Ring, the Amazon home-security division, ran one of the most-liked ads during Super Bowl LX: a spot promoting Search Party, a feature that helps people find lost dogs using AI to scan opt-in footage from Ring cameras in a neighborhood.
Many viewers found Ring’s Search Party canine-finding ad heartwarming. Others, however, were alarmed at the surveillance implications of such a feature — and amid a growing backlash, Ring has announced that it was ending its partnership with Flock Safety, a company that enables users to share information with law enforcement agencies.
“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,” Ring said in a statement released Thursday.
According to Ring, the “integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.”
Ring and Flock Safety in October 2025 announced plans to work together to let Ring owners “securely and privately share helpful video footage with local public safety agencies during an active investigation — only if they choose to.”
The Search Party dog-finding tool that Ring promoted in its Super Bowl commercial remains available (and free to anyone to use). Ring says it built the feature with “strong privacy protections” and that users can decide on a case-by-case basis whether they want to share videos with a pet owner who initiates a Search Party request.
“Before Search Party, the best you could do was drive up and down the neighborhood, shouting your dog’s name in hopes of finding them,” Ring chief inventor Jamie Siminoff said in a press release accompanying the Super Bowl ad. “Now, pet owners can mobilize the whole community — and communities are empowered to help — to find lost pets more effectively than ever before.”
Ring also announced that it was committing $1 million to equip animal shelters across the U.S. with Ring camera systems that can be used with Search Party.
Image showing Ring’s Search Party feature for finding lost pets using user-provided camera footage in a neighborhood
Courtesy of Ring
In addition, Ring said that Community Requests remain “a core feature of Ring’s mission.” Users can opt to share specific videos with local police in response to requests for help with active investigations. According to Ring, every Community Request is publicly posted and searchable “for complete transparency and auditability.”
“We remain focused on building tools that empower neighbors to help one another while maintaining strong privacy protections and transparency about how our features work,” Ring said in the statement Thursday. “We’ll continue to carefully evaluate future partnerships to ensure they align with our standards for customer trust, safety, and privacy.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, was among those slamming Ring’s “surveillance” capabilities as a threat to privacy.
“No one, including our furry friends, will be safer in Ring’s surveillance nightmare,” Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at EFF, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “The addition of AI-driven biometric identification is the latest entry in the company’s history of profiting off of public safety worries and disregard for individual privacy, one that turbocharges the extreme dangers of allowing this to carry on. People need to reject this kind of disingenuous framing and recognize the potential end result: a scary overreach of the surveillance state designed to catch us all in its net.”
Amazon acquired Ring for $839 million in 2018. “Our mission is simple: make neighborhoods safer,” Ring says on its website. “As a smart security company, we strive to make safety and peace of mind accessible to everyone and empower communities to work together for one another.”
Watch the Ring “Search Party” ad, which has been viewed more than 4 million times on YouTube to date: