Neighbors (app)

Amazon Neighbors, also known as simply Neighbors, is a neighborhood watch app offered by Amazon and Ring Inc. that allows users to get real-time crime and safety alerts from your neighbors and local law enforcement. The Neighbors Portal is an extension of the Neighbors app that allows police officers to view and comment on public posts as verified law enforcement.

Neighbors App can be downloaded via the App Store.

Usage

Users can report on news and events in their neighborhoods. If their community does not already exist on Neighbors, users can establish and name their own digital neighborhood. These neighborhoods much attract a minimum of 10 households to become established.

Images and video are captured by similar "Ring" video doorbells

The app determines what alerts or notifications a user receives based on their home address. Users can comment on these alerts in order to provide additional information about local issues, give tips to avoid affected areas, or share photos or videos to help neighbors stay on the lookout. The radius around the user's home address can be narrowed to focus on only hyper-local issues via the app's filter.

Partnerships

Neighbors has partnered with different police departments, who use the app to create posts asking the community for help identifying and locating missing person(s) and/or suspect(s).[1]

History

Neighbors was launched in 2018 by Ring as a hyperlocal social networking app that would allow users to crowdsource information and discuss safety and security concerns in their area.[2] The service allows users to share footage captured from Ring products, so that others can help to identify suspects. All user posts are anonymous and do not include specific location information, and are moderated to remove off-topic content (in contrast to services such as Nextdoor, it focuses exclusively on crime and safety). Ring also has partnerships with local police departments in some cities to incorporate Neighbors into their crime monitoring processes, and they are also able to make official posts for distribution on the service. Ring has credited the service with having helped to solve crimes, and noted that activity on the service surged in California regions affected by wildfires in November 2018.[3]

Amazon disclosed Ring's criteria for accepting requests from police departments for video footage shared to the Neighbors portal in a response to Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey on November 1, 2019. Each police request must be associated with a case number and submitted individually, although no evidence is needed. Ring provides at most 12 hours of footage recorded within the previous 45 days in a maximum search area of 0.5 square miles for each request. Markey criticized Amazon's response, describing Ring as "an open door for privacy and civil liberty violations".

Police departments may access user-generated footage through the Ring Neighborhoods portal by request, using a map interface. After a police officer requests video from a list of houses, Ring sends all affected users automated messages requesting permission to release the footage.

Criticism
Ring Doorbell video recording example.

Neighbors has received criticism over Ring partnering with law enforcement, as this gives them the ability to request footage captured on Ring devices or video of home security cameras that may have captured an incident.[4] U.S. Senator Ed Markey has questioned the impact this would have on civil liberties and privacy and requested that Amazon to provide a detailed report of how it develops contracts with police departments.[5][6]

Further reading
  • Zhang, Min; Bandara, Arosha K.; Price, Blaine; Pike, Graham; Walkington, Zoe; Elphick, Camilla; Frumkin, Lara; Philpot, Richard; Levine, Mark; Stuart, Avelie; Nuseibeh, Bashar (2020-04-25). "Designing Technologies for Community Policing". Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Honolulu HI USA: ACM: 1–9. doi:10.1145/3334480.3383021. ISBN 978-1-4503-6819-3.
  • West, Emily (2019-03-31). "Amazon: Surveillance as a Service". Surveillance & Society. 17 (1/2): 27–33. doi:10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.13008. ISSN 1477-7487.
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See also

References
  1. Harwell, Drew (August 28, 2019). "Doorbell-camera firm Ring has partnered with 400 police forces, extending surveillance concerns". Washington Post.
  2. "In first move since Amazon acquisition, Ring launches Neighbors app to help users fight crime". GeekWire. 2018-05-08. Retrieved 2020-06-03.
  3. Rubin, Ben Fox. "How Ring's Neighbors app is making home security a social thing". CNET. Retrieved 2020-06-03.
  4. Lecher, Colin (2019-11-19). "Amazon lets police ask for Ring videos that are more than a month old". The Verge. Retrieved 2020-06-03.
  5. "US senator demands answers from Amazon's Ring over its police partnerships". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2020-05-24.
  6. February 24, Grace Baek CBS News; 2020; Am, 7:03. "Are video doorbells and neighborhood watch apps generating more fear than security?". www.cbsnews.com. Retrieved 2020-05-24.CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
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