Ring is backing away from its planned partnership with surveillance tech company Flock Safety just days after its Super Bowl ad sparked backlash online.
The Amazon-owned video doorbell company announced Thursday that it has canceled a planned Flock integration into Ring’s Community Requests program. The initiative allows users to voluntarily share video footage when requested by police working on active investigations, with the footage being handled by a third party like Flock Safety.
The controversy began during this year’s Super Bowl, when Ring aired a commercial promoting its AI-powered “Search Party” feature, which uses Ring cameras to help find lost pets. While that sounds like a program that no one would argue is harmful to society, it demonstrated to the world that Amazon has gradually been building a massive private surveillance state that could be weaponized with the flick of a switch. The fact that the tech industry has been eager to work with ICE at a time when the public broadly sees the agency’s foot soldiers as lawless thugs has not done Amazon any favors. Suddenly, Ring customers were disabling, destroying, and selling their home surveillance setups.
Credit narrative intelligence firm Peak Metrics monitored online conversations about Super Bowl ads in the days following the game and found that sentiment around Ring’s promotion leaned negative. According to the company, 17% of brand-relevant conversations about Ring included boycott or cancellation language.
Even Sen. Ed Markey weighed in, sending an open letter to Amazon on Wednesday calling the technology “creepy.”
“As many viewers quickly and correctly realized, this technology could easily be used to surveil and identify humans. In fact, last year Amazon rolled out facial recognition technology (FRT) in its Ring doorbells, creating serious privacy and civil liberties risks,” wrote Sen. Markey.
Markey previously called on Ring last October to abandon the rollout of its Familiar Faces feature, which alerts users when known visitors arrive at their homes.
But this time, much of the backlash zeroed in on Ring’s previously announced partnership with Flock Safety, a company that makes license plate readers used by law enforcement agencies across the country.
The planned integration would have tied Flock Safety into Ring’s Community Requests program. Unlike Ring’s earlier Request for Assistance program, which allowed police to request footage directly from users without a warrant, Community Requests allows law enforcement to work through a third-party evidence management system. Ring still currently works with the taser and body camera maker Axon.
Critics have raised concerns about Flock Safety’s role in broader law enforcement surveillance. Reports have found that some police departments have used Flock Safety license plate data to assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.
Flock Safety wrote in a blog post last month that it does not work with ICE and that the agency does not have direct access to its cameras or data.
Still, the scrutiny appears to have been enough to derail the partnership before it even officially launched.
“Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” Ring said in a press release. “As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration.”
The company emphasized that the integration never launched and that no videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.
“We believe this decision allows both companies to best serve their respective customers and communities,” Flock Safety wrote in its own update.
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