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 a 30-second Ring ad that aired during the 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 鈥渏oint 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.
鈥淔ollowing a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,鈥� Ring’s statement said.
鈥淭he integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.鈥�
Flock reiterated that it never received Ring customer videos 鈥� and that ending the planned integration was a mutual decision that allows both companies to 鈥渂est serve their respective customers.鈥� In a statement, Flock added that it 鈥渞emains dedicated to supporting law enforcement agencies with tools that are fully configurable to local laws and policies.鈥�
Flock is one of the nation鈥檚 biggest operators of automated license-plate reading systems. Its cameras are mounted across the U.S., capturing billions of photos of license plates each month. The company has faced public outcry amid the Trump administration鈥檚 aggressive crackdown. But Flock maintains that it does not partner with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or contract out with any subagency of the Department of Homeland Security for direct access to its cameras. The company with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations last year.
Still, Flock says it doesn鈥檛 own the data captured by its cameras, its customers do. So if a police department, for example, chooses to collaborate with a federal agency like ICE, 鈥淔lock has no ability to override that decision,鈥� the company notes on its website.
Beyond the Flock partnership, Amazon has faced over its Ring doorbell cameras.
In the Super Bowl ad, a lost dog is found with Ring’s Search Party feature, which the company says can 鈥渞eunite lost dogs with their families and track wildfires threatening your community.鈥� The clip depicts the dog being tracked by cameras throughout a neighborhood 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.
鈥淎mazon Ring already integrates biometric identification, like face recognition, into its products via features like 鈥楩amiliar Faces鈥� 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. 鈥淚t doesn鈥檛 take much to imagine Ring eventually combining these two features: face recognition and neighborhood searches.鈥�
Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts also urged Amazon to discontinue its 鈥淔amiliar Faces鈥� technology.
In a published letter addressed to Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy, Markey wrote that the backlash to the Super Bowl commercial 鈥渃onfirmed public opposition to Ring鈥檚 constant monitoring and invasive image recognition algorithms.鈥�
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