Amazon is using footage of an alleged thief to promote its Ring doorbells on social media

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Amazon’s Ring is under fire for a recent Facebook post they published. Ring showed footage of a suspected theft attempt in California as a sponsored video on Facebook.

The footage was captured on the doorbell camera and was shared via the Ring’s Neighbors app. The sponsored post asks anyone with knowledge regarding the suspect to contact the local Mountain View Police Department.

Apparently, this is legal, but it definitely isn’t cool

The video states “Mountain View and vicinity: do you recognize this woman?” In the video, we can see a woman attempting to open a locked car, with the description of the video stating,

On May 22, this woman was caught on camera breaking into a vehicle at a Mountain View home near Castro St and Miramonte Ave … please share this post, so we can all stay alert.

The video has had over 14,000 views and had been shared over 100 times

“Alerts are created using publicly posted content from the Neighbors app that has a verified police report case number,” the spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement last Friday. “We get the explicit consent of the Ring customer before the content is posted, and utilize sponsored, geotargeted posts to limit the content to relevant communities.”

READ MORE: Ring is giving your camera footage to police without a warrant

Now the main issue in all of this is the legality of Ring using someone’s face who has been suspected of a crime by their ‘customers’ without consent. Even though Ring states that they have done nothing wrong, people on the internet don’t share the same opinion. Read more here.

What do you think? Is Ring in the right? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Murtaza Islam

Murtaza is a Computer Science student who takes immense interest in mobile technology. He believes the future of computing lies in smartphones because ARM architecture will eventually take over. He also loves to tinker with ROMs and kernels keeping up with the latest in smartphones.