Amazon ends Flock partnership after backlash over Super Bowl ad

Amazon’s Ring unit has ended its deal with security technology company Flock Safety after backlash over a Super Bowl commercial for the retail giant’s smart doorbell sparked concerns about unwanted surveillance. 

The Ring Super Bowl ad portrayed a family’s search for their lost dog, with the manufacturer’s internet-enabled doorbell coming to the rescue by showing additional smart doorbells around the neighborhood scanning for the pet and using AI to identify the lost animal. 

The service, called “Search Party,” wasn’t related to Flock, but Amazon last year said it planned to work with the company to give Ring owners the option of sharing video with law enforcement through Ring’s “Community Requests” service.

Surveillance “nightmare”?

While Search Party was framed in the Super Bowl ad as a helpful option for Ring doorbell owners, the spot sparked concerns from some critics that the tech could be used for nefarious purposes. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on civil liberties related to digital technology, declared that “no one … will be safer in Ring’s surveillance nightmare.”

“[T]he 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 group said in a Feb. 10 blog post. 

In a statement on Thursday, Ring said that it opted to end the partnership because integrating Flock’s technology “would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated.” The statement didn’t mention the Super Bowl commercial or cite it as a reason for ending the agreement. 

Amazon also said the integration between Ring and Flock was never completed, noting that “no videos were ever shared between these services.” 

Flock confirmed that it never received any videos from Ring customers. Company founder Jamie Siminoff told CBS News on Thursday that the company protects privacy. 

“The backlash has been a little bit around this concept of, ‘Is this surveillance?'” he said. “It’s actually not. It’s allowing your camera to be an intelligent assistant for you and then allowing you to be a great neighbor.”

When asked by CBS News chief correspondent Matt Gutman if there’s an inherent tension between the public’s desire for privacy and law enforcement’s desire to crack a case, Siminoff responded: “I think you can have both,” adding: “We built the system based on our customers asking us. They want to help out.” 

Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CBS News: “There is still a strong, reasonable expectation of privacy that people have a sense of, even if it is not strongly protected by the legal system at the moment.”

Smart doorbells in the spotlight

The focus on Ring comes amid another high-profile use of a smart doorbell, with investigators in recent days saying they had recovered footage from a Google Nest camera outside the Arizona home of Nancy Guthrie — the missing mother of “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie. 

Investigators said they were able to extract “residual data” from the Google equipment, raising questions about how it was possible to retain the video. Officials had said the doorbell was disconnected, with no active subscription for storing video. 

In its Thursday statement, Ring said its Community Requests feature remains “core” to its mission. The service is optional and voluntary, it added. 

Community Requests was also used during the Brown University shooting in December, when the Providence Police Department used the service to ask for video footage, Ring noted.

“Within hours, seven neighbors responded, sharing 168 videos that captured critical moments from the incident,” Ring said. “One video identified a new key witness, helping lead police to identify the suspect’s vehicle and solve the case.”