Weren’t there regular scandals about local law enforcement regularly accessing Ring footage without the owner’s agreement or knowledge? Ring absolutely is a surveillance tool that can be used without oversight. See here for example: https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/corporate/amazon-ri...
All access required user consent, other than a dozen very limited examples that were discovered in which Ring employees provided footage without user consent or a court order (which is negligible in the grand scheme of things). So no, Ring has not been abused by the police as much as Flock.
There are precedents with Ring being very cozy with police departments, e.g.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/police-can-get-y...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/amazon-ring-stop...
And many more over the years (all the way until February of this year, when they cancelled a deal with Flock). Amazon is not a company to trust.
It's not possible to use Ring for mass surveillance with as little effort as Flock supports.
> No single Flock camera can do that
What does that matter? Flock allows government agencies to enter a license plate number and find all instances of that vehicle across all participating customers. This is not technically possible with Ring.
> this can be used to track people
Prove it. Find one example. I can find hundreds of examples for Flock.
Both articles you linked to prove my point - access to footage was accessed by government agencies with consent from users, in which case a warrant was not needed. Read more than the misleading headlines and you would have figured that out for yourself, god forbid you let facts get in away of your bias. There were an small number of incidents in which Ring used an emergency situation to share 11 instances of footage without a warrant, which isn't even worth talking about since they've since closed that hole.
> Amazon is not a company to trust.
This has nothing to do with trusting Amazon and everything to do with false equivalence.