Are you sure?

How can we as citizens verify it?

Yes. If Ring had even the barest shred of ethics, they would client-side encrypt the videos stored in their cloud. It would use no extra space. The user would have to explicitly approve the decryption and sharing of videos.

But they don't, because being able to access and datamine those videos is a huge money-maker for them.

Ring is terrible, but their engineers willing to implement this corporate surveillance state? They're the worst. They wield their software skills as a mercenary would a weapon against innocents. I seriously cannot even comprehend how they sleep at night and look at themselves in the mirror in the morning.

At least folks over at Apple are sane and are making sure that HomeKit surveillance videos are client-side encrypted.

The issue is that Ring's terms specifically allow them to circumvent "normal judicial review" if the request is "reasonable". From the same WaPo article:

> Ring users consent to the company giving recorded video to “law enforcement authorities, government officials and/or third parties” if the company believes it's necessary to comply with “legal process or reasonable government request,” its terms of service state.

I'm fine with the police having access to video after obtaining a warrant or subpoena, even if it's not a particularly high bar to clear. But that should still be the bar. We shouldn't expect Ring to refuse police requests even after being served, but we should expect them to hold out until that point — and unfortunately, we can't trust them to do that.

It really looks to me like this is exactly what they're building.