Amazon Ring aired a commercial during the Super Bowl that was supposed to be a feel-good story about how the collective power of their cameras can be used to find lost dogs. Instead, it revealed to a global audience that their home security system is being used as a mass surveillance tool by the government. It was one of the most glorious corporate self owns that I’ve seen, up there with Pepsi sending Kendall Jenner out to broker world peace. (Now she’s hawking a betting app, so you can see how that worked out.)

Part of the public awareness about Ring cameras involved their cooperation with Flock, a truly evil corporation with its own mass surveillance infrastructure used by local and national agencies. (You can look up where the Flock cameras are here. Watch this video to learn about what they’re capable of.) After people unplugged, replaced and put limits on their Ring cameras, Amazon announced that they no longer have an agreement with Flock to share footage. CNBC has a good breakdown:

Ring is terminating its partnership with police tech provider Flock Safety, the Amazon
-owned company announced Thursday.

The partnership between Flock and Ring came under scrutiny after the Amazon doorbell company ran an ad during the Super Bowl that touted a “Search Party” feature that uses AI to help locate lost pets. When a user initiates the feature, it activates a network of participating Ring cameras, which scan footage for images resembling the missing dog. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called the feature a “surveillance nightmare.”

Flock, meanwhile, operates a network of automated license plate readers, and sells access to that software to customers that include law enforcement agencies.

Ring’s decision to cancel its partnership with Flock comes as tech companies face growing pressure to reexamine their work with federal agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Earlier this week, Salesforce employees pressed CEO Marc Benioff to cancel “ICE opportunities,” CNBC reported. More than 900 Google employees also asked their company to divest itself from ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Privacy and civil liberties advocates called on Ring to drop its partnership with Flock. A protest calling on the e-commerce company to cut its ties with Flock, ICE and CBP is scheduled for Friday, outside of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

“Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” Ring wrote in a blog post. “As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration.”

[From CNBC]

Being associated with a government that uses technology to kidnap and murder people isn’t good for business, who knew? I wish Amazon would just admit that they don’t want their technology to be used for evil, but that’s not the point. This was purely a business decision by another truly evil company.

There was yet another recent public relations issue for home security when the footage of Nancy Guthrie’s (alleged) abductor came out. Guthrie hadn’t paid for a subscription, but the footage was still available, stored on Google’s servers. In this case Guthrie had a Nest camera, owned by Google, but it opened people’s eyes to the fact that Amazon and Google store data and are not to be trusted.

As I mentioned in our last post about this, I use Eufy cameras and only store data locally. (There was a mild issue with this three years ago that has since been fixed, but it was with the video thumbnails being used for app push notifications, not actual video stored on Eufy’s servers. They’re consistently rated high in privacy.) I just checked and there’s still footage on my phone, stored locally, from as far back as October. (This is an affiliate link to a similar system to what I use.) The app is easy to use, my cameras were simple to install, and they’re accurate.

Wyze recently capitalized on Ring’s massive f-k up by creating their own commercial spoofing Ring’s dystopian one and touting their privacy features. Brilliant.

Here are affiliate links to camera systems to replace Ring. Use the arrows to navigate. We need to make money too! I’m trying to be less Gen X about this.