Flock × Ring Pull the Plug After Super Bowl Backlash

Amazon recently rolled out a warm and fuzzy Super Bowl spot that imagined a pervasive surveillance net helping to find a lost puppy. The ad was deliberately feel‑good, selling the idea that more surveillance can help your community.

The commercial was promoting Ring’s new Community Requests feature—a tool that would let police departments submit video access requests directly through the Ring doorbell app. The plan, announced in partnership with FlockSafety, was to roll the integration out in the months following the ad.

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It’s puzzling why Amazon would spend millions of dollars on advertising to promote something it hadn’t “integrated” yet. And obviously both companies were surprised when it genuinely creeped everyone out. The announcement has since been removed from FlockSafety’s website.

Critics pointed out that if the same AI can be trained to spot a lost dog, it can just as easily trace the movement of any person or vehicle. Consumer-grade devices would be used to feed live footage to law enforcement. The ad brought every sports fan face to face with the surveillance state.

Ring published an update on their blog:

“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 statement is classic doublespeak, never mentioning the unanimously negative public reaction. Instead, it blames “time and resources”—completely distancing themselves from accountability over privacy concerns.

“The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.” 

Notice the phrasing “Ring customer videos” instead of “Ring footage” or “Ring data.” The choice of words could hide the truth even if Amazon had been sending footage or data.

Flock also published an update on their blog following the backlash.

And despite the pushback, Ring and Flock cancelling their partnership doesn’t mean much when Amazon already works with Axon, the major provider of body camera and evidence‑management systems for law enforcement.

We were about to enter a timeline where the three biggest surveillance players in the U.S.—Ring, Axon, and Flock—were positioned to fuse their networks into a single, city‑wide, eyes‑on‑everything infrastructure. 

Central to this infrastructure are the popular geofence-like requests we’ve covered extensively—law enforcement picking a date, time, and region on the map—and getting back data from their selection.

Here’s how community requests work between Ring and Axon:

1. Officer creates a geo‑fenced request—A specific address or neighborhood is entered into the system, along with a date/time.
2. Ring users receive a push notification—The request appears in the Ring app on any device covering the targeted area.
3. User decides to share or ignore—Participation is optional, but the wording of the prompt can pressure compliance.
4. If accepted, video uploads to the Axon platform—The footage joins the police managed evidence pool, where it can be indexed, searched, and used in investigations.

Even with ‘consent,’ the sheer scale of Ring’s installed base—over 30 million devices in the United States—means that a single request could pull thousands of clips into law enforcement databases in seconds.

Senator Ed Markey highlighted the danger, calling the termination “a necessary step to protect Americans from pervasive surveillance” and urging stricter oversight of corporate‑law‑enforcement data pipelines.

The takeaway is clear. When a consumer device is repurposed as a police tool, the line between voluntary security and compulsory surveillance blurs beyond repair.

Looking for Solutions?

Replace your Ring doorbell with another brand that doesn’t have partnerships with surveillance companies.

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