The Ring Neighbors Community Guidelines Prove That Ring Doesn’t Care About Your Safety

A s I’ve previously written in this blog, I live in a very dangerous high-crime area. The problem is exacerbated by incompetent law enforcement leadership in our area and the corrupt practices of the local state attorney, who refuses to prosecute crime. My neighbors and I live in an environment where we feel powerless and under constant threat. With the advent of crowdsourced safety resources like Ring Neighbors, Nextdoor, PulsePoint, and Citizen, we felt like we finally had a means of looking out for each other and working together to use these resources to keep ourselves safe. Sadly, it was too good to be true…as I discovered this week when one of those apps, Ring Neighbors, refused to allow me to post about an incident because of recent changes in their community guidelines. Those guidelines are not consistently enforced and are not well informed, rendering the Ring Neighbors App useless.

I should start be describing the incident that happened to me that resulted in my Ring Neighbors post that was not allowed on their app. I was working from home on a Friday afternoon when I heard someone on my front porch. I pulled up my camera feed and saw that a man I didn’t know had crossed my yard from out of sight and was standing at my front door. He banged on the door multiple times and looked in my living room window. This happened for five minutes. He never identified himself or rang the doorbell and was standing behind a column so that he couldn’t be seen from the street. My instincts honed by living in a rough neighborhood for most of my life told me that this was suspicious, so I sounded the alarm via the panic feature on my phone app. He immediately left across the yard in the direction he had come from before. I bookmarked the videos and posted one to Ring Neighbors asking if anyone knew this man or had a similar experience because it was strange and I wanted to inform my neighbors and maybe get an explanation for his behavior. Ring moderators flagged it and refused to post it.

I appealed this decision to Ring moderators and they pointed to their new guidelines. When I informed them that he was in fact trespassing and loitering under Florida law, they casually replied that they didn’t care about local laws and that they used the same standards for every jurisdiction. Naturally, I’m skeptical when a representative of a company tells me that they’re above the law, so I decided to look more deeply into this issue. What I found was troubling.

Ring’s new community guidelines are available here. We’ll focus on the trespassing/loitering part of them since that’s the part that prevented me from informing my neighbors of a possible threat.

The first section would be hilarious if it wasn’t so potentially dangerous for Ring Neighbor users — they’d prefer that you post pictures of “successful crimes,” which essentially negates the app’s usefulness for *crime prevention.*

The second section isn’t much better because it seems to be somewhat nebulous in its enforcement — although they list “touching windows and main house doors without permission” as being postable, my video wasn’t allowed despite the person in my video touching a door and window without my permission. Selective enforcement of rules makes rules pointless.

Let’s take a deeper look at their trespassing rules:

Trespassing can include a lot of different behaviors. However on Neighbors, one of the following 2 attributes must be present in posts about trespassing:

Individual(s) are on an unusual location of the property

Unusual location means: any deviation from the path between where someone accesses a property and the front door or other place where guests are typically received.

Individual(s) are on the property late at night or early in morning, meaning between 10pm-7am

The following behaviors are not considered trespassing:

Individual looking through, leaving, or taking trash

Individual hiding from someone or something

These definitions don’t actually match the statutory definitions of trespassing or loitering per Florida law. The “not trespassing” guidelines above include situations that are in fact trespassing and/or loitering.

(1) It is unlawful for any person to loiter or prowl in a place, at a time or in a manner not usual for law-abiding individuals, under circumstances that warrant a justifiable and reasonable alarm or immediate concern for the safety of persons or property in the vicinity.
(2) Among the circumstances which may be considered in determining whether such alarm or immediate concern is warranted is the fact that the person takes flight upon appearance of a law enforcement officer, refuses to identify himself or herself, or manifestly endeavors to conceal himself or herself or any object…. — FS 856.021

(1)(a) A person who, without being authorized, licensed, or invited, willfully enters upon or remains in any property other than a structure or conveyance:
1. As to which notice against entering or remaining is given, either by actual communication to the offender or by posting, fencing, or cultivation as described in s. 810.011; or
2. If the property is the unenclosed curtilage of a dwelling and the offender enters or remains with the intent to commit an offense thereon, other than the offense of trespass, commits the offense of trespass on property other than a structure or conveyance. — FS 810.09

The incident I attempted to report is classified as a misdemeanor, but Ring says that this doesn’t matter because *their* definitions trump the actual law.

Incidents that Ring deems irrelevant are actually fairly common. A quick search of Orlando Police Department calls for trespassing and loiter/prowling was enlightening. At the time of this writing, there were 381 such calls in the city of Orlando alone in just the past week and 1,503 in the past month. Since the start of 2023, that number is 3,487 calls, and there were a whopping 17,203 such calls in 2022.

