Amazon scraps partnership with surveillance company after Super Bowl ad
backlash
[February 14, 2026] Amazon's
smart doorbell maker Ring has terminated a partnership with police
surveillance tech company Flock Safety.
The announcement follows a backlash that erupted after a 30-second Ring
ad that aired during the Super Bowl featuring a lost dog that is found
through a network of cameras, sparking fears of a dystopian surveillance
society.
But that feature, called Search Party, was not related to Flock. And
Ring's announcement doesn't cite the ad as a reason for the “joint
decision" for the cancellation.
Ring and Flock said last year they were planning on working together to
give Ring camera owners the option to share their video footage in
response to law enforcement requests made through a Ring feature known
as Community Requests.
“Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock
Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources
than anticipated,” Ring's statement said.
“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 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.
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A person pushes the doorbell on their Ring doorbell camera, July 16,
2019, in Wolcott, Conn. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill, File)
 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.”
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