In my coverage of the Super Bowl LX ads I did not mention the Ring Camera ad that used puppies to distract from the fact that people’s security cameras are being used as a mass surveilance tool of our fascist government. I’m sorry, I just wasn’t ready to unpack all that. I’ve known about it for some time, and about the Flock camera network, but have been trying to focus on stupid things to numb my brain. (Sidenote: Shelter with Jason Statham, which I only learned about the day I decided to go to the movies, was excellent for this purpose.)
The Ring Super Bowl commercial, which is below, shows a child finding their dog after the dad searches for it on the Ring app, which activates all the Ring cameras in the neighborhood. Following that ad, many people were appalled to learn that Ring cameras can be used in this way. Major news outlets are running stories about this and it’s finally reaching critical mass – Ring is being used to track people through biometrics. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has the best breakdown. Here’s some of their report, with more at the source.
Amazon Ring’s Super Bowl ad offered a vision of our streets that should leave every person unsettled about the company’s goals for disintegrating our privacy in public.
In the ad, disguised as a heartfelt effort to reunite the lost dogs of the country with their innocent owners, the company previewed future surveillance of our streets: a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise.
The ad for Ring’s “Search Party” feature highlighted the doorbell camera’s ability to scan footage across Ring devices in a neighborhood, using AI analysis to identify potential canine matches among the many personal devices within the network.
Amazon Ring already integrates biometric identification, like face recognition, into its products via features like “Familiar Faces,” which depends on scanning the faces of those in sight of the camera and matching it against a list of pre-saved, pre-approved faces. It doesn’t take much to imagine Ring eventually combining these two features: face recognition and neighborhood searches.
Ring’s “Familiar Faces” feature could already run afoul of biometric privacy laws in some states, which require explicit, informed consent from individuals before a company can just run face recognition on someone. Unfortunately, not all states have similar privacy protections for their residents.
Ring has a history of privacy violations, enabling surveillance of innocents and protestors, and close collaboration with law enforcement, and EFF has spent years reporting on its many privacy problems.
This is so scary and it’s happening now. If you have a Ring camera, you can disable this feature, which is turned on by default, by following the instructions in the tweet below. The EFF article I excerpted also has instructions. If you can afford to replace your cameras, I recommend Eufy, which I use with an app that stores footage locally.
What’s more is that Ring is not only cooperating with law enforcement, they’re arguably cooperating with ICE. Ring/Amazon is trying to deny this, but they’re not to be trusted. Dog Rates/We Rate Dogs’s Matt Nelson has an excellent breakdown of this, which I’m embedding below. I love that guy. As Matt points out, the best way to protect your dog is to get them microchipped. Local Facebook pages and apps like Next Door are a better option for finding a missing pet.
Also, if you’re not familiar with Flock you can learn more here at the ACLU. You can search for local Flock cameras in your neighborhood at Deflock.org. You can petition your local government not to use Flock cameras. They are notoriously snsecure and are a mass privacy and overpolicing risk. Here’s a link to an ACLU article about how Flock tools can be used legally and without overreach by local law enforcement. That ship has sailed, but it’s a decent overview if you’d like to speak about these issues with local decision makers.
If you have Ring cameras, you were AUTO-ENROLLED into Search Party.
If you DON’T want your cameras being used, PLEASE go to your app > Control Center > Search Party and make sure you DISABLE the feature.
— embob (@emob_) February 9, 2026
I saw the danger of this when it first came out, I’ve even returned one I got as a gift, now all my friends who called me paranoid are looking for alternatives.
Saaaaaaaame. It’s never been less satisfying to be able to say I told you so than in this situation. People used to make so much fun of me for being all, I refuse to pay for my own surveillance state.
Dystopia wrapped in fluff. We have a blink camera and blink doorbell, they are an amazon product. My partner bought it after we had anti-social neighbours move next door to us in our old house. Prior to that I was against buying any camera doorbells or cameras for our home but he felt it was needed to document their harassment or deter it. We decided to sell our home after a year of the local housing council not doing anything to address their tenants breaking a lot of the rules in their lease. We still have the blink camera in our home but I’ll look for alternatives that doesn’t use amazon.
The Eufy recommend in the story is a good one. I use their solar cameras – you charge them with AC power and then the solar panel maintains them unless or until you want to charge with AC power again. (It has been a good 5 months and we haven’t had to charge them manually.)
We are living in a cross between Brave New World and 1984 with a dash of Animal Farm thrown in.
The problem isn’t the technology itself — it’s the near-total absence of consumer protections around it. That’s the truly alarming part. Citizens are effectively the only major stakeholder group without a lobbying arm, and it shows. Tech giants have been given sweeping freedom not just to build these systems, but to unilaterally define how the data generated by the public is used. That’s why Congress needs to pursue treating large-scale data infrastructure more like a utility.
Unfortunately this is a complex issue, and it’s pretty clear that (1) Congress has no appetite to tackle complex issues, and (2) 50% of the American public is too dumb/lazy to demonstrate interest.
Consumers have the power here. That’s true with regard to all technology. We managed to survive for all of human history without cameras at our doors.
I have hated doorbell cameras even before I knew this info. I have a neighbor who always mentions seeing me doing everyday things, like walking my dog or leaving for work, in his camera. Creepy. Those Search Party searches are absolutely despicable.
I had a stalker in the 80’s it was terrifying I can’t imagine if he had access to technology like this.
What is it going to take to make people stop buying from Amazon?
My understanding is that most of Amazon’s profits come from data & cloud storage solutions and not from consumer shopping. I need to fact check this in the annual report but based on the amount of money the company I work for spends with AWS, I can well believe it.
I work in tech and this is a 100% true. Literally all of their profit comes from AWS. They have massive government contracts for AWS hence Bezos’s complete sell out.
So, when an individual has a Prime membership, and buys Amazon products, Amazon doesn’t get money?
I wish we lived in a world where we could be confident knowing this technology could only be used for Amber Alerts and Silver Alerts… but we don’t. 🙁
My teenager saw that commercial and immediately said “sure, it’s great for missing dogs. But what happens when a creepy uses it to find a kid”? I will be honest, she got there way faster than me, because the ad WORKED, my first thought was “that would be so awesome if my (indoor) cat got out”.
And yeah, it could be helpful in many ways. But it also could be used for evil, and/or more mundane spying and that is just not ok. To har that everyone was auto-enrolled? yikes
It is just the beginning!
I live in a small isolated lake community, no businesses. I don’t see police. Sometimes I take a walk at 11 pm to the park. So many police stops for walking in the dark. My friend pointed out that it had to be Ring cameras.
Matt Bernstein did a IG reel on this too, and in pointing out what a distraction the dog thing is, he noted that they say 10 million dogs go missing every year… and look, we find an average of a dog a day with this surveillance. wooo [tumbleweeds]. That’s the kind of return I want to hear in exchange for a surveillance state!