Your RING door bell is spying on you

Our Take

Andrew Kaufman's rundown lands on something we've been tracking for a while: the line between your front porch and the local ALPR dragnet is basically gone. Ring spent a couple of years publicly distancing itself from police "Request for Assistance" tools after a privacy backlash, only to reportedly quietter deals with Axon and Flock Safety back into the pipeline. That's not a coincidence — it's a rebrand. Instead of cops directly emailing your neighbor for footage, the data now flows through corporate-law-enforcement partnerships that are harder to see and harder to opt out of.

What makes this dangerous isn't just doorbell footage, it's the stitching. Flock's whole business model is building a searchable, retroactive map of every vehicle's movement using cameras planted on streets and now, potentially, cross-referenced with home devices and body-cam data from Axon. Kaufman's point about "front door to the streets" tracking is exactly the pattern DeFlock exists to expose: individually these devices seem harmless, but networked together they create a permanent, queryable record of where you go, who visits you, and when — all without a warrant requirement in most jurisdictions.

Credit to Andrew Kaufman for connecting these corporate dots in plain language. If you want to see how far this network already reaches in your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete next steps.