Amazon’s Neighborhood Watch
Jackson Eskay * | 24.5 | Comment | Citation: Jackson Eskay, Amazon’s Neighborhood Watch, 24 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 1164 (2022).
DoorBot, a technology startup, featured on the fifth season of NBC’s hit entrepreneurial reality show, Shark Tank. It offered customers the ability to see, hear, and speak to anyone at their front door with its single product, the “video doorbell.” After the product pitch, Robert Herjavec, one of the investor-sharks, said “it freaks me out.” DoorBot did not secure a deal.
In 2014, the company rebranded to Ring—a double entendre capturing meaning from both the doorbell’s “ring” and the “ring” of security provided around the home. It also inaugurated its mission statement: “[M]ake neighborhoods safer.” In 2018, Amazon acquired Ring for a deal valued at more than $1 billion. More than 2,000 partnerships now exist between Amazon’s Ring (“Ring”) and law enforcement agencies across the United States. These partnerships streamline government access to video recorded from privately owned devices. More than three million Ring cameras are online nationwide. This is the “The New Neighborhood Watch.”
Ring’s partnerships with law enforcement pose important questions about the role of private companies in government surveillance. The united effort presents a novel surveillance scheme amid an explosion of surveillance technologies and systems implemented by both the private sector and the government. Ring is rapidly increasing its number of partnerships with law enforcement, developing more intimate relationships with individual agencies, growing its total number of cameras, and innovating for more powerful technology. Privacy advocates around the country are calling for reform.
This Comment explores the Fourth Amendment questions raised by the partnerships between Ring and law enforcement. The Fourth Amendment protects the right to be free from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” It safeguards “reasonable expectation[s] of privacy” by providing “obstacles in the way of a too permeating police surveillance.” Typically, courts evaluate government surveillance through the lens of the Fourth Amendment. This Comment adopts that same approach and argues that law enforcement should be required to obtain a warrant before requesting video footage from Ring’s camera network.
Part I of this Comment charts the Supreme Court’s evolving Fourth Amendment case law and outlines the modern framework for the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. Part II provides factual background about Ring, its flagship product (the Video Doorbell), its virtual network (the Neighbors app), and its partnerships with law enforcement. Part III applies the Fourth Amendment framework to the questions presented by Ring’s partnerships with law enforcement. It discusses three long-established doctrines (the “public view doctrine,” the “third-party doctrine,” and the doctrine of Fourth Amendment standing) and several federal cases that involve analogous surveillance technology and techniques. Part IV briefly considers model legislation proposed by the ACLU that offers communities more transparency into law enforcement’s surveillance practices. Part V concludes: The Fourth Amendment’s modern privacy-and-technology conscious jurisprudence recommends restraining Amazon’s New Neighborhood Watch. Law enforcement must obtain a warrant before requesting Ring footage.
* J.D., University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, 2022, and served as Senior Editor for Volume 24 of the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. Thank you to Professor Michael Levy for inspiring this Comment. Thank you to Professor David Rudovsky for the mentorship. Thank you to everyone at the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law for the time spent editing and providing feedback. This Comment is dedicated to my late grandfather, Buck, who told me to keep writing, and my grandmother, Dear, who reviewed every draft, from idea to publication.