Those numbers are only for loiter/prowl and trespassing. If I include calls for suspicious vehicles or persons, the totals become:

• 829 calls in the past week
• 3,322 calls in the past month
• 7,660 calls so far in 2023
• 37,295 calls in 2022

I decided to drill down the numbers a little more, so I consulted FDLE stats. In the past ten years, FDLE reports 21,771 arrests for loitering and trespassing in my home county of Orange, and these arrests account for around 11% of all convictions in the county during that decade.

This means that thousands of incidents that the police consider a crime don’t rise to that standard according to Ring, an alleged security company. As I’m editing this story for final publication on a lazy Sunday afternoon in March, there are currently 20 active calls of the types I mentioned above right now just between Orange County Sheriff and Orlando Police. Ring doesn’t care. Their guidelines say that they have a preference for posts showing crimes taking place, yet they’re blocking posts that do just that with loiter/prowl and trespassing posts.

Left: OPD calls described above. Right: A selection of similar calls in Tampa. Every dot and circle is a call that Ring can no longer be bothered to care about.

It gets worse, so stay with me. Some of the actions that Ring lists as being benign and not worth showing on their app are common activities used by criminals.

• Not being on an unusual part of the property — this displays a classic ignorance of criminal behavior that shows that the people writing these guidelines clearly learned everything they know about crime from watching TV. 34% of burglars enter through the front door, 23% use a first floor window, and 9% use the garage door to gain entry. That adds up to about 66% of burglaries happening because a burglar was milling about a part of your property that Ring doesn’t consider “unusual” or worth posting to their app. (The prowler in the video they refused to let me post was at the front door and next to two 1st floor windows.) Criminals have also begun walking near the front of homes with scanners trying to find car key fob frequencies, which they then clone to access and steal cars. Ring doesn’t seem to care about this disturbing new trend.
• Individuals being on the property between 10pm-7am — again, this guideline proves that Ring knows nothing about crime statistics, which is troubling for a security company. Most burglaries occur between 10am and 3 pm — times that Ring doesn’t consider worth posting to their app.
• Individuals looking through and taking trash — this is a fairly common tactic by identity thieves, who will dig through trash looking for personally identifying information from bills and other correspondence thrown away without being shredded. Burglars also look through the trash for discarded boxes of newly purchased valuables like televisions, computers, and video game consoles. This is so common that many local law enforcement agencies have special dumpsters available around Christmas to allow people to dispose of those boxes so that they don’t draw attention from burglars. Again, Ring ignores this in favor of their ridiculous guidelines.
• The guidelines also list driving slowly by a house, taking pictures, of your property, and looking in car windows as not being suspicious. While some county and city officials and utility workers might have a reason to be on your property and taking pictures, bad guys also do slow drive bys and take pictures when they’re casing an area. And car burglars often look in car windows to look for valuables before breaking into a car. Criminals will also frequently ring a doorbell to see if anyone is home before committing a crime.

These guidelines don’t seem to be enforced consistently. Just a day after my prowler post was banned from the app, someone in my area posted a video of an obvious law enforcement officer in full uniform and kit ringing their doorbell once and leaving. He was obviously a cop and wasn’t behaving suspiciously, nor was he in an “unusual part of the property” or there at an “unusual time” but *that* post was allowed through the censors. Why?

This post violates the perplexing guidelines but was allowed on the app. I asked why but have yet to receive a response.

Another example of Ring not consistently enforcing their community guidelines. These women aren’t on the property at an unusual time and aren’t engaging in what Ring considers “suspicious behavior.” Furthermore, Ring specifically states that videos of individuals taking a shortcut through an unfenced portion of a yard aren’t allowed, yet this post made it through moderation.

The day after the deputy post that was allowed on the app despite not being in accordance with the new guidelines, another post made it through moderation despite not conforming to the rules. A post about kids “looking into cars” was allowed, despite Ring’s rules specifically stating that looking into car windows didn’t meet the standards for posting. Once more, guidelines were not enforced consistently by the moderators.

I was also told that my post “didn’t have anything to do with crime or safety” yet there is a flood of posts about people seeing stray cats in their yard or seeing a stray Pomeranian walking down the street. Do those posts have anything to do with crime or safety? According to Ring’s language, no: “neighbors posts are intended to help the community stay informed about safety related incidents. While posts must relate to crime and safety, not every crime or every safety event can be posted.” As a test, I decided to flag two “stray pet” posts in the app as not being relevant to crime or safety — one was put back in my feed after review and the other one wasn’t. Again, there doesn’t seem to be any consistency to the enforcement of these rules.

