HOPE 2020 (2020): Ring's Wrongs: Surveillance Capitalism, Law Enforcement Contracts, User Tracking

Our Take

Bill Budington's HOPE 2020 talk is five years old, but it holds up because Ring wrote the playbook that Flock Safety is now running at scale. Same basic move: sell homeowners and small businesses on a comforting story about safety, then quietly wire the resulting footage into a nationwide network that police can tap without a warrant. Ring did it with doorbell video and neighborhood "crime" apps. Flock does it with license plate scans stitched into a searchable, cross-jurisdictional database. The technology changed; the trust exercise didn't.

What's striking watching this now is how little pushback slowed any of it down. Budington flagged over 1,300 secret law enforcement partnerships and a security track record bad enough that hackers were talking through people's doorbells. None of that stopped adoption — it just moved the business model upstream from individual homeowners to city governments signing multi-year contracts for ALPR coverage. The lesson isn't that Ring was uniquely bad; it's that "private company, public policing, minimal oversight" is a durable business model, and it's the same structure powering the camera on the pole at the end of your street right now.

If Ring taught us that convenience sells surveillance, Flock is the version where you don't even get a doorbell out of the deal — just the cameras, the contract, and the data-sharing agreement your city council may not have read closely. Check our map to see what's already deployed near you, and hit take action if you want to push back before the next contract renews.