Amazon Ring’s Super Bowl ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance

Ring’s new Search Party feature has once again drawn backlash for the company. A 30-second ad that aired during Sunday’s Super Bowl showed Ring cameras “surveilling” neighborhoods to locate a lost dog. In the current political climate, a prime-time ad celebrating neighborhood surveillance struck a nerve.

People voiced concerns across social media that the AI-powered technology Ring uses to identify dogs could soon be used to search for humans. Combined with Ring’s recent rollout of its new facial recognition capability, it feels like a short leap for a pet-finding feature to be turned into a tool for state surveillance.

Privacy expert Chris Gilliard told 404 Media that the ad was “a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement and other equally invasive surveillance companies.”

The fears center on the Amazon-owned Ring’s partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that has contracts with law enforcement to use its automated license plate readers, video surveillance systems, and other technologies.

The partnership connects Ring’s massive residential camera network with an organization that has reportedly allowed ICE to access data from its own nationwide camera network.

“This definitely isn’t about dogs — it’s about mass surveillance,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) posted on X. A vocal critic of Ring’s ties to law enforcement, Markey has pressed for greater transparency into Ring’s connections with law enforcement, along with stronger privacy protections for consumers.

Comments on the YouTube video of the ad ranged from “This is a huge problem disguised as a solution,” to “Smart way to gaslight people in mass surveillance.” Video: Ring

Ring spokesperson Emma Daniels told The Verge that Search Party is designed to match images of dogs and is “not capable of processing human biometrics.” Additionally, she maintains that the Familiar Faces facial recognition feature is separate from Search Party. It operates on the individual account level, she said, and there’s no communal sharing as there is with Search Party.

While Familiar Faces is opt-in for each user, Search Party is enabled by default on any outdoor camera enrolled in Ring’s subscription plan. It works by using AI to scan footage in the cloud for the missing dog once the owner uploads a picture to Ring’s Neighbors app. If a match is found, Ring alerts the camera’s owner, who can then choose to share the video or notify the owner through the app.

“These are not tools for mass surveillance,” Daniels said. “We build the right guardrails, and we’re super transparent about them.”

While that may be the case today, I asked whether Ring cameras could one day be used to specifically search for people. “The way these features are built, they are not capable of that today,” she said. “We don’t comment on feature road maps, but I have no knowledge or indication that we’re building features like that at this point.”

Ring users can currently share footage from their cameras with local law enforcement during an active investigation through a feature called Community Requests. Unlike previous Ring police partnerships, Community Request goes through third-party companies — the Taser company Axon and, soon, Flock. “The reason we did that is these third-party evidence management systems offer a much more secure chain of custody,” says Daniels. If a user declines a request, no one will be notified.

The company maintains that neither the government nor law enforcement can access its network, and that footage is shared only by users or in response to a legal request. Daniels reiterated what the company had previously told The Verge, that it has no partnerships with ICE or any other federal agency, and said you can see every request agencies have made on its Neighbors app profile.

Additionally, the Flock integration is not currently live, although Daniels had no update on the company’s plans for the partnership following the backlash. She referred me to an earlier response. “As we explore the integration, we will ensure the feature is built for the use of local public safety agencies only — which is what the program is designed for.”

The problem is that there’s nothing preventing local agencies from sharing footage with federal ones. And while the Super Bowl ad played up heartwarming images of a girl reunited with her puppy, the leap to this technology that can track people in your neighborhood is still very small. Combined with government overreach, it’s not hard to imagine how a powerful network of AI-enabled cameras goes from finding lost dogs to hunting people.

And Ring has a history of partnering with the police. While it has rolled back some of that in recent years, since founder Jamie Siminoff returned, the company has renewed its focus on using its products to prevent crime.

Siminoff said he came back because of the possibilities AI brings. With this technology, he believes neighborhood cameras could be used to virtually “zero out crime” within a year. Given these stated goals and the new capabilities AI can bring, why wouldn’t Ring be planning to add some form of Search Party for People to its cameras?

Eliminating crime is an admirable goal, but history has shown that tools capable of large-scale surveillance are rarely limited to their original purpose. Ring has a responsibility here to protect its users, which it says it is doing. But ultimately, it comes down to how much you can trust a company – and the company it keeps – to never overstep. If Ring is cloaking its ambitions behind our instinct to protect our furry friends, that trust will be hard to find.