Amazon was caught red-handed, handing over Ring doorbell footage to law enforcement agencies without user permission, subpoenas, warrants, without any of the traditional legal controls which prevent liberal disclosure of non-public data to law enforcement. This disclosure was set to further ignite ongoing debates about privacy and civil liberties in relation to the tech giant’s video-sharing agreements with police departments nationwide.

Amazon is giving the police video taken by private homeowners’ Amazon Ring doorbells not only without a warrant, not only without the consent of the homeowner, but without even the knowledge of the homeowner! And what Amazon has to say about the program is stunning. The Internet Patrol obtained the letter that Amazon sent to Senator Markey in response to Markey’s alarmed request to Amazon for disclosure, and what Amazon has disclosed is, frankly, frightening. Amazon’s Ring Neighbors app includes a ‘Neighbors Public Safety Service’ (NPSS) component, and through that portal a total of 2,161 law enforcement agencies have joined the Ring Neighbor app (so far), as have 455 fire departments. You can think of the Ring Neighbor app as being like Nextdoor, but specifically for Ring Doorbell owners. And, increasingly, the police. However unlike Nextdoor, Amazon is handing over private homeowners’ videos to the police without a warrant, and they’ve done it nearly a dozen times in the first half of 2022 alone. And they clearly fully intend to keep doing it.

Amazon Sidewalk automatically uses a bit of your wireless network to create a mesh network with nearby Alexa and Ring devices. Amazon is enabling it automatically for all devices (old and new), so you have to disable it if you won’t want your neighbors’ Amazon devices using your wireless network.

Apparently some folks in the UK have bigger problems than breaking up with the EU on their minds. UK ice cream maker Cornetto has come up with Netflix “commitment rings”, to keep partners from binge watching their favourite shows unless they are together, so that one can’t commit Netflix adultery on the other. Yes, really. Because, says Cornetto, “Love should last longer than one season.”

Dozens of high school and middle school students in Cañon City, Colorado are facing the possibility of felony child pornography charges (and having to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives) in one of the largest underage sexting scandals to date.