Share a Ring video with police and your address goes with it

There is a line in Ring's help centre, under a heading marked Important Note, that almost nothing written about Ring and the police quotes. Here it is in full:

“When a Ring customer voluntarily shares video footage, their home address and the email address associated with their Ring account are automatically provided to the investigator with the video.”

Not the street. Not the neighbourhood. The address, and the email you log in with. The word doing the work in that sentence is automatically — it is not a second screen you agree to, it travels with the clip.

Does Ring share my footage with police automatically?

No — and this is worth being precise about, because it is the part people get wrong in both directions. Ring's own FAQ answers it flatly: your footage is never automatically shared with public safety agencies when they make a Community Request.

Nobody is quietly siphoning video off your doorbell. A request arrives, you look at it, and nothing leaves your account unless you choose a clip and send it. Ring also says no information is shared about who viewed a request or who declined it, so ignoring one is genuinely invisible.

One limit on that answer, since Ring's wording is specific: it is about Community Requests. It does not say anything about warrants or emergency disclosures, and neither does this article — we have not checked that, and it is a different question with a different answer. For a separate privacy trade-off, see what Ring's end-to-end encryption turns off.

So what actually gets sent when I share?

The clip, your home address, and your Ring account email. That is Ring's own description, and it appears on both the page written for customers and the page written for police.

We looked carefully at whether the disclosure was only on the agency-facing page, which would have been a far more serious finding. It is not. Ring tells both sides the same thing. The gap is not honesty — it is that the note sits below the fold of a support article, while “participation is voluntary” is the line that gets repeated everywhere else.

The sentence itself, on Ring's page

Quoting it is one thing. This is the paragraph as it appears in Ring's own help centre, read at the time shown.

What is Community Requests?

A way for verified public safety agencies to ask a map area for footage, run through Axon Evidence. An agency cannot simply post; the request has to carry specific things, and Ring lists them.

Each request must include details of the incident, the date and timeframe of the footage wanted, the investigator's contact details, a map of the area covered, and a unique investigation code. It is then moderated against Ring's community guidelines before it appears. Everyone inside the map area sees it in the Neighbors feed and gets a push notification and an email.

If you do share, the video goes into Axon Evidence — an evidence management system with an audit trail — rather than to an officer's inbox. That part is a genuine improvement on how this used to work.

Did Ring not stop letting police request video?

It stopped, then started again, and then cancelled a bigger version. The timeline is short and it explains why people are confused.

Ring retired its earlier police request tool in 2024 to some praise. In 2025 it introduced Community Requests with Axon, which is the system running today. A further integration with Flock Safety — a firm known for automated licence plate reading — was announced in October 2025 and cancelled in February 2026, Ring saying it “would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated”, after sustained public criticism.

How do I turn Community Requests off?

Four taps, and you keep the rest of your feed. These are Ring's own instructions rather than a version copied from elsewhere, which matters here because the steps published by several outlets no longer match the app.

Deselecting it stops the posts and their notifications. Other categories in the Neighbors feed are unaffected, and Ring notes you can adjust those in the same place.

What if I rent, or live alone?

Then the address disclosure is the part to think hardest about. Sharing a clip attaches your home address to a police investigation record — reasonable if you reported the incident, worth a pause if you merely happened to film it.

None of this is an argument against helping. It is an argument for knowing what leaves with the video, which is all this article is for. If you rent, there is a prior question about fitting a camera at all — what your lease actually says.

Is there a camera that avoids the question?

Yes: one that records to a card or a hub you own. There is no Neighbors feed, no company holding the footage, and nothing to request — if someone wants your video they have to ask you, the ordinary way.

That is the subject of which cameras work without a subscription. The trade is real and worth stating: you lose the neighbourhood feed, and you become responsible for your own backups.

Cameras with nothing to request

Specifications as published by each maker, read on 13 August 2026. Nothing here was tested and nothing is ranked — these record to storage you own, which is the point of the section above.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This costs you nothing and never affects what is covered here.

How this was checked

Every quotation and every step above was read on 13 August 2026 from Ring's own support pages — “Getting started with Community Requests” on Ring Help, and the “Community Requests” article in Neighbors Verified Help, which is the version written for public safety agencies. Both were read in full rather than in part, after a first partial read produced a wrong impression that the address disclosure appeared on only one of them.

The Flock Safety cancellation and Ring's quoted reason were reported in February 2026 and are not from Ring's own pages. No Ring account was used, no camera was purchased, and no Community Request was answered for this article.

Corrections

Ring changes these pages, and this one is dated so you can tell when it was last true. If something here no longer matches the app or the help centre, tell us and it is corrected with the new date noted.