When a “Smart Doorbell” Became a Surveillance Network

Our Take

Pat Berlinquette's rundown of Ring's rap sheet — employees snooping on customers, hackers hijacking cameras to talk to kids, and a Neighbors app that turned doorbell footage into a crowdsourced suspicion machine — lands because it shows the pattern so clearly. A product sold as "peace of mind" became a pipeline for police to request footage from millions of private cameras, frequently without a warrant and often without the homeowner ever knowing. That's not an accident. It's the business model.

This is the same playbook we track every day with automated license plate readers. Flock Safety doesn't hack your camera or talk to your kids, but it does the same quiet trick: sell a neighborhood safety gadget, then stitch thousands of them into a searchable, retroactive tracking grid that police and federal agencies can query with little oversight and even less public consent. Ring proved Americans would trade privacy for a sense of security one doorbell at a time. Flock is doing it one intersection at a time.

If Berlinquette's video makes you uneasy about who's watching your street, take a look at our map to see how much ALPR coverage already exists near you, then check take-action for concrete ways to push back before the network gets any bigger.