Can Federal Law Enforcement Access Your Ring Doorbell Videos? Here Are the Details, and Your Options.

Ring has not yet rolled out its Flock integration, and the company wouldn’t reveal its timing with CR. However, once the partnership is live, Flock’s law enforcement customers will be able to request video footage from Ring users through Ring’s recently introduced Community Requests feature. 

No federal agency can sign up with Ring to participate. “It has always been our policy that only local police are able to create Community Requests, and local public safety agencies can only request videos for themselves,” a company spokesperson told us by email. In addition, Flock states that it does not provide “direct access” to any U.S. Department of Homeland Security agency, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

However, according to research by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (PDF), D-Ore., such agencies did briefly have access to Flock’s systems for a pilot program and have also gained access to data by coordinating with local police departments.

Notably, Flock is the second partnership Ring has struck in the last year. The company launched Community Requests in partnership with Axon, a company that operates a digital evidence management system that local law enforcement agencies can now use to request footage from Ring owners in a particular neighborhood.

Local police departments can post a Community Request in the Neighbors by Ring app to investigate a crime. The request is supposed to include information about the incident, a time frame of up to 12 hours for requested camera footage, and some other information. Users are then invited to review footage from that time frame and choose any clips they want to share. 

If you don’t want law enforcement to see videos captured by your Ring device, you can simply ignore a Community Request without police officials knowing, according to the company.

Note that if you do share your videos with police, you don’t have control over what happens to the clips later. “Customers do not have the ability to request footage not be shared with other police agencies,” a Ring spokesperson told us. That means your footage could eventually be shared with other government agencies, and you don’t have a way to get the videos deleted.

If you don’t want to see Community Requests at all, you can turn them off. Open the Neighbors section of the Ring app and go to the Neighbors feed. At the top right of the feed, tap on the gear icon, followed by Neighborhood Settings under your town’s name.

From there, tap Feed Settings and scroll down to Community Requests under Post Types. Finally, de-select the checkbox next to Community Requests and click the Apply button.

Community Requests aren’t the only way that law enforcement officials might acquire a homeowner’s video footage. This applies not just to Ring but to any company that stores customer videos on its servers. As we’ve reported before, the police could serve a manufacturer with a binding legal order, such as a search warrant, as explained in Ring’s online documentation. Second, companies are allowed to share footage with police in the event of a potentially life-threatening emergency.

If you want to lock down your Ring footage and be certain no one can access it, not even Ring, you can enable Ring’s end-to-end encryption (E2EE) feature.

End-to-end encryption means that the videos are encrypted both in transit, when they travel back and forth from your home to the company, and at rest while sitting on Ring’s servers. This keeps your recordings secure and private, and it prevents law enforcement or anyone else from seeing your videos.

However, enabling E2EE will disable many other Ring features, including shared accounts, person detection, facial recognition, 24/7 recording, pre-roll recording, and AI video search. The full list of affected features, as well as detailed instructions for enabling E2EE, are detailed on Ring’s end-to-end encryption support page.

Given all of the functionality that you lose by enabling E2EE, the trade-offs might not be worth it to you. And there are other options on the market that provide smart features along with E2EE (more on that below).

Regardless of what security camera you use, you can be served with a binding order to obtain your footage. This applies whether your videos are encrypted or even stored locally in your home.

When authorities use court orders to obtain your footage, there are usually strict rules about what they can collect, who they can share it with, and who can even know they obtained it. There are generally more protections for your footage than if you share it voluntarily.

If you want complete control over the video footage your cameras create, you’ll want to store it locally in your home. Many manufacturers now offer security cameras and video doorbells with local storage, and none of them have direct law enforcement partnerships like Ring. Here are a few cameras and doorbells that perform well in our ratings and offer local video storage.