Case Study 16.2: Ring's Partnership Contracts — Transparency, Resistance, and Reform

Background: The Contracts That No One Read

In 2019, journalist Joseph Cox at Motherboard/Vice filed public records requests with dozens of cities and counties that had signed formal partnership agreements with Ring. The contracts Cox obtained revealed a surveillance arrangement significantly more extensive than what Ring had described in its public communications.

The documents showed that police departments in Ring's partnership program received:

• Access to Ring's law enforcement request portal, which mapped the precise location of every registered Ring camera in the jurisdiction
• Promotional materials and suggested social media scripts for police departments to use in encouraging residents to purchase Ring cameras and join the network
• Quotas or "goals" (phrased differently in different contracts) for the number of Ring devices registered in the partnership area
• Guidance discouraging police departments from publicly disclosing the terms of the partnership

This final point was particularly significant. Several contracts included language asking or directing police departments not to "reveal" the terms of the partnership to the public without Ring's approval. The Electronic Frontier Foundation analyzed these provisions and argued they represented a systematic effort to prevent public oversight of a surveillance program with significant public consequences.

The Promotional Role of Police

The promotional component of Ring's partnerships represented a novel privatization of a public function. Police departments, trusted public institutions with authority derived from democratic governance, were recruited as marketing agents for a private consumer product.

Promotional materials provided by Ring included suggested language for police department Twitter and Facebook accounts ("Protect your home and help keep [City Name] safe with @Ring doorbells — join our neighborhood network!"), template press releases announcing local Ring partnerships, and guidance on hosting "Ring giveaway events" where police departments would raffle Ring cameras to incentivize community participation in the network.

The reciprocal benefit for Ring was substantial. Police endorsement of Ring cameras carried credibility that commercial advertising could not match. When a police chief announced that Ring cameras had helped solve a local burglary, the implicit message was that Ring was police-approved, crime-fighting technology. This endorsement drove sales, which expanded the camera network, which made the law enforcement portal more valuable, which deepened the partnerships.

The promotional relationship also created perverse incentives for police. Departments that had signed Ring partnership agreements had reputational and relational stakes in Ring's success. Publicly criticizing Ring's privacy practices, or even declining to renew a partnership, would mean disengaging from an arrangement that had become part of the department's public communications infrastructure.

Lakeside, Oregon: A Case Study in Resistance

In 2020, the city of Lakeside, Oregon (population approximately 1,800) declined to renew its Ring partnership agreement, becoming one of a small number of jurisdictions to publicly reject the program. The city council's decision followed a presentation by a local privacy advocate who had obtained the Lakeside-Ring partnership contract through a public records request.

Lakeside City Councilwoman Diane Reyes described the council's concerns: "We looked at this contract and we realized we were agreeing to things on behalf of our residents that they didn't know about. The map of camera locations. The promotional requirements. The language about not disclosing the terms. This didn't feel like a tool for our residents — it felt like we were agreeing to be part of Ring's sales network."

The Lakeside Police Department's chief had initially supported the partnership. After the council's decision, he said publicly that Ring had been "a useful investigative resource" but that he understood the council's concerns about transparency. He noted that Ring had not offered to modify the contract terms to address the council's concerns, only to provide "more context" about how the features were used.

Lakeside's decision received significant coverage in privacy advocacy publications and was cited in subsequent debates in larger cities about Ring partnerships. Ring did not publicly comment on the Lakeside contract non-renewal.

Portland and the Municipal Surveillance Ordinance

Portland, Oregon passed a comprehensive surveillance ordinance in 2021 that addressed private surveillance networks in several ways. Under Portland's ordinance, city agencies were prohibited from acquiring or using facial recognition technology and were required to seek city council approval before entering into data-sharing arrangements with private technology companies — including Ring-style partnerships.

Portland's ordinance was the most restrictive municipal surveillance regulation in the United States at the time of its passage. The city council debate over the ordinance featured extensive testimony from civil liberties advocates, police representatives, and community members with divergent views.

Supporters of the ordinance argued that Ring partnerships and similar arrangements represented a form of privatized policing that bypassed the democratic oversight normally applied to public surveillance programs. The camera network that a Ring partnership creates is functionally equivalent to a city-operated CCTV network — but is deployed without the public hearings, budget appropriations, or legislative authorization that a city-operated network would require.

Opponents argued that voluntary, opt-in participation by homeowners was an adequate substitute for democratic authorization, and that restricting police access to voluntarily shared private footage would reduce investigative capacity without meaningful privacy benefit.

