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![[Graphic] Shows Black Lives Matter protestor behind facial recognition with text that reads "This Black Friday, Don't Let Amazon Ship Police Surveillance to Our Doors."](https://gallery.mailchimp.com/d9dc62939f7109284a2735703/images/cc2377d8-d254-47f5-b5ec-336e238ee159.png)
Dear Friend,
As Amazon rakes in its massive annual Black Friday profits, here’s one deal you may not see advertised: over 500 contracts with law enforcement agencies that allow police access to Amazon’s Ring network.1
Amazon’s reputation as a dependable and reliable company is intrinsically connected to the company’s ruthless and persistent collection of our personal data, and through campaigns like #NoTechforIce, we’ve learned how much Amazon stands to gain from the surveillance of Black & brown people.2 This Black Friday, we’re demanding Amazon put an end to its deals with the surveillance state. Will you join us?
Don’t let Amazon ship police surveillance to our doors. Click here to take action!
Each day this week, the newly-launched Athena coalition is holding online actions to expose and demand accountability for the harms that Amazon’s corporate empire attempts to hide from its consumers. Today, MediaJustice is using Black Friday to expose how Amazon has monetized state surveillance, and the threat this poses to communities of color. Ring’s backdoor deals offer police unprecedented access to data recorded by its video doorbell devices, and platforms like its Nextdoor app stoke false hysteria over “rising crime,” effectively turning every door with a Ring device into a cop. Through it all, Black people pay the ultimate price.3
For instance, facial recognition technology is already being used by local police to monitor, capture, and store data on countless Black Detroiters through its Project Green Light, all without their knowledge or consent. Ring’s hundreds of partnerships expand police surveillance capacity nationwide, and the company has even been caught coaching police departments in requesting data from Ring users without a warrant.4 With Ring, Detroit police are gifted a crucial ingredient necessary for its facial recognition system: a database of our faces.
However, community groups are fighting back against high tech surveillance powered by corporate greed. Amazon has already come under fire for marketing its facial recognition products directly to law enforcement around the country, despite numerous studies proving this technology is racist.5 Meanwhile, criminalizing law enforcement labels like the FBI’s “Black Identity Extremist” designation threaten to make Black activists even further vulnerable as this technology spreads.6 This is not the first time that Amazon has been caught equipping state surveillance for profit, but this is one Black Friday deal that we can bring to an end.
Join us in telling Amazon to stop profiting from racist police surveillance.
MediaJustice is building a movement to keep Black & brown communities free from surveillance and offer alternatives that will actually keep us safe. Resistance against Amazon is growing by the day, and communities across the country are taking action. We know that we can strengthen this fight with your investment in grassroots Black-led, abolitionist groups fighting to end the criminalization of our people and the threat of high-tech policing on the ground. As you continue your Black Friday shopping, please consider adding a donation to our friends at Detroit Community Technology Project, the Greenlight Black Futures Coalition, and No New Jails NYC to your list.
In Solidarity,
Myaisha and the rest of Team #MediaJustice
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Sources:
[1] Business Insider, “Use this map to see if your local police department has access to Amazon Ring's unofficial surveillance network of video doorbells”
[2] #NoTechForIce Campaign Site
[3] Vice, “Amazon’s Home Security Company Is Turning Everyone Into Cops”
[4] Forbes, “Here’s How Amazon’s Ring Doorbell Police Partnership Affects You”
[5] MIT News, “Study finds gender and skin-type bias in commercial artificial-intelligence systems”
[6] MediaJustice, #ProtectBlackDissent Campaign Site
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