Amazon’s Ring cancels controversial partnership with tech company Flock amid privacy concerns

Our Take

Credit to JordyBReporting for tracking this one through CNN: Ring backing away from its Flock Safety tie-up after a Super Bowl ad stunt blew up in their faces is a genuine case study in what happens when ordinary people notice surveillance creep and say something out loud. A 'find your lost dog' pitch is a classic soft-sell for a hardware network that was really about stitching millions of private doorbell cameras into a searchable, ALPR-adjacent surveillance mesh. People smelled it immediately, and the backlash was fast enough to force a reversal.

Don't mistake this for Flock retreating, though. The company's core business — license plate readers feeding a nationwide, largely unaccountable database shared with police departments and increasingly federal agencies — keeps expanding whether or not Ring is in the room. Canceling one partnership doesn't undo the thousands of Flock cameras already bolted to poles in neighborhoods across the country, often installed with zero public hearing or city council vote.

The lesson here isn't 'crisis averted,' it's 'pressure works, so keep applying it.' If a Super Bowl commercial can trigger this kind of reversal, imagine what sustained local organizing against city contracts can do. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you, and hit take action for concrete steps to push back before the next partnership quietly ships.