Amazon’s plan to turn Ring doorbells into a neighborhood-wide surveillance system was roundly denounced as dystopian even when it was just searching for lost dogs.
The company does at least seem to have learned from the privacy backlash, announcing that it has now abandoned plans for a partnership with police …
Amazon had originally announced a partnership with Flock Safety, a company specializing in automated license plate recognition and other forms of video surveillance. The deal would have allowed police to send requests for doorbell video footage to Ring owners.
The company claims that it has now abandoned this plan because it would require “more time and resources than anticipated.”
In October 2025, Ring and Flock Safety announced our intention to work together on an integration with Community Requests. Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration.
The far more likely reality is that the company abandoned its plan after the backlash it experienced when it ran a Super Bowl ad promoting the Ring Search Party feature to help find lost dogs.
Against a backdrop of nationwide protests against ICE operations, viewers quickly pointed out that this laid the groundwork for the feature being tweaked to work against human faces rather than dogs.
It does not take an imagination of any sort to envision this being tweaked to work against suspected criminals, undocumented immigrants, or others deemed ‘suspicious’ by people in the neighborhood. Many of these use cases are how Ring has been used by people on its dystopian “Neighbors” app for years.
ICE has reportedly been using Flock’s license plate database for immigration-related searches.
Image: 9to5Mac/Amazon/Rawpixel. Via Engadget.
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