- Ring severs ties with law enforcement-linked Flock Safety
- Critics accuse Ring of deploying ‘mass surveillance’
- A new Search Party ad also raised privacy concerns
Facing growing criticism over its privacy and data-sharing policies, Amazon-owned Ring has severed ties with surveillance technology company Flock Safety — although that may not be enough to assuage many of its critics.
“We determined that the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” says Ring (via The Verge). “As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration.”
Ring also confirmed that the integration was never launched, despite being announced last October, and therefore no data was sent between the two companies. Flock Safety is known for working with government and law enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The Ring and Flock Safety partnership was part of Ring’s Community Requests feature, where users can choose to share camera footage with local police to assist in active investigations. This program continues and Ring notes that it helped identify a key witness to the Brown University shooting in December 2025.
“We remain focused on building tools that enable neighbors to help each other while maintaining strong privacy protections and transparency about how our features work,” Ring says. “We will continue to carefully evaluate future partnerships to ensure they meet our standards for customer trust, security and privacy.”
With facial recognition added
What this ad doesn’t show: Ring has also rolled out facial recognition for humans. I wrote to them months ago about this. Their response? They will not ask for your consent. It’s definitely not about dogs, it’s about mass surveillance. https://t.co/bncjffU3DZFebruary 9, 2026
A few days ago, Ring also released a new ad showcasing its Search Party feature, which sparked further complaints from critics, who called it “dystopian” – although, like the Flock Safety integration, it’s not new and was unveiled last year.
The idea of Search Party is that if a dog goes missing, local Ring cameras are used to help track it down. It’s on by default, so you should turn it off if you don’t like it – but Ring says more than one dog per day has been found by Search Party since its launch.
Finding lost dogs is a worthy goal, but some worry that the same setup could easily be used to track people. U.S. Senator Ed Markey described Search Party as a “mass surveillance” system, especially since Ring products can now be programmed to recognize familiar faces as well.
Ring says facial recognition data remains private and secure and can improve security by letting you know whether it’s a family member or a stranger walking through your property. This is also a feature available on other security cameras, including Google Nest Cams. However, users are far from convinced that Ring can be trusted.
The problem lies not in the announced capabilities, but in how they might be reused in the future, with or without public knowledge – a debate over trust and privacy that will undoubtedly continue. It seems many people are already fed up with Ring’s approach and are returning their cameras.
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