The council passed the ordinance 4–1.

Amazon's Response and Policy Changes

Sustained pressure from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, academic researchers, and investigative journalists produced several policy changes from Ring between 2019 and 2023:

2019: Ring announced that it had created an "end-to-end encrypted" option for Ring footage, allowing users to store footage locally with encryption keys that Ring itself could not access. Adoption of end-to-end encryption remained low due to the inconvenience of the setup process and Ring's default architecture.

2020: Ring updated its privacy policy to provide more detail about law enforcement request procedures, including the volume of requests received and the proportion fulfilled. The first transparency report Ring published (following significant public pressure) showed that Ring had fulfilled thousands of law enforcement requests in 2020.

2021: Following reporting on the Neighbors app's racial bias problems, Ring announced enhanced content moderation including automated filters for racial language and a new appeals process for disputed posts.

2022: Ring announced that it would no longer provide footage to law enforcement without a warrant in emergency situations — a reversal of its prior policy of allowing emergency warrantless access.

2023: Amazon announced that Ring would not use Ring footage to train facial recognition algorithms without explicit user consent — a reassurance that critics noted did not address other potential commercial uses of the footage.

Each of these policy changes followed, rather than preceded, public pressure and investigative reporting. None was implemented proactively as a matter of privacy-by-design. The pattern is consistent with what scholars of corporate surveillance accountability call "reactive compliance" — companies respond to the minimum extent required by public scrutiny, preserving maximum flexibility for future data use.

What the Policy Changes Did Not Fix

Despite these modifications, the fundamental architecture of Ring's surveillance ecosystem remained intact. At the time of this writing:

• Ring cameras continue to upload footage to Amazon's cloud by default
• The Neighbors app continues to operate as a crowdsourced crime-watching platform
• Ring maintains partnerships with hundreds of law enforcement agencies
• The map of registered camera locations continues to be shared with partner police departments
• Users who share footage "voluntarily" with police continue to share footage of third parties who have no voice in that decision
• The racial profiling dynamics of the Neighbors app continue to generate documented outcomes

The policy changes Ring has implemented are real but peripheral. They modify the most legally vulnerable and publicly visible elements of the system without altering the structural conditions that produce the system's most significant surveillance impacts.

Analysis

The Transparency Report as Public Relations

Ring's transparency reports, which disclose the number of law enforcement requests received and fulfilled, are genuine contributions to public knowledge. They are also, surveillance scholars have argued, a form of reputational management. By publishing aggregate statistics, Ring satisfies a public demand for accountability while providing minimal information about the specific practices, geographic distributions, or demographic impacts that would enable meaningful scrutiny.

Transparency, in the context of corporate surveillance, is not synonymous with accountability. A company can be "transparent" — can publish data about what it does — while remaining entirely unaccountable for the consequences of what it does. True accountability would require not just disclosure but external oversight, independent auditing, and meaningful redress for those harmed by the system.

Community Resistance as Democratic Practice

The Lakeside, Oregon case illustrates that municipal governments can exercise meaningful authority over private surveillance infrastructure — but only when they have access to the actual terms of the arrangements being proposed. The opacity of Ring's partnership contracts, documented by investigative journalists through public records requests, was itself an obstacle to democratic governance. Contracts designed to prevent public disclosure of their terms are designed to prevent the kind of democratic deliberation that Lakeside's city council ultimately conducted.

The implication is significant: privacy advocacy in the surveillance era requires not only legislation but information. Public records requests, investigative journalism, and academic research that makes surveillance arrangements visible are themselves acts of democratic self-defense.

Discussion Questions

1. Ring's partnership contracts included language discouraging police departments from disclosing contract terms to the public. What is the relationship between this opacity and the "consent as fiction" concept from the chapter? Who benefits from this opacity and who is harmed by it?

2. Evaluate the argument that police endorsement of Ring cameras constitutes a conflict of interest for police departments. What safeguards, if any, would address this concern?

3. The reactive compliance pattern Ring has demonstrated — making changes only after public pressure — is common among surveillance technology companies. What structural changes (regulatory, legal, market-based) would produce proactive privacy protection rather than reactive compliance?

4. Portland's surveillance ordinance was described as the most restrictive in the United States. What are the limits of municipal-level surveillance regulation? What would federal-level regulation need to do that municipal ordinances cannot?

5. The chapter distinguishes between transparency (disclosing what a company does) and accountability (being responsible for the consequences). Evaluate Ring's transparency reports using this distinction. What would genuine accountability look like for Ring?