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... Law enforcement agencies will soon have easier access to footage captured by Amazon's Ring smart cameras. In a partnership announced this week, Amazon will allow approximately 5,000 local law enforcement agencies to request access to Ring camera footage via surveillance platforms from Flock Safety.

Ring cooperating with law enforcement and the reported use of Flock technologies by federal agencies, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has resurfaced privacy concerns that have followed the devices for years. ...

A flock of privacy concerns

Outside its software platforms, Flock is known for license plate recognition cameras. Flock customers can also search footage from Flock cameras using descriptors to find people, such as "man in blue shirt and cowboy hat." Besides law enforcement agencies, Flock says 6,000 communities and 1,000 businesses use their products.

For years, privacy advocates have warned against companies like Flock.

This week, US Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter [PDF] to Flock CEO Garrett Langley saying that ICE's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the Secret Service, and the US Navy's Criminal Investigative Service have had access to footage from Flock's license plate cameras.

"I now believe that abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable and that Flock is unable and uninterested in preventing them," Wyden wrote. ...