Amazon’s Ring cancelled its partnership with police surveillance company Flock Safety on February 13. The companies announced the integration four months earlier in October 2025. Ring aired a Super Bowl ad three days before the cancellation showing how neighborhood doorbell cameras could track lost pets.
Ring’s 30-second commercial demonstrated how AI activates multiple cameras across a neighborhood to locate missing dogs. Senator Ed Markey called the technology “dystopian” in a February 11 letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. The Massachusetts Democrat wrote that Amazon “inadvertently revealed the serious privacy and civil liberties risks” of AI-enabled image recognition.
Ring rolled out facial recognition technology in December 2025. The Familiar Faces feature catalogs up to 50 people and identifies them by name when they approach Ring cameras. Amazon told Markey in October 2025 that privacy protections “only apply to device owners and not members of the public.”
Flock Safety operates 40,000 automated license plate readers across 5,000 U.S. communities. The company maintains it has no relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Federal agencies cannot directly access Flock’s systems or data, according to company statements.
404 Media obtained police network audit logs in May 2025. Local and state police performed more than 4,000 searches of Flock’s nationwide camera network between June 2024 and May 2025. Officers listed reasons as “immigration,” “ICE,” or “ICE WARRANT” in search logs.
Illinois law prohibits using license plate reader data for immigration enforcement. Flock’s internal audit found multiple agencies conducted searches for impermissible reasons under Illinois law. The company revoked access to Illinois data from 47 agencies in May 2025.
Virginia law enforcement conducted nearly 3,000 immigration-related searches on Flock’s network over 12 months. In Washington State, U.S. Border Patrol had access to license plate data from at least 10 local agencies that never authorized federal sharing. Officers across dozens of states acted on informal requests from federal agents.
Ring’s Community Requests feature allows law enforcement to request doorbell footage from users in specific geographic areas. A third-party partner handles requests and maintains evidence chain of custody. Flock was announced as the second partner in October 2025.
Axon Evidence remains Ring’s active partner. Axon processes all Community Requests submissions and delivers footage to requesting agencies. Ring shares the user’s home address and email with public safety agencies when footage is submitted.
Axon maintains contracts with the Department of Homeland Security. Ring spokesperson Emma Daniels told CNN federal agencies including ICE are not permitted to submit Community Requests. Flock faced the same restriction.
The Federal Trade Commission ordered Ring to pay $5.8 million in May 2023. The agency found Ring gave employees and contractors “dangerously overbroad access” to customers’ private videos. One Ring employee viewed thousands of videos from 81 female users’ bathroom and bedroom cameras between June and August 2017.
More than 55,000 customers had accounts compromised through hacking between January 2019 and March 2020. The FTC required Ring to delete all videos used for research without consent. Ring must maintain a 20-year data security program restricting human review of customer videos.
Both companies framed the partnership cancellation as mutual. Ring stated the integration “would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated.” Neither company referenced the Super Bowl backlash or Markey’s letter.
Ring’s Search Party feature promoted in the Super Bowl ad remains active. The technology activates multiple Ring devices across a neighborhood when someone reports a lost pet. The feature is enabled by default.
Ring estimates 27% of American households use doorbell cameras. Flock Safety supports close to one million arrests annually. Neither company’s surveillance infrastructure disappeared with the partnership cancellation.
The cancelled integration would have formalized local police sharing Ring footage with federal agencies through partnerships claiming to prevent direct federal access. Ring’s Super Bowl ad demonstrated how the surveillance network operates. Americans objected to seeing how it works.
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