Nilay Patel

And Ring, in particular, has always been proud of its cooperation with law enforcement, which has raised big questions about civil rights.

Especially because Ring had proudly announced a partnership with a company called Flock Safety, whose systems have been accessed by ICE.

There's some complication to that.

We'll come back to it.

Anyway, the backlash to that ring ad was swift, intense, and effective.

The data company Peak Metrics says conversation about the ad on social media platforms like X actually hit a high two days after the Super Bowl.

And the vibes, as they measured them, were strikingly negative.

I mean, you know it's bad when Matt Nelson, who runs We Rate Dogs, