Amazon has dropped plans to partner its Ring doorbell cameras with police surveillance tech company Flock Safety, after a controversial Super Bowl ad.
Amazon and Flock Safety framed the decision as mutual. It comes less than a week after an ad prompted concern that Ring cameras may track people too aggressively. Ring security cameras are displayed on a shelf at a Target store on June 01, 2023 in Novato, California.
Amazon has dropped plans to partner its Ring doorbell cameras with police surveillance tech company Flock Safety, the companies said Thursday, days afterin October, would have given Ring customers the option to share footage from their doorbell cameras with police in some instances through a program called Community Requests, but it had yet to launch.touting a similar feature to Community Requests, called Search Party, that would allow Ring users to share their doorbell footage to help find lost dogs. It prompted significant online blowback from people who noted that the same cameras, which can be paired with facial recognition technology, can be used to track people. That program was unrelated to Flock. Both Flock and Amazon confirmed the planned partnership had been canceled and framed the decision as mutual. “We can confirm that Flock’s intended integration with Community Requests has been cancelled,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an email. “This integration was never live, and no videos were ever shared between these services. Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made the joint decision to cancel the integration.”, Flock announced that “the planned integration between Flock and Ring’s Community Request tool has been canceled. The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock.”“We believe this decision allows both companies to best serve their respective customers and communities. Flock remains dedicated to supporting law enforcement agencies with tools that are fully configurable to local laws and policies, and we continue to engage directly with public officials and community leaders,” the site said. Flock has become one of the most dominant law enforcement surveillance companies in the country. It is best known for its network of thousands of license plate reader cameras scattered across the U.S., which record and identify cars and by their license plates in real time as they pass. Anyone who owns an Amazon Ring doorbell provides consent for the device to record anyone who comes to the door - footage that could also capture neighbors' property. And clips from Amazon's Ring doorbells can be sent to law enforcement, an element of surveillance that causes concern for PhD candidate Lauren Bridges at the University of Pennsylvania. Unlike other police tech companies, Flock uses that footage to create a centralized database and lets participating police officers around the country track vehicles’ movements without a warrant. Controversy over that access — as well asDoorbell cameras have steadily become common across the U.S., with an estimated 27% of American households now using them, the consumer technology market research firm Parks Associates told NBC News. Ring is by far the most popular doorbell camera, Parks found.
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