Watch: Montana woman fends off moose to protect her dogs

Our Take

This is a good story about a mom and her dogs, and it's the kind of thing Ring loves to push out because it makes their product look like a lifesaver instead of a data collection device sitting on your porch. Fair enough — the moose was real, the dogs are fine, and nobody's mad at that. But it's worth remembering what else these cameras do when they're not catching wildlife encounters.

Ring has spent years building partnerships with thousands of police departments across the country, giving law enforcement a backdoor to request footage from millions of private doorbells without a warrant in many cases. That's a different animal than a one-off moose video — it's a residential camera network that, like Flock's ALPR cameras, quietly expands what police can see without much public debate about consent, retention, or abuse. Moose don't know they're on camera. Neither do most people walking past someone's porch.

We track this stuff because the pattern matters more than any single cute clip: cameras marketed as harmless home safety tools keep turning into surveillance infrastructure with law enforcement access baked in. If you want to see how far automated camera networks have spread in your own area, check our map, and if you'd rather push back on this creep than just watch it happen, our take-action page has concrete steps.