Ring announced it canceled a planned integration with Flock Safety days after a widely criticized Super Bowl ad stoked fears about mass police surveillance.
The company cited logistical concerns, but the timing (and its emphasis on "voluntary" data sharing) suggested mounting pressure on the company played a role in the decision.
Critics are now celebrating what they see as a rare rollback in the surveillance tech arms race.
Why Ring canceled its Flock partnership
Ring backtracked on Thursday, days after massive backlash to the Super Bowl commercial from viewers worried about law enforcement access to private home surveillance footage
"Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated," the Amazon company claimed. "As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration."
"Community Requests remain a core feature of Ring's mission. The feature empowers Ring camera owners to choose to share specific videos with local police in response to requests for help with active investigations–or ignore the request altogether," it added. "Participation is always voluntary."
Stressing the voluntary part might be a result of all the accusations that Flock would use Ring cameras to create a surveillance network for the police. This could, in theory, even help ICE locate and arrest immigrants.
Flock is notorious for creating automated license plate readers and gunfire locators favored by cops. In 2024, Forbes described a similar gunshot detection system as "wildly inaccurate," pointing to a study that showed ShotSpotter in New York that just 16 percent of alerts led to any evidence of actual gunfire.
In an email to the Daily Dot, Amazon confirmed the partnership's end.
"We can confirm that Flock’s intended integration with Community Requests has been cancelled," the statement read. "This integration was never live, and no videos were ever shared between these services."
"This is why complaining is important," say critics
The increase in government surveillance has become a pressing issue in modern times. Critics have already panned Ring for contributing to mass surveillance systems for years before the fateful ad.
Regardless of the official reasons given, the same critics took a victory lap following the partnership cancellation.
"This is why complaining is important," said @_iamjamila on X. "Lmfaoooooo wasted all that money on the ad!"
"This has gotta be one of the biggest self-owns in advertising history," declared @Ike_Saul. "You literally spend millions of dollars for a 30-second Super Bowl spot to tell everyone you're spying on them, immediately destroying your brand reputation and unpending your business model."
"Our pressure is working. We don’t have to accept an ever-expanding surveillance state," wrote Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey on Bluesky. "Now Ring needs to go further: End facial recognition now."
"I'm actually amazed that they really cancelled this," said @gussquawks.bsky.social. "This was no doubt MANY millions of dollars wasted. That may go down as one of the worst commercials ever."
"Companies trudging ever forward into the surveillance state are actually starting to realize that it's bad to do this."
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