Ring privacy concerns after Super Bowl ad backlash

Our Take

Credit to ABC News for digging into why a cutesy Super Bowl ad about finding lost dogs blew up in Ring's face. Amazon's Ring has spent years selling doorbell cameras as neighborly convenience while quietly building one of the largest privately-owned camera networks in the country, one that's been shared with police departments with minimal oversight. A "help find Fido" pitch is the kind of warm, low-stakes framing that gets people to forget they're plugging another node into a surveillance grid that can just as easily be used to track people, not pets.

This is the same playbook Flock Safety runs with ALPR cameras: pitch it as solving a sympathetic problem (stolen cars, missing kids, lost dogs) so nobody asks who else gets access to the data, how long it's kept, or what happens when it's subpoenaed, hacked, or misused. Ring's backlash shows the public is getting sharper about spotting the pattern. Flock deserves the same scrutiny, especially since its cameras are reading plates on public roads with far less friction than a doorbell camera on someone's porch.

If you want to see how much of this infrastructure is already sitting in your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on it locally, our take-action page has concrete steps.