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By Chris Walker / Truthout
Ring, the doorbell and security systems company owned by Amazon, announced last week it was canceling its partnership with surveillance company Flock Security following immense backlash to a Super Bowl commercial touting its artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
The integration with Flock was first announced in October. Ring released a statement on February 12 stating that the planned partnership with the company “would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated.”
“We therefore made the joint decision to cancel the integration and continue with our current partners,” Ring added on its website, further stating that the partnership between the two companies “never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.
The timing of the announcement, though, came within a week of Ring’s controversial Super Bowl ad.
Within the spot, which aired to an audience of more than 120 million people, Ring touts its AI technology as being able to help find lost dogs using its doorbell cameras. The feel-good advertisement was quickly viewed with skepticism, as people noted that the tech could be used to provide information on humans to police departments or federal agencies, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Indeed, Flock, which sells its surveillance tech to police departments around the country, already sees its dragnet used by federal immigration agents, even at times in violation of the law.The company has helped corporations make “watch lists” against labor and social movement organizers.
“We already know [Ring has] a form cops can fill out to get access to footage without warrant or permission in an ‘emergency’ as determined by them. What will this mean for new features?” surveillance and policing expert Matthew Guariglia explained.
Importantly, the announcement that the two companies wouldn’t integrate with each other doesn’t negate the fact that Ring already utilizes biometric identification into its products, including in features like “Familiar Faces.”
“It doesn’t take much to imagine Ring eventually combining these two features: face recognition and neighborhood searches,” read a statement last week from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit group that aims to defend civil liberties and rights of people in the digital world.
Experts are also skeptical that Ring will not try to bring Flock back into its fold sometime in the future. The Amazon-based company partners with other security companies, like Taser and body camera company Axon, through which it runs a program that allows law enforcement access to Ring footage. The program is similar to a prior one run independently by Ring that allowed police to request videos, which was shut down after backlash.
“Customers of Ring and the bystanders their cameras surveil have reason to distrust the company’s assurances” from last week, Dave Maass, director of investigations at EFF, said in an email to Truthout.
“Ring has a long history of privacy failures and violations that go back years before it announced its partnership with Flock,” Maass added. “Furthermore, surveillance companies like Ring have previously made promises amid public pressure only to backtrack later.”
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Chris Walker
Chris Walker is a news writer at Truthout, and is based out of Madison, Wisconsin. Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues of the day and their impact on the American people. He can be found on Twitter: @thatchriswalker