Worried About Ring’s Lost Dogs Super Bowl Ad? You Don’t Know The Half Of It
During Super Bowl LX, Amazon aired an ad for its Ring security cameras that has people talking.
The ad, titled “Search Party” showcased a feature that helps people find lost dogs, leveraging cameras across the neighborhood to give Ring doorbell owners full visibility of where their missing pooch may have gone.
The AI-powered tool drew a great deal of backlash, with many worrying that it is not a stretch to think that this could be expanded to search for people.
Under the guise of convenience, as is frequently the case, we have built a neighborhood panopticon, with the central tower being guarded by the once-seemingly-cuddly upstart bookselling platform.
The Panopticon, a building where all individuals within it can be observed without knowing it.
This is not the first time people have raised alarm bells about Ring doorbells, and it won’t be the last, let’s revisit some stories which weren’t recently aired to an audience of 120million+.
2018-19 Police Partnerships
In May 2018, Amazon launched an app called Neighbors, allowing users to share video alerts with both neighbors and the local police.
During this period, the online retailer began to aggressively build relationships with U.S. police departments, including deals where law enforcement encouraged residents to install both this app and Ring devices.
Reports emerged, during this period, that, if given access, police were able to keep the videos from these doorbells indefinitely. Even more worryingly, these requests were made privately. The backlash from this was sufficient to cause Amazon to change direction, and, in late 2019, police requests became public… they were not stopped, but they became more visible.
2021 Police Partnerships (Continued)
At this point, Ring had around 1,800 law enforcement partners, but they refused to disclose how many users had footage shared with police.
Transparency reports, however, revealed that in 2021, Amazon gave a record amount of doorbell footage to the government.
2022 Warrantless Sharing
In 2022, Ring publicly confirmed that it provided footage to police without user consent or a warrant at least 11 times in 2022, under its emergency policy. Bear in mind that this piece was published in July of that year, so that figure is likely under-counting for the whole calendar year.
Criticism from privacy groups started to intensify, with organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explicitly calling for the end of its police partnerships.
2023 Regulatory Backlash
In this year, Ring reached a $5.8 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over its inability to keep users’ footage private. Part of this required it to disclose to its customers how much of their data was accessed by the company and contractors.
Even then, the line from Amazon was that Ring helped “reunite families with missing loved ones and pets, solve crimes, and provide critical information during natural disasters.”
This narrative and functionality is not that new…
2024 Policy Change
In January 2024 Ring announced it will stop allowing police to request footage via the Neighbors app’s “Request For Assistance” tool, requiring law enforcement to use warrants instead.
“Public safety agencies like fire and police departments can still use the Neighbors app to share helpful safety tips, updates, and community events,” Eric Kuhn, head of Neighbors, wrote in the post. “They will no longer be able to use the RFA tool to request and receive video in the app.”
It’s important to note that Ring footage was still something that police forces could access; this update fundamentally changed the process for them, forcing them through official channels.
2025 (Another) Policy Change
In 2025, warrantless sharing came back to Ring, through a partnership with a company called Axon. Sharing remained voluntary, but the need for a warrant could be sidestepped once again through law enforcement directly soliciting users.
Ring Founder, Jamie Siminoff, claimed “[t]his integration with Axon will foster a vital connection between our neighbors and public safety agencies in their communities, giving them a way to work together to keep their neighborhoods safe.”
In order to give these street snoopers an expanded ability to capture high-quality footage, two models were also given a free upgrade to allow them to capture 2k footage.
2026 Artificial Intelligence
That brings us to 2026. What Amazon surely thought was an innocuous, and even useful, Super Bowl XL advert about an AI-Powered Alsatian identifier caused an uproar.