SHAREHOLDERPROPOSALS them. Ring designed Neighbors to protect user privacy and to keep users in control of what information, if any, they wanttoshare. Users can choose to upload videos, photos, or text-based posts to Neighbors to publicly share crime and safety-related information with their communities. They can also choose not to do that. With Neighbors, public safety agencies can only view publicly available content on Neighbors or videos that a user explicitly and voluntarily chooses to sharewithapublicsafetyagencyaspartofanactiveinvestigation.Policeandotherpublicsafetyofficialsdonothaveaccess to users’ devices, device locations, video recordings, or personal information when using Neighbors unless a user chooses to share. Ring never provides police and other public safety officials access to device livestreams. • Audit with the NYU Policing Project. In 2021, Ring completed a civil rights and civil liberties audit with the Policing Project at New York University School of Law. The audit represented nearly two years of work and was focused on potential racial justice, civil rights, civil liberties, and democratic accountability issues relating to law enforcement’s use of Neighbors andRing’s practices regarding law enforcement requests for information. As part of the audit, the Policing Project presented Ring with a detailed set of recommendations. During the course of the audit, Ring implemented over one hundredchangestoitsproducts, policies, and legal processes. For example, public safety agencies are now only able to request information or video from their communities through a new, publicly viewable post category on Neighbors called Request for Assistance. Public safety agencies can use these posts to notify residents of an incident and ask their communities for help related to an investigation. The full text of all Request for Assistance posts are publicly viewable in theNeighborsfeed,andloggedontheagency’spublicprofile.Thisway,anyoneinterestedinknowingmoreabouthowan agency is using Request for Assistance posts can simply visit the agency’s profile and see the post history. Request for Assistancepostsareopt-in;nothingissharedwithanyagencyunlessauseractivelychoosestodoso.Userscanalsoremove Request for Assistance posts from their feed. Public safety agencies are not able to see how many users viewed a Request for Assistance post or which users removed those posts from their feed.16 This new post category, along with other changes such as adding community resources like mental health services to the Neighbors App, were cited by the Policing Project as steps Ring has taken to safeguard against improper use and address potential harms. • Enforce Strict Limitations on Requests for Video Recordings. Ring also imposes strict limitations on public safety agencies whentheycreate a Request for Assistance post. For example, Ring’s policy expressly prohibits agencies from creating a RequestforAssistance post for lawful activities, such as protests, and the agencies must provide an active case or incident numberrelated to a specific crime or safety incident before a Request for Assistance post can be viewed on user’s feeds. Additional safeguards include: restricting local public safety agencies to only asking for videos recorded during a specified 12hourperiod, such as noon to midnight, in a given day; requiring a minimum 0.025 square mile and maximum 0.5 square mile (approximately 10 city blocks) geographic region each time a public safety official asks for assistance to avoid targeting specific residents or broad geographic requests; prohibiting public safety officials from asking for video recordings more than 45 days after the incident under investigation took place; and requiring that public safety officials submit their request for assistance individually, not “batched.” Ring moderates every post submitted before the post becomesavailable for viewing on Ring users’ feeds to make sure it follows our guidelines, and Ring does not allow for openrequests for footage. • Require Customer Agreement to Community Guidelines. Ring is committed to upholding a standard of trust and civility and does not tolerate racial profiling, hate speech, and other forms of profiling or prejudice on Neighbors. Ring requires all Neighbors users to agree to strict community guidelines, which prohibit racial profiling, hate speech, and other forms of discrimination. To monitor compliance with these standards, Ring also invests heavily in manual and automated content moderation.Ringhasadedicatedgroupofteammembers,whoaretrainedregardingcriticalandtimelyissues,proactively moderating Neighbors content and working to remove prohibited content prior to posting publicly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When posts are denied, an email is sent to the Neighbors user who submitted the post to inform them of the reason, reinforcing our guidelines and helping users make responsible decisions. In addition, Neighbors users can flag incorrect or inappropriate content directly in the App. The moderation team will remove the flagged content if they determine that the content violates community guidelines. Ring also engaged the Center for Democracy and Technology (the “CDT”) to provide counsel and help strengthen its moderation practices, and the CDT contributed to updates to the Neighbors App and community guidelines in 2021. • Deliver on Privacy and Security Commitment. Ring continues to innovate and identify new ways to help uphold customer privacy and security and give users even more control over their devices and personal information. For example, Ring launched end-to-end encryption in early 2021, a feature that allows customers to further secure their videos with anadditional virtual lock, which can only be unlocked by a key that is stored on the customer’s enrolled mobile device, designed so that only the customer can decrypt and view recordings on their enrolled device. 16 For more information on the Policing Project’s civil rights and civil liberties audit, see https://www.policingproject.org/ring. 36
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