Amazon’s Ring cancels partnership with Flock, a network of AI cameras used by ICE, feds, and police

Ring, Amazon’s home security business, said Thursday that it is ending its planned partnership with Flock Safety — the company behind AI-driven surveillance cameras whose footage is shared with law enforcement agencies.

Ring and Flock announced the partnership in October. Under that deal, Ring doorbell customers would have been able to share their videos with Flock and its network of public safety agencies to support “evidence collection and investigative work.” As previously reported by 404 Media, video captured by Flock’s system has been used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Secret Service, and the U.S. Navy, all of which have had access to Flock’s tens of thousands of AI-enabled cameras. Flock, for its part, has said it does not explicitly work with ICE.

In a blog post, Ring said it and Flock mutually agreed to cancel the partnership because the integration would “require significantly more time and resources than anticipated.”

The announcement comes less than a week after Ring ran a Super Bowl commercial highlighting its AI-powered Search Party feature, which uses a neighbourhood camera network to help locate lost dogs. That ad sparked backlash from some viewers who worried the same capabilities could be used to track people.

A Ring spokesperson has said the Search Party technology is “not capable of processing human biometrics.”

Even so, the underlying concept is not far from what Flock offers. Using footage from Flock cameras, government and police partners can run natural-language searches across video feeds to locate individuals matching specific descriptions. When law enforcement uses these kinds of AI tools, studies and reporting have shown they can worsen existing racial bias.

Ring itself introduced a facial recognition feature in December called “Familiar Faces.” The tool allows customers to save and label faces of frequent visitors, so a notification might read “Mom at Front Door” instead of the more generic “a person is at your door.”

The push to market consumer-facing face recognition is happening at a moment in the U.S. when concerns about mass surveillance are especiallygreath. ICE has used similar facial recognition approaches — supported by companies like Clearview AI — as part of its efforts to locate individuals during large-scale deportation operations.

Even though the Flock partnership is no longer moving forward, Ring still offers customers ways to share footage with police if they choose. Ring does this partly through a partnership with Axon, a company that operates in a similar space to Flock.

Ring has also faced scrutiny in the past over how securely it protects customer video. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission ordered Ring to pay $5.8 million over allegations that employees and contractors had broad access to customer videos for years.