Ring claims it’s not giving ICE access to its cameras

Ring’s partnership with Flock is sparking renewed online backlash this week, with influencers calling for people to smash their Ring cameras and claiming the company is part of the surveillance state amid heightened concerns over ICE actions.

Flock is an AI-powered surveillance camera company that has reportedly allowed government agencies — including ICE — to access data from its nationwide camera network. Amazon-owned home security company Ring announced a partnership with Flock last year as part of its new Community Requests tool. This allows local law enforcement agencies to request footage from nearby Ring users when investigating an active case.

According to reporting from Futurism, activists are pushing a grassroots campaign across social media, including TikTok and Bluesky, telling Ring users to get rid of their cameras to prevent footage from being used by ICE. However, Ring spokesperson Yassi Yarger told The Verge in an email that “Ring has no partnership with ICE, does not give ICE videos, feeds, or back-end access, and does not share video with them.”

Yarger also said that the Flock integration in question, which was announced last October, is not yet live. Meaning Flock does not have access to Community Requests.

“As we explore the integration, we will ensure the feature is built for the use of local public safety agencies only — which is what the program is designed for,” she said. According to Ring’s support site, local agencies are limited to city and county organizations.

Still, once footage is in the hands of local authorities, it’s out of Ring’s control. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff has told The Verge that he believes widespread cameras can prevent crime. But once deployed, the potential for such a large-scale local surveillance system to be used for other purposes is very real.

Since returning to the company last year, Siminoff has leaned into his belief that more cameras lead to safer communities, launching Community Requests last September.

This is essentially a rebrand of Ring’s controversial Request for Assistance feature, which was discontinued in 2024. Only, instead of direct partnerships with law enforcement, Community Requests works through integrations with “third-party evidence management platforms,” such as Flock and Axon, a Taser and body-cam company.

Any local agency partnered with either company can request users’ footage through the Ring’s apps. According to Yarger, currently, only the Axon partnership is live.

According to Ring, Community Requests sends a request from the local agency to both the Ring Neighbors app and the Ring app’s Community Feed. The request appears to all users in the area of an active investigation, and a user can choose to share footage or ignore the request. Ring says no one will be notified if you ignore a request.

How to disable Community Requests and enable E2E

If you don’t want to participate in Community Requests, you can disable it in the Ring or Neighbors app. Go to the app’s settings page, find the Neighbors Settings, then scroll down to Neighborhood Settings, click Feed Settings, uncheck Community Requests, and click Apply.

However, Ring — like many security camera companies — may provide footage to law enforcement without a warrant in what it deems an emergency.

To prevent anyone from accessing your Ring footage, you can enable end-to-end encryption (E2E) in the Ring app.

While your footage is still stored in Ring’s cloud, with E2E turned on, only the mobile device you set up the camera with can view the video; it cannot be accessed by Ring or used for Community Requests.

Enabling E2E means you lose several features, including person detection, rich notifications that show a snapshot of activity, and Ring’s new AI-powered descriptions, all of which rely on the cloud.

While most cloud-based security cameras encrypt footage in transit and at rest, they need to access it in the cloud to analyze it and enable those features.

Alternatives to cloud-dependent cameras

If you want to avoid cloud-dependent cameras entirely, there are several other options for keeping your camera footage private and secure.

As mentioned, Ring cameras use the cloud to process footage for features like person detection; however, some security cameras can process video locally and fully encrypt it before sending it to the cloud. Generally, this requires a hub to process the footage.

If you are an iPhone user, Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video service is fully E2E encrypted. Video analysis is done locally on a home hub, such as a HomePod or Apple TV, and stored in your iCloud account. It requires compatible cameras, including models from Eve, Aqara, and Eufy.

Anker-owned Eufy is another company that offers local storage and video processing for its wide selection of cameras and video doorbells. The company had some serious security breaches involving the cloud in 2022, but its newer HomeBase hardware can run locally.

TP-Link’s Tapo, Aqara, and Reolink recently launched local hubs for storage and processing of footage from their cameras, and these companies also offer cameras and video doorbells with onboard local processing and local storage via microSD cards.

The new Matter standard now supports security cameras, which could open more options for local, secure storage and processing of camera footage.

Ultimately, any camera connected to the internet comes with the risk that it could be accessed by someone other than you, no matter what the company says. So it remains important to think carefully before adding any type of surveillance to your home or your neighborhood.