Nilay Patel

It's about mass surveillance.'"

And then on Thursday, February 12th, just four days after the Super Bowl, Ring announced that it was canceling its partnership with Flock in a statement first reported by The Verge's Jen Toohey.

That statement is itself a lot.

Ring says, quote, 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.

Ring, in this statement, also goes on to say that Ring cameras were used by police in identifying a school shooter at Brown University in December 2025.

That'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.

As it happens, Ring's founder, Jamie Siminoff, was just on Decoder 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.

And we actually talked about Dog 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 its work with law enforcement.

But ever since he's come back, the emphasis on crime and the work with police has only intensified.

I asked him about it.

Amazon said, we're going to stop working with police.

You came back.

Boy, Ring is going to work with police again, right?

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?