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Dave Limp, of Amazon, during a public presentation in September 2018 in Seattle. Grant HINDSLEY / AFP

The e-commerce giant is joining forces with the American police more and more to fight crime, even if it raises the fear of increasingly massive surveillance and a decline in individual freedoms. A final example: Amazon's ring-connected ringworm company announced this week that it has partnered with more than 400 police agencies in the United States.

With our correspondent in San Francisco, Éric de Salve

It's an intelligent video doorbell that allows you to remotely control your door from your phone.

Sold for $ 100, it works like a traditional videophone: when someone rings the door, it is displayed on video on the phone of the owner of the house who can then see and talk to him, even if he is not not at home.

But this seemingly practical and harmless technology has been "Big Brother" since Ring, the California company that produces it, has announced a partnership with more than 400 police departments.

A partnership that runs throughout the United States, and allows these policies, with the agreement of the owner, to access the images recorded on their doorstep by Ring Bell cameras as part of an investigation .

The stated objective is obviously to better fight against crime. But according to critics, this association between Amazon, owner of Ring, and US police, is a threat to privacy and a factor of safe paranoia.

" It's a vast network of video surveillance that gives Amazon and the police access to the cameras of everyone's doorsteps ," worries the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

California: Senators will be voting on AB 1215: a bill to prohibit the use of face recognition, or other forms of biometric surveillance technology, on police body cameras.
Today is an important day to ask for protection and support this measure: https://t.co/qbeZXwmPGS pic.twitter.com/hAx9ayjSSH

EFF (@EFF) August 30, 2019

And especially since Amazon already collaborates with several US police since 2017, selling them facial recognition software to identify the perpetrators of crimes or offenses from video surveillance images.

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