Amazon ended its planned partnership with Flock Safety, a company known for automated license-plate reading cameras, after a Super Bowl ad for Ring sparked public backlash over surveillance and privacy fears, according to the Associated Press.
Ring said it terminated the planned Flock integration as a “joint decision” following a review and described the work as requiring more time and resources than anticipated. Ring also said that the integration never launched, adding that no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.
The break came after a 30-second Ring ad aired during the Super Bowl that followed a lost dog that is found through a network of cameras. The ad, which Ring described as a feature called “Search Party,” was not connected to the Flock integration, but it drew online criticism that it represented a dystopian surveillance society and left some viewers wondering whether similar camera-based systems could be used to track people.
Ring and Flock had said last year that they were planning to work 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.” In Thursday’s announcement, Ring did not cite the Super Bowl ad as the reason for cancelling the planned integration.
Flock, in a statement, reiterated that it never received Ring customer videos and said the end of the plan was mutual. Flock added that it “remains dedicated to supporting law enforcement agencies with tools that are fully configurable to local laws and policies,” the AP reported, while describing the company’s broader role in law enforcement technology.
Flock is among the largest operators of automated license-plate reading systems in the United States. The company has faced public outcry amid scrutiny of surveillance tied to immigration enforcement during the Trump administration, but Flock said it does not partner with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or contract with any subagency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for direct access to its cameras.
Flock said the company does not own the data captured by its cameras and that customers control it. It also said that if a police department chooses to collaborate with a federal agency such as ICE, “Flock has no ability to override that decision,” according to text on its website. The company also said it paused pilot programs with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations last year.
Beyond the partnership talk with Flock, the AP reported that Ring has faced additional surveillance concerns tied to its other features. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-liberties nonprofit focused on digital technology, said this week that Americans should feel unsettled about potential privacy loss, citing what it described as Ring’s ability to integrate biometric identification such as face recognition via features including “Familiar Faces.”
In a statement published by the group, the EFF wrote that Ring already integrates biometric identification like face recognition and said it “doesn’t take much” to imagine Ring combining face recognition with neighborhood searches. Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts also urged Amazon to discontinue its “Familiar Faces” technology.
Markey’s letter to Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy said the backlash to the Super Bowl commercial “confirmed public opposition to Ring’s constant monitoring and invasive image recognition algorithms,” the AP reported.