Amazon's smart doorbell unit Ring has officially ended its planned partnership with police surveillance tech company Flock Safety following controversy over a recent Super Bowl ad.
The 30-second commercial featured a lost dog being tracked using Ring's "Search Party" feature, raising public concerns about potential overreach in neighborhood surveillance.
Ring and Flock had initially planned to integrate their systems so Ring owners could voluntarily share video footage with law enforcement through Ring's "Community Requests" service.
However, the integration never 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 statement.
The company also clarified that "no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety."
Flock confirmed the decision was mutual, stating that ending the partnership allows both companies to "best serve their respective customers."
The company emphasized that it never received any Ring videos and that its tools remain fully configurable to local laws and policies.
Flock founder Jamie Siminoff told CBS News, "The backlash has been a little bit around this concept of, 'Is this surveillance?' It's actually not. It's allowing your camera to be an intelligent assistant for you and then allowing you to be a great neighbor."
🚨 #Amazon's #Ring is ending its partnership with #FlockSafety, following scrutiny over AI tech after a controversial #SuperBowl ad.
— ☎️ Mike ☎️ 🇺🇸🦅 (@inMikeRotch) February 13, 2026
source: https://t.co/TUGcz0YcmU pic.twitter.com/7e9viQPLkJ
Senator Urges Amazon to Drop "Familiar Faces"
The Super Bowl ad, which showed Ring cameras tracking a dog across a neighborhood using artificial intelligence, sparked fears that similar technology could be used to monitor humans.
Critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), expressed concern that features like Ring's "Familiar Faces," which uses face recognition, could combine with Search Party to compromise privacy.
The EFF wrote that Americans should feel unsettled about "the potential loss of privacy" and the possibility of Ring combining face recognition with neighborhood tracking, AP News reported.
Democratic Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts also addressed privacy concerns in a letter to Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy, urging the company to discontinue the "Familiar Faces" technology.
Ring stressed that its Community Requests feature remains "core" to its mission and is fully optional.
The service has been used to aid law enforcement in emergencies, such as a shooting at Brown University in December. Within hours, seven neighbors shared 168 videos, which helped police identify a suspect's vehicle.
Originally published on vcpost.com
