Ring Sharing my personal information with 3rd parties - Statement required

Ring Inc
Ring Inc. provides security products. The Company offers alarms, video doorbells, security systems, cameras, and lighting products. Ring serves customers worldwide.

ADDRESS
1523 26th Street Santa Monica, CA 90404 United States
PHONE
1-310-929-7085

The problem ring has is that they havent upheld principle 1 of the GDPR.

I act as a Data Protection Officer. I know the law about data sharing.

I was unaware of any sharing with the evil Facebook corp (i don’t have an account and nor should you) or anyone else.

I will be requesting a DSAR in the morning and so should you if you live in the EU. As part of the DSAR Ring will be forced to disclose who they share data with.

I am sick and tired of big US corps thinking they can use our data under any excuse.

If you are a lawyer and want to test Article 82 of the GDPR then contact me.

For anyone reading this - ask for a Subject Access Request under Article 15 of the GDPR and article 45 (chapter 3) of the UKs Data Protection Act 2018. From this you will see what they have on us and whom they have shared it with.

You should also consider contacting your countries DPA if they give you the cold shoulder.

This screams class action and if so then the UK may be a good place to start.

Dear Ring,

We BUY your product. We are not THE product.

And you’re wasting my time. A canned response is useless, as the question is being dodged. You should be able to understand that. I am not attempting to harass anyone. It’s an honest question. So I suggest you stop harassing customers.

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@Jennifer,

I am still awaiting a reply. I understand that you as community manager may not have the authority to do so, but please pass this up the chain.

I understand sharing data for analytics but Facebook?! - From all the places where your data could go, that’s probably one of the largest threats for anybody’s privacy.

Max.

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I’d like to opt-out of ANY and ALL sharing of my personal information. Please, don’t respond with your typical form letter, regarding how much “Ring” cares about my privacy. Prove it, by allowing any customer to opt-out. It’s simple, attached is an example of how Verizon allows their customers to do so.

We’d like to opt out of a bunch of the same posts posted by the same person. Just post once, you don’t need to spam the forum.

You have got to be kidding. After all the things you post? That’s funny.

Which button do I press to opt you out? In other words, how do one go about giving Ring (and affiliated companies) your private information instead of mine?

I’d like to opt-out of ANY and ALL sharing of my personal information. Please, don’t respond with your typical form letter, regarding how much “Ring” cares about my privacy. Prove it, by allowing any customer to opt-out. It’s simple, attached is an example of how Verizon allows their customers to do so.

Wow, guess there’s children on here.

Hi neighbors,

First and foremost, we want to remind you that at Ring, privacy is foundational - and guides every decision we make.

Like many companies, Ring uses third-party service providers to understand the use of our mobile app, which helps us improve features, optimize your customer experience, and evaluate the effectiveness of our marketing. We care deeply about providing our neighbors with the best possible experience and leverage these tools to help us do so.

We want to ensure you that these service providers’ use of the data provided is contractually limited to appropriate purposes, such as performing these services on our behalf, and not for other purposes. Ring is not in the business of selling customer information.

For more information, please reference our Privacy Notice on Ring.com/privacy.

Please also review our Community Guidelines to ensure we are making the Community the best it can be for all neighbors.

Thanks,

Marley

Marley,

You are the second person to completely avoid making a statement answering the questions in my original post. Only after receiving a firm “Yes! We are sending your data to FACEBOOK” we can continue having a discussion.

Please, enough with the impotent form letters–they mean nothing! Not to the 1st year law student that wrote it, and certainly not to paying customers. I want privacy, not patrinization! Either tell me how to opt-out of ANY and ALL information sharing. Or, tell me it’s not possible and I will cancel my subscription.

1 Like

Some seem to be getting a bit carried away here.

You cannot withdraw consent if consent isn’t being used as a legal basis to process.

I also can’t help and nor can RIng, if you are US based and resident in a state that has poor data protection law (federal law is woeful - that is a given) . That isn’t Rings fault, it’s yours, the voter. You can’t blame them for your government etc.

Here in the more enlightened EU we have strong DP laws and it is these laws I believe that Ring have broken. My DSAR is due within the next week and I will post back with findings. My feeling is that they won’t fulfil the DSAR correctly. They may even offer me free stuff to make me go away. We will see.

@tinrobot I appreciate your nuanced reply. However, the premise of your argument suggests that companies only respond to legal pressure–I disagree. If enough customers, or in this day & age, the right social media “influencers” apply sufficient pressure, Ring will acquiesce to the demands of their customers. Would laws help? Sure. However, money talks much, much louder. If somehow I could compel thousands of customers to threaten to cancel their contracts, trust me, Ring would change their policy by next Tuesday. I’m going to do what I can.

I agree to a degree - inn the EU the greatest threat to businesses flouting DP law isn’t regulatory action but reputational damage.

However, unless you have a regulatory framework the consumer is fighting a losing battle. Companies “greenwash” their environmental efforts and they are doing the same ith DP issues - just look at the glib replies from Ring on this forum. Our data is being misused by corporations and governments to such an extent that sometimes I feel we have already lost. The big problem is that most people don’t care and in many cases will sacrifice privacy for convenience.

Has Facebook changed since it was caught red handed misusing data? No, because the business model is fundamentally wrong and it is headed by a freak that fundamentally doesn’t believe in data privacy. Millions still use facebook. Go figure.

Ring should be held to account but due to the type of product they sell it is likely that action based on regulatory constraints is likely to be more of a stick than a few posts on the sites “community” pages.

I am a California resident, at least for now. California passed a law, much like the EUs GPDR laws, that went into effect on January 2020.

As provided by the new law I am requesting the following.

I also would like to know what personal information is collected about me.

How I can access it and if it is shared and if so with whome, including those needed for the service.

I would like a response in a resonable amount of time from Ring and will be making the request to them directly.

I know Ring says they do not sell our information, but I will state for the record, that I do not give the them the right to sell any of my information.

I will be making a formal request to Ring as soon as I can find a way of doing so.

mfowler I share your concern. I called Ring last week, requested to speak with a manager to demand that I opt out of any and all information sharing. Still have not received a call back. When I followed-up, they said my case is being reviewed by Ring legal staff. I plan to call again on Friday (2/21). I’ll keep you posted.

I too have requested several times for details as to what private data is being shared with whom; for what purpose (in particular Facebook and Google); and how I can opt out; etc. All the things that any concientious consumer would want to know… I only get the standard responses that we’ve all seen on the this board.

I did finally get an email reply that told me that you can request a

“copy of your personal data, or deletion of your personal account online at www.ring.com and go to: https://ring.com/account/datarequests.”

I made a request and received an email that it takes 30 days to process the request.

Here’s an interesting article by the New York Times about Ring and suggestions as to how to protect yourself to the extent that you can.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/technology/personaltech/ring-doorbell-camera-spying.html

Also per the article:

“In response to how Ring’s apps were using invisible trackers to send data to third-party marketing and analytics firms, the company said it was ‘temporarily pausing the use of most third-party analytics services in the Ring apps and website’ while it worked on tools for people to opt out of this type of data sharing.”

However, when I ran the Fyde app, it looks to me as if the Ring app is still collecting all the third party data that the EFF identified…

meme–thanks so much, this is good. I’ll submit the request. Why on earth it would take 30 days, I’ll never know. Considering, they can activate a new customer account in a matter of seconds, literally.

So, I can request a copy of my personal information, or delete my data (which means close the account). What I’d like, is a simple way to just opt-out of information sharing. Attached is a form which Verizon provides for doing so with their system. Ring needs to do the same.