Amazon scraps partnership with surveillance company after Super Bowl ad backlash
Amazon's smart doorbell maker, Ring, has terminated a partnership with police surveillance tech company Flock Safety, following a controversial Super Bowl ad that sparked public outrage. The ad, featuring a lost dog found through a network of cameras, raised concerns about a dystopian surveillance society.
Despite the backlash, Ring's announcement doesn't cite the ad as a reason for the cancellation. Instead, it states that the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated, and never launched. Flock Safety confirmed that it never received Ring customer videos and that the decision to end the integration was mutual, allowing both companies to better serve their respective customers.
Flock Safety is one of the nation's largest operators of automated license-plate reading systems, with cameras mounted in thousands of communities across the U.S. However, the company has faced public outcry over its involvement with the Trump administration's aggressive immigration enforcement efforts. Flock maintains that it does not partner with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and does not contract out with any subagency of the Department of Homeland Security for direct access to its cameras.
Beyond the Flock partnership, Amazon has faced other surveillance concerns over its Ring doorbell cameras. The Super Bowl ad, which depicted a lost dog being tracked by cameras using artificial intelligence, drew criticism for its sinister portrayal. Viewers expressed fears that the feature could be used to track humans, leading to calls for the feature's deactivation.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital technology and civil liberties, warned that the potential loss of privacy should concern Americans. They highlighted Ring's integration of biometric identification, such as face recognition, and expressed concern about the potential combination of this technology with neighborhood searches.
Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts also urged Amazon to discontinue its 'Familiar Faces' technology, citing public opposition to Ring's constant monitoring and invasive image recognition algorithms.
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