Curious if others in my area had hit a similar wall while trying to post to the Neighbors app, I found a few other cases where my neighbors had their posts denied:

• A person was screaming, howling, growling, and shambling across people’s front yards between midnight and 4am. The post was denied despite this not being normal behavior and the incident taking place during a time that Ring’s guidelines determine is “unusual.”
• Unknown individuals were prowling along the fence lines of several houses late at night along a strip of county easement, between 1 and 2 am for several days. Each night, there were thefts and attempted break-ins, and neighbors heard them running away along the easement. This was during a massive string of car burglaries, thefts, and home burglaries at the time. Ring denied the post despite this clearly being suspicious behavior.

Ring seems to know this lack of consistency in moderation exists but doesn’t seem to care, posting videos on their social media channels that don’t conform to their own standards for their Neighbors app, as they did in this Twitter post.

These two men aren’t in an “unusual part of the property” “at an unusual time” and aren’t doing anything inherently suspicious according to Ring Neighbors’ community guidelines, yet Ring thought the post was worth promoting on their Twitter account to their over 70,000 followers.

I guess activity that I want to report for the safety of myself and my neighbors isn’t allowed, but that same type of content is just fine if it can be used to help Ring sell more products. This is a blatant double standard on Ring’s part and it has eroded my trust in them.

There’s an additional level of recklessness in these guidelines — local law enforcement agencies often skim through Ring Neighbors posts for various reasons. Sometimes they’re looking for videos that can help them solve a nearby crime, while other times a law enforcement agency’s intelligence unit goes through them looking for crime trends that are worth additional attention. Since Ring boundaries don’t follow municipal or county jurisdictional borders, this also allows the police to somewhat attenuate the problem of linkage blindness — the phenomenon where crimes committed by the same offenders across jurisdictional boundaries are often not linked by investigators because they don’t effectively share information with their peers at other agencies. Now that Ring is severely restricting posts, a lot of useful information that could help solve or prevent crimes is forever lost, and Ring…an alleged security company…doesn’t seem to care.

These rules also make people less likely to post content on the app for fear of the draconian rules blocking it. When people encounter this negative feedback long enough, they become less vigilant and less likely to care about strange activity in their area. Police will tell you that it’s often difficult to get people to come forward with information about a crime — shaming them and blocking them from doing so as Ring is doing only makes that problem much worse on a larger scale that transcends the use of their app.

The reactions of police and law abiding citizens to Ring’s rules aren’t the only ones that worry me. Criminals will notice the new rules as well, and that’ll be really bad for the rest of us. As a brand, Ring was justifiably feared by criminals — they knew that every doorbell and floodlight was a potential means of identifying them to local law enforcement and that having their picture plastered all over the neighborhood via Ring Neighbors would make it harder for them to operate in the area. Now that they can get away with so much more shady activity that won’t be allowed to be shared on the app, they’ll know that they’re much safer from scrutiny because Ring is protecting them from it.

I almost have to wonder if Ring is *hoping* that these new guidelines will cause an increase in crime…more crime means more fear, and more fear means more potential customers for a security company.

Digging a little deeper, I found that not only are these rules ill-conceived, Ring claims that they are a result of community feedback. From their website:

“In certain cases, we use community feedback to determine what incidents are no longer permitted because the community does not find them as relevant to local safety. For example, local ordinance violations pertaining to animal waste or posts about individuals that lack physical actions outlined in the “Reporting individual behavior section” resulted in negative feedback and persistent flags from the community.”

This might seem harmless or even egalitarian at first glance, but once again it is misinformed and potentially dangerous for reasons that might not seem obvious at first, so let me explain as someone who lives in a high crime area and who studies crime analytics.

Criminals are becoming more sophisticated in their use of technology. Sometimes this can be as complex as scanning for car key fob signals and cloning them to steal cars, but other times it is far more subtle. I’ve seen local gangs with huge Instagram followings or YouTube channels, and I’ve witnessed criminals leveraging crowdsourced safety apps like Ring Neighbors to their advantage as well. Since you don’t need to own a Ring product to install and use the app, criminals have been installing it and using it to find out what areas and houses have Ring equipment and what areas their cameras cover. They also use it to get a better idea of what neighborhoods and houses are more security conscious and use apps like Ring Neighbors to share information.

During a particularly massive surge in crime in my area a few years ago, my neighbors and I noticed something far more insidious — criminals were searching Nextdoor and Ring Neighbors for posts about their criminal activities and those of their accomplices, then reporting the content and getting it removed. This had become so frequent that during that period Ring Neighbors had become useless because the criminals had turned it against us. Ring is now using that tactic to inform their policies, essentially letting the criminals dictate what we, their potential victims, can post on an app that is supposed to help increase our security.

I’m also not buying into the suggestion that moderation was too burdensome, making these draconian rules necessary. Ring makes hundreds of millions a year in revenue and should consider spending more of it in areas like content moderation if that truly is an area where they’re lacking.

I can give specific examples of instances in my neighborhood when a post of camera footage that is now banned by Ring was essential for the security of myself and my neighbors.

