After strong backlash over its partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that works with law enforcement, Ring announced it was canceling the integration.
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In a statement posted to Ring’s blog and provided to The Verge before publication, the company said: “After a comprehensive review, we determined that the planned integration with Flock Safety would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. Therefore, we made the mutual decision to cancel the integration and continue with our current partners. The integration never began, so no Ring customer video was ever sent to Flock Safety.”
The statement goes on to say that Ring’s mission to make neighborhoods safer “comes with significant responsibility – to our customers, to the communities we serve, and to the trust you place in our products and capabilities.” In recent weeks, the company has faced significant public outrage over its association with Flock, with Ring users encouraged to destroy their cameras and some announcing on social media that they were throwing away their Ring devices.
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The partnership with Flock was announced last October, but after recent nationwide unrest related to ICE activities, public pressure against Ring’s involvement with the company has begun to grow. Flock has reportedly allowed ICE and other federal agencies to access its network of surveillance cameras, and social media influencers have claimed that Ring provides a direct connection to ICE.
While this claim is not accurate, as the integration with Flock has never been activated, Ring has a history of working with police, and the company quickly came under heavy criticism. As if that weren't enough, last weekend Ring ran an ad during the Super Bowl for its new AI-powered Search Party feature.
While the company says it's designed to find lost dogs, claiming the feature is not capable of finding people, the ad quickly sparked fears that Ring cameras are being used for mass surveillance. The ad shows dozens of Ring cameras in a neighborhood scanning the streets.
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Additionally, the company recently launched a new facial recognition feature, Familiar Faces. Combined with Search Party, the technological leap of using neighborhood cameras to search for people through a mass surveillance network suddenly seems too small. Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) — a longtime critic of Ring — sent an open letter this week calling on Amazon to cancel the company’s facial recognition feature.
