Tags: amazon | ring | flock | police | surveillance | privacy

Amazon Ends Police Tech Partnership After Backlash

Amazon Ends Police Tech Partnership After Backlash
A security camera is seen across the street from the World Trade Center site in New York. A London-style surveillance system, dubbed the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, is being planned to blanket the area with 3,000 security cameras and other measures in an effort to detect terrorists. (Mario Tama/Getty Images file)

Friday, 13 February 2026 11:07 AM EST

Amazon's smart doorbell maker Ring has terminated a partnership with police surveillance tech company Flock Safety.

The announcement follows a backlash that erupted after 30-second Ring ad that aired during the Super Bowl featuring a lost dog that is found through a network of cameras, sparking fears of a dystopian surveillance society.

But that feature, called Search Party, was not related to Flock. And Ring's announcement doesn't cite the ad as a reason for the “joint decision" for the cancellation.

Ring and Flock said last year they were planning on working together to give Ring camera owners the option to share their video footage in response to law enforcement requests made through a Ring feature known as Community Requests.

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

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

Beyond the Flock partnership, Ring has faced other surveillance concerns.

In Super Bowl ad, a lost dog is found with Ring's Search Party feature, which the company says can “reunite lost dogs with their families and track wildfires threatening your community.”

The clip depicts the dog being tracked by cameras throughout a neighborhood on using artificial intelligence.

Viewers took to social media to criticize it for being sinister, leaving many wondering if it would be used to track humans and saying they would turn the feature off.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focus on civil liberties related to digital technology, said this week that Americans should feel unsettled over the potential loss of privacy.

“Amazon Ring already integrates biometric identification, like face recognition, into its products via features like “Familiar Faces,” which depends on scanning the faces of those in sight of the camera and matching it against a list of pre-saved, pre-approved faces," the Foundation wrote Tuesday.

“It doesn’t take much to imagine Ring eventually combining these two features: face recognition and neighborhood searches,” the Foundation added.

Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.


StreetTalk
Amazon's smart doorbell maker Ring has terminated a partnership with police surveillance tech company Flock Safety.
amazon, ring, flock, police, surveillance, privacy
337
2026-07-13
Friday, 13 February 2026 11:07 AM
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