A few years ago while I was out of town, I received a series of notifications on my phone that my front security camera had detected motion. Upon scrolling through my video, I saw that a strange man I didn’t know had been loitering all morning on my front porch, leaving and coming back several times. I reported the strange behavior and the police arrived quickly while he was still on my property. As the deputy began to question him, he ran. Multiple units, K9s, and a helicopter were all dispatched to find him and he was eventually caught. It turns out that he was a career criminal with multiple convictions for violence against women and had a pending case against his ex-girlfriend, who lived in the apartments down the road from my house. He had come to do her harm, but got scared when he saw earlier police activity down the street. He decided to hide on my porch until the police left and his ex came home. Under Ring Neighbors’ current guidelines, this activity was not worthy of reporting because he wasn’t in an unusual place at an unusual time, and their rules specifically forbid posting about someone hiding on your property. Sometimes (many times, actually) things that Ring now considers innocent behavior is actually sinister. Their guidelines could have gotten someone killed in this case.

Another local example was of a man who was casing houses to rob. He began innocently looking around houses (again, not in an unusual place or at an unusual time, so not relevant according to Ring). After he had become comfortable with this activity, he started kicking down doors and robbing people. One of those doors was that of my elderly next door neighbor. Fortunately she’s ok (she has a non-Ring security system that went off, scaring the burglar away).

The suspect kicking down a door. Non-reportable behavior quickly escalated to reportable behavior, but by then it was far too late. This is on Ring.

That burglar wasn’t the only time that activity now banned by Ring Neighbors led to something more sinister. Last year, residents of a nearby apartment complex noticed a repeat visitor exhibiting strange behavior (behavior that is not not reportable on Ring Neighbors anymore due to their new guidelines) and through sharing posts about him learned that he was a drug dealer. Eventually he menaced some of the residents by drawing a knife, threatening them on camera, and attempting to pry out their Ring peephole cameras. Behavior that seems innocuous quickly escalated, and under the new Ring guidelines, neighbors wouldn’t have been aware of this threat before it became obvious.

The knife wielding drug dealer caught on camera. Before this incident, his behaviors didn’t reach a level where they would be allowed to be reported on the Neighbors app under the current guidelines.

As a final example, last year a strange man came to my door, banged on it for a while, then started circling my house and looking in the windows. Since I only had footage of him ringing the doorbell and banging on the door, under the current guidelines I would not be allowed to post the incident. However, this was before the stupid rules change and I posted to Ring Neighbors. The man turned out to not be sinister — he was the mentally challenged son of someone down the street. He had gotten away from his parents and they couldn’t find him. After sharing the video, his mother got in touch with me, I shared what I knew, and he was found safely. This sort of exchange is no longer possible now that Ring has changed the rules.

I was an enthusiastic customer of Ring and recommended them for years to friends, family, and colleagues. I have lost all faith in them after this disastrous change to the guidelines for posting to their Neighbors app. I no longer believe that our safety is their concern and that they have ceased to be a relevant and reliable home security company. Sadly, I’ll be swapping my Ring equipment for a competitor and cancelling my subscription. This might seem vociferous on my part, but when you live in a neighborhood as dangerous as mine you can’t afford to take any chances. In a time when our local law enforcement leadership isn’t reliable and the criminal justice system is refusing to prosecute criminals, Ring’s lax attitude for our safety is nothing less than a betrayal.

What can Ring do to fix this issue? It’s simple — allow a broader range of posts like what used to be allowed before these ridiculous new guidelines came into effect, and better train their moderators. People with actual law enforcement, security, and crime prevention training and experience should be informing the policies of a safety company, but that is clearly not the case here. At most, perhaps a community moderation standard (like Twitter has with their community notes feature) might ease the moderation burden somewhat.

At this point, I’d encourage users to contact Ring and post about them on social media asking them to reconsider these guidelines. Until Ring does, it might be best to stop using the app, and if you’re considering purchasing their products and services, reconsider. If they notice a drop in app usage and a hit in their profits along with a flood of complaints, they might take notice and reconsider their stance. Since the app will be far less useful to law enforcement, I’d also encourage law enforcement agencies to drop their partnerships with Ring until this issue is addressed.

Above all, I hope everyone who is reading this stays safe and secure despite Ring’s negligent disregard for your wellbeing.

Update: A day after publishing this story, the man from the incident that inspired this post came back. This time he was more aggressive, circling around the back of my house peering in windows and banging on some of them. He then came back to the front of my house and started aggressively pounding on my window while shouting incoherent threats at me. I had to call 911. I’m shaken but fortunately I’m safe now, but Ring didn’t allow me to post about the activity last week that turned out to become a more serious threat just three days later. This just illustrates my point that Ring’s guidelines for posting to Neighbors are foolish and ill-conceived. I truly hope they reconsider them.