Super Bowl ring camera ad sparks concern about privacy

Our Take

WRAL's coverage of Ring's Super Bowl ad gets at something we've been saying for years: surveillance tech doesn't sell itself as surveillance. It sells itself as convenience. A lost dog is a perfect Trojan horse — who's going to argue against reuniting a family with their golden retriever? But the feature depends on stitching together a mesh of privately owned cameras that can track movement across a neighborhood, and that same infrastructure doesn't care whether it's looking at a dog or a person.

Ring has a long, documented history of partnering with police departments, and Amazon has faced repeated scrutiny over how easily that footage can end up in law enforcement hands, sometimes without a warrant. A cute ad about a missing pug is also a marketing push to get more cameras on more porches, which means more footage, more metadata, and more potential access points for exactly the kind of automated tracking that groups like Flock Safety already run at scale on public roads.

None of this is about being anti-dog or anti-doorbell. It's about recognizing that every 'helpful' feature expands a private surveillance network most people never agreed to be part of. If you want to see how far that network already reaches in your area, check our camera map, and if you'd rather push back than opt in, our take-action page has concrete steps.