it gives it away for free — to the police. In the first half of 2022 alone, Ring fielded more than 3,500 requests from law enforcement agencies.