The smart doorbell provider faced blowback for its Super Bowl TV ad last Sunday.
The Amazon-owned home security camera provider Ring has cancelled an upcoming partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance tech provider to US police forces.
The pair agreed last October to collaborate on Ring’s ‘community requests’ feature, which allows Ring users to share footage with local police when requested, if they choose to do so.
In a statement yesterday (12 February), Ring said that after “a comprehensive review”, it found that “the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated”, and therefore was cancelling the partnership.
The smart doorbell platform attracted controversy this week around an ad broadcast during TV coverage of the Superbowl on 8 February publicising another Ring feature, ‘search party’, which Flock had no involvement with.
The ad showed multiple Ring cameras throughout a neighbourhood being activated in unison to search for a missing pet. Online criticism of the feature notes that this network of surveillance could also be used to track people.
Flock’s best-known offering to US police forces is a network of cameras nationwide that can record and identify car registration plates and upload them to a centralised database which can be accessed by police to track vehicles.
The company has recently denied that it works with the US federal agency ICE, and said: “ICE does not have direct access to Flock cameras, systems, or data.”
Both Ring and Flock said that because their planned integration never launched, no video belonging to Ring customers was ever sent to Flock.
Ring added: “We remain focused on building tools that empower neighbours to help one another while maintaining strong privacy protections and transparency about how our features work.
“We’ll continue to carefully evaluate future partnerships to ensure they align with our standards for customer trust, safety and privacy.”
Flock said it “remains dedicated to supporting law enforcement agencies with tools that are fully configurable to local laws and policies”, and it would continue to engage directly with public officials and community leaders”.
Public reaction to Ring’s TV ad during the high-profile Superbowl broadcast is reflected by the attitudes of some within big tech companies in the current climate of surveillance and law enforcement in the US.
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