Ring’s “lost dog” Super Bowl ad sparked a surveillance freakout — and Amazon just cut ties with Flock

Amazon’s Ring is backing away from a police surveillance partnership after a Super Bowl commercial about finding a lost dog set off a wave of privacy backlash that spread far beyond tech circles. Ring said it has terminated a planned partnership with Flock Safety, a company known for license-plate reader systems used by police departments, after critics argued the ad was basically a feel-good pitch for a neighborhood-wide camera dragnet.

The controversy started with a 30-second Ring ad that aired during the Super Bowl and showed a missing dog being located through a network of cameras. To many viewers, the message wasn’t “community helps family.” It was “we’re normalizing always-on tracking.” The response was immediate: privacy advocates, some lawmakers, and a lot of regular people online said the scenario looked less like safety and more like a blueprint for monitoring neighbors and strangers without consent.

Ring’s decision to scrap the Flock partnership was framed as a quick course correction, not an admission of wrongdoing. Ring said the Flock integration had not been fully implemented and that no customer data had been shared with Flock, according to reporting summarized by The Verge. Still, the pullback matters because it shows how fast a mainstream brand can get trapped in a surveillance debate once the marketing gets too honest about where the technology is heading.

Flock’s systems have been controversial for years in cities that adopted automated plate readers, with critics warning that the tools can be used for large-scale tracking and that access controls aren’t always as tight as advertised. Ring, meanwhile, has faced repeated questions about how much footage can end up in law enforcement hands and how easily “neighborhood safety” can blur into “neighborhood surveillance,” especially when devices are installed at scale.

In other words, this didn’t blow up because Americans suddenly learned what a doorbell camera is. It blew up because the ad helped people picture a future where the same tools used to find a dog could be used to find a person — quickly, quietly, and widely — and that hits a nerve right now.