Ring Drops Deal With Surveillance Company

Amazon's Ring is backing away from a controversial law-enforcement tie-up before it ever switched on. The home security company says it has scrapped a planned integration with Flock Safety, a surveillance firm whose automated license plate readers and camera networks are widely used by police—and, according to some reports, accessed by federal agencies including ICE. In a blog post, Ring said a "comprehensive review" showed the project would take more work than expected and described the move as a mutual decision, adding that no Ring video was ever shared with Flock because the system never launched.

The reversal follows weeks of online outrage, calls to destroy Ring cameras, and renewed scrutiny of the Amazon-owned brand's broader policing partnerships, the Verge reports. Critics linked the Flock deal to protests over immigration enforcement and argued the integration would deepen what they see as a growing private-public surveillance web. Ring disputes claims it was creating a direct pipeline to ICE but acknowledges that its mission to make neighborhoods "safer" carries "significant responsibility" to maintain user trust. Flock says it doesn't partner with ICE but since customers own data from its cameras, it doesn't have any say in whether a police department chooses to share information with federal agencies.

The backlash intensified after Ring's Super Bowl ad for its "Search Party" tool, which showed a lost dog found by a network of neighborhood cameras, raising fears about mass surveillance, the AP reports. The feature isn't connected to Flock.

Ring also recently rolled out "Familiar Faces," an optional facial-recognition feature that labels known visitors. Democratic Sen. Ed Markey urged Amazon this week to abandon facial recognition altogether. Ring insists its products are "not tools for mass surveillance" and says Familiar Faces is designed to give users more control over alerts, not to track people at scale. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, said Americans should be worried about privacy, the AP reports. "It doesn't take much to imagine Ring eventually combining these two features: face recognition and neighborhood searches," the civil liberties group said.