- Ring is severing its ties to law enforcement-affiliated Flock Safety
- Critics accuse Ring of rolling out ‘mass surveillance’
- A new Search Party ad has also raised privacy concerns
Facing mounting criticism over its privacy and data-sharing policies, Amazon-owned Ring has cut ties with surveillance technology firm Flock Safety — though that may not be enough to mollify many of its critics.
“We found that the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than expected,” says Ring (via The Verge). “As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration.”
Ring also confirmed that the integration never actually launched, despite being announced last October, so no data has been sent between the two companies. Flock Safety is known for working with governments and law enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The Ring and Flock Safety partnership was part of Ring’s Community Requests feature, where users can choose to share camera footage with local police to help with active investigations. That program continues, and Ring points out that it helped identify a key witness in the December 2025 Brown University shooting.
“We remain focused on building tools that allow neighbors to help each other while maintaining strong privacy protections and transparency about how our features work,” says Ring. “We will continue to carefully evaluate future partnerships to ensure they align with our standards for customer trust, security and privacy.”
With added facial recognition
What this ad doesn’t show: Ring also rolled out facial recognition to humans. I wrote to them months ago about this. Your answer? They will not ask for your consent. This is definitely not about dogs – it’s about mass surveillance. https://t.co/bncjffU3DZFebruary 9, 2026
A few days ago, Ring also released a new ad showing off its Search Party feature, which has drawn further complaints from critics who described it as “dystopian” – although like the Flock Safety integration, this isn’t new and was revealed last year.
The idea of Search Party is that if a dog goes missing, local Ring cameras are used to spot it. It’s enabled by default, so you’ll have to turn it off if you don’t like it – but Ring says Search Party has found more than one dog a day since it launched.
Finding lost dogs is a laudable goal, but there are concerns that the same setup could easily be used to track people. US Senator Ed Markey has described Search Party as a “mass surveillance system”, especially given that Ring products can now be programmed to recognize familiar faces as well.
Ring says facial recognition data is kept private and secure and can improve security by letting you know if it’s a family member or a stranger wandering around your property. It’s also a feature available on other security cameras, including Google Nest Cams. However, users are far from convinced that Ring can be trusted.
The issue is not the announced capabilities, but how they can be reused in the future, either with or without public knowledge – a debate about trust and privacy that will no doubt continue. It seems that many people have already had enough of Ring’s approach and are returning their cameras.
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