Amazon Scraps Partnership with Surveillance Company After Super Bowl Ad Backlash

Kawish Hussain

February 16, 2026

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Amazon’s smart doorbell maker Ring has terminated a partnership with police surveillance tech company Flock Safety, following backlash from a Super Bowl ad.

Ring Just Killed Its Flock Deal and Honestly It's Because You Lost It

So I had to laugh when Ring announced they were canceling their partnership with Flock Safety on February 12th. The official reason they gave was that the integration "would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated." Translation: we got absolutely roasted online and decided to bounce.

Here's what actually happened. Back in October 2025, Ring and Flock Safety were like cool, let's team up. Flock operates thousands of license plate readers across the US and runs a whole surveillance network. Ring wanted to integrate that with their Community Requests feature so cops could ask you for your doorbell footage through Flock's system.

Then came Super Bowl Sunday. Ring ran this 30-second ad for their Search Party feature. Basically it shows a bunch of Ring cameras scanning a neighborhood looking for a lost dog using AI. Everyone immediately looked at that and went "so this is how they track people, got it." People started freaking out. The backlash was nuclear.

Suddenly senators like Ed Markey are sending open letters asking Amazon to kill Ring's facial recognition features. Privacy groups are losing their minds. Influencers are telling people to smash their Ring cameras. It got bad. And Ring's response was to quietly kill the Flock deal and say it was too much work. Sure, Ring.

Here's the thing though. The integration never actually launched so no videos were ever shared with Flock. That's actually true. But Ring still has Community Requests running with their Axon partnership so cops can still ask for your footage. And Search Party is still live and working. And Ring still has facial recognition built in.

The real issue is what Ring could do with these tools combined. They've got cameras scanning your whole neighborhood through Search Party. They've got facial recognition through Familiar Faces. Those two things together are basically a human tracking system if you think about it. And that's what scared people.

Flock itself is still out there doing their thing. They're monitoring billions of license plates every month across the US. They got caught up in immigration enforcement drama with ICE but they claim they don't directly partner with federal agencies. Local police departments do though. And those departments can share Flock data with whoever they want. So the chain of custody gets murky real fast.

What's wild is Ring tried to spin this like they were being responsible the whole time. They pointed out that Community Requests helped solve the Brown University shooting in December 2025. Seven neighbors shared 168 videos and it helped identify a witness. That actually works. I get it. But privacy advocates are saying the same tool could be used against vulnerable people.

The backlash to this whole thing actually worked though. Ring canceled Flock. People pushed back and something changed. The question is whether that same energy can stay focused because Ring isn't actually stopping any of this surveillance infrastructure. They're just not using Flock for it anymore.

What you need to know:

Ring killed the Flock partnership on Feb 12 after massive public backlash

The integration never went live so zero customer videos were shared

Ring's Search Party and Familiar Faces features are still running

Community Requests still work with Axon for police video requests

Flock still operates nationwide license plate readers and surveillance cameras

You can opt out of Community Requests in the Ring app if you want

This is technically a win but the underlying surveillance infrastructure is still intact