Amazon Terminates Partnership with Surveillance Firm Following Super Bowl Ad Controversy

Ring, the smart doorbell company owned by Amazon, has ended its collaboration with Flock Safety, a firm specializing in police surveillance technology.

This decision comes in the wake of a major backlash against a 30-second Ring commercial aired during the Super Bowl. The ad, which depicted a lost dog being located through a network of cameras, stirred public concern over a potential surveillance society.

However, the controversial feature, known as Search Party, is not linked to Flock Safety. Moreover, Ring did not explicitly mention the advertisement as a factor in their mutual decision to call off the partnership.

Initially, Ring and Flock had announced plans to collaborate, allowing Ring camera users to share video footage in response to law enforcement requests via Ring’s Community Requests feature.

In a statement, Ring explained, “After a thorough evaluation, we concluded that the integration with Flock Safety would demand more time and resources than initially expected.”

“The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.”

Flock reiterated that it never received Ring customer videos — and that ending the planned integration was a mutual decision that allows both companies to “best serve their respective customers.” In a statement, Flock added that it “remains dedicated to supporting law enforcement agencies with tools that are fully configurable to local laws and policies.”

Flock is one of the nation’s biggest operators of automated license-plate reading systems. Its cameras are mounted in thousands of communities across the U.S., capturing and billions of photos of license plates each month. The company has faced public outcry amid the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement crackdown. But Flock maintains that it does not partner with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or contract out with any subagency of the Department of Homeland Security for direct access to its cameras. The company paused pilot programs with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations last year.

Still, Flock says it doesn’t own the data captured by its cameras, its customers do. So if a police department, for example, chooses to collaborate with a federal agency like ICE, “Flock has no ability to override that decision,” the company notes on its website.

Beyond the Flock partnership, Amazon has faced other surveillance concerns over its Ring doorbell cameras.

In the Super Bowl ad, a lost dog is found with Ring’s Search Party feature, which the company says can “reunite lost dogs with their families and track wildfires threatening your community.” The clip depicts the dog being tracked by cameras throughout a neighborhood using artificial intelligence.

Viewers took to social media to criticize it for being sinister, leaving many wondering if it would be used to track humans and saying they would turn the feature off.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focus on civil liberties related to digital technology, said this week that Americans should feel unsettled over the potential loss of privacy.

“Amazon Ring already integrates biometric identification, like face recognition, into its products via features like ‘Familiar Faces’ which depends on scanning the faces of those in sight of the camera and matching it against a list of pre-saved, pre-approved faces,” the Foundation wrote Tuesday. “It doesn’t take much to imagine Ring eventually combining these two features: face recognition and neighborhood searches.”

Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts also urged Amazon to discontinue its “Familiar Faces” technology.

In a published letter addressed to Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy, Markey wrote that the backlash to the Super Bowl commercial “confirmed public opposition to Ring’s constant monitoring and invasive image recognition algorithms.”