Ring ends partnership plans with Flock days after privacy blowback from Super Bowl ad

Ring is cancelling its partnership plans with Flock Safety, a police surveillance tech company that manages a growing network of controversial automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras, the Amazon-owned company announced Thursday.

The announcement came days after a Ring Super Bowl ad generated backlash from consumers concerned about privacy. The ad, ostensibly about how Ring camera videos can be shared to find lost dogs, raised questions about how the facial recognition-enabled cameras can also be used to surveil and monitor the movements of people.

Ring and Flock had announced their partnership in October, saying that Ring customers would soon be empowered to share their doorbell camera videos with police through Ring’s Community Requests program.

Ring maintains a Community Requests program with another major police surveillance tech company called Axon. Flock, however, has been far more controversial than Axon, and several cities have recently ended contracts with the company after learning that other police departments were searching their databases without authorization or that people were being tracked on behalf of immigration authorities.

The partnership between Ring and Flock had not yet launched, a fact that Amazon emphasized in a statement on the matter. 

"We can confirm that Flock’s intended integration with Community Requests has been cancelled,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “This integration was never live, and no videos were ever shared between these services.” 

“Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” the statement said.

In a blog post on its website, Flock said it believes the decision “allows both companies to best serve their respective customers and communities.” 

“Flock remains dedicated to supporting law enforcement agencies with tools that are fully configurable to local laws and policies, and we continue to engage directly with public officials and community leaders,” the Flock blog post said.

Ring has faced scrutiny from lawmakers and consumers since its Sunday ad, which focused on an AI-enabled program similar to Community Requests called “Search Party.”

On Wednesday, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) wrote a letter to Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy about the ad and Ring’s surveillance capability.

“Amazon apparently intended its Super Bowl commercial to demonstrate that its new technologies could identify lost pets,” Markey wrote. “Instead, Amazon inadvertently revealed the serious privacy and civil liberties risks attendant to these types of Artificial Intelligence-enabled image recognition technologies.”

Markey noted that the ad did not mention that Amazon began using facial recognition technology in its doorbell cameras last year.

“The massive backlash to Ring’s Super Bowl advertisement confirmed the public’s opposition to Ring’s constant monitoring and invasive image recognition algorithms,” Markey’s letter said. “Social media posts with thousands of engagements describe the feature as ‘dystopian’ and raise alarms about the expansion of mass surveillance into residential neighborhoods.”