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{“topic”: “Ring’s Controversial Super Bowl Ad and the Surveillance Debate”, “body”: “<h5>Introduction</h5>\n<p>Today, let’s talk about the camera company Ring, lost dogs, and the surveillance state. You probably saw this ad during the Super Bowl a couple of weekends ago:</p>\n<div class=\"youtube-embed\"><iframe title=\"Search Party from Ring | Be A Hero In Your Neighborhood\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/OheUzrXsKrY?rel=0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"accelerometer *; clipboard-write *; encrypted-media *; gyroscope *; picture-in-picture *; web-share *;\"></iframe></div>\n\n<h5>The Backlash</h5>\n<p>Since it aired for a massive audience at the Super Bowl, Ring’s Search Party commercial has become a lightning rod for controversy — it’s easy to see how the same technology that can find lost dogs can be used to find people, and then used to invade our privacy in all kinds of uncomfortable ways, by cops and regular people alike.</p>\n<p>Ring in particular has always been proud of its cooperation with law enforcement. That raises big questions about our civil rights, especially since Ring announced a partnership last fall with a company called Flock Safety, whose systems have been accessed by ICE. There’s some complication to that — we’ll come back to it in a bit.</p>\n\n<h5>Public Reaction</h5>\n<p>The backlash to Ring’s Super Bowl ad was swift, intense, and effective: the data company PeakMetrics says conversation about the ad on social platforms like X actually peaked two days after the Super Bowl, and the vibes, as they measured them, were strikingly negative. I mean, you know it’s bad when Matt Nelson, who runs the weratedogs account, is posting videos like this:</p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-instagram wp-block-embed-instagram\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"instagram-media\" data-instgrm-permalink=\"https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUlye8NETR3/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading\" data-instgrm-version=\"14\"><div> <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUlye8NETR3/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading\" target=\"_blank\"> <div> <div></div> <div> <div></div> <div></div></div></div><div></div> <div></div><div> <div>View this post on Instagram</div></div><div></div> <div><div> <div></div> <div></div> <div></div></div><div> <div></div> <div></div></div><div> <div></div> <div></div> <div></div></div></div> <div> <div></div> <div></div></div></a></div></blockquote>\n</div></figure>\n\n<h5>Political Concerns</h5>\n<p>Sen. Ed Markey called the ad “dystopian” and said it was proof Amazon, which owns Ring, needed to cease all facial recognition technology on Ring doorbells. He said, “This definitely isn’t about dogs — it’s about mass surveillance.”</p>\n<p>And then, on Thursday, February 12th, just four days after the Super Bowl, Ring announced it was canceling its partnership with Flock, in a statement first reported by <em>The Verge</em>’s Jen Tuohy. That statement itself is a lot:</p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration. The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<h5>Ring’s Mission</h5>\n<p>The company also goes on to say that Ring cameras were used by police in identifying a school shooter at Brown University in December 2025. It’s an odd non sequitur in a press release about canceling a controversial partnership that really explains a lot about Ring, and how the company sees itself.</p>\n<p>As it happens, Ring’s founder Jamie Siminoff was just on <em>Decoder</em> a few months ago, talking about how and why he founded the company, and in detail about why he sees Ring’s mission as eliminating crime. Not selling cameras or doorbells, or floodlights, or anything else Ring makes, but getting rid of crime.</p>\n\n<h5>AI and Surveillance</h5>\n<p>We actually talked about Search Party and how people might feel about that kind of surveillance, and how Ring works with the cops quite a bit. In fact, Jamie briefly left Ring in 2023, and the company slowed down on its work with law enforcement. But ever since he returned, the emphasis on crime and the work with police has only intensified. I asked him about it:</p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><strong>NILAY PATEL:</strong> You left, Amazon said we’re going to stop working with police, you came back, boy, Ring is going to work with police again. You have a partnership with Axon, which makes the taser, that allows law enforcement to get access to Ring footage. Did that feel like a two-way door? They made the wrong decision in your absence, and you came back and said, “We’re going to do this again”?</p>\n\n<p><strong>JAMIE SIMINOFF:</strong> I don’t know if it’s wrong or right, but I think different leadership does different things. I do believe that I spent a lot of time going on ride-alongs. I spent a lot of time in areas that I’d say are not safe for those people, and I’ve seen a lot of things where I think we can positively impact them. So, we don’t work with police in the way of … I just want to be careful, as we’re not … What we do allow is for agencies to ask for footage when something happens. We allow our neighbors, which I’ll say in this point are our customers, just to be clear, we allow our customers to anonymously decide whether or not they want to partake in that.</p>\n\n<p>So, if they decide they don’t want to be part of this network and don’t want to help this public service agency that asks them, they just say no. If they decide that they do want to, which, by the way, a lot of people want to increase the security of their neighborhoods. A lot of people want their kids to grow up in safer neighborhoods, a lot of people want to have the tools to do that, and are in places that are dangerous. We give them the ability to say yes and make it more efficient for them to communicate with those public service agencies, and also do it in a very auditable digital format.</p>\n\n<p>That’s the other side. Today, without these tools, if a police officer wanted to go and get footage from something, they’d have to go and knock on the door and ask you, and that’s not comfortable for anyone. There’s no digital audit trail of it, and, with this, they can do it efficiently with an audit trail. It is very clear, and it’s anonymous.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<h5>The Role of AI</h5>\n<p>Jamie actually talked a lot about searching for dogs in this context, because one of the reasons he was so excited to come back to Ring was to use AI to search through the massive amounts of video generated by Ring cameras. In fact, he told me that Ring could not have built Search Party five years ago, because AI systems to do it weren’t available.</p>\n<p>Jamie is nothing if not direct about this, which I appreciate. The man really thinks you can use AI and cameras to reduce or even eliminate crime. But I had a lot of questions about this:</p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><strong>JAIME SIMINOFF:</strong> But when you put AI into it, now, all of a sudden, you have this human element that AI gives you. I think, with our products in neighborhoods and, again, you have to be a little bit specific to it, I do see a path where we can actually start to take down crime in a neighborhood to call it close to zero. And I even said, there are some crimes that you can’t stop, of course.</p>\n\n<p><strong>NILAY PATEL:</strong> Mechanically, walk people through what you mean. You put enough Ring products in a neighborhood, and then AI does what to them that helps you get closer to the mission of zeroing out crime?</p>\n\n<p>So, the mental model, or how I look at it, is that AI allows us to have … If you had a neighborhood where you had unlimited resources, so every house had security guards and those security guards were people that worked the same house for 10 years or 20 years, and I mean that from a knowledge perspective. So, the knowledge they had of that house was extreme; they knew everything about you and that residence and your family, how you lived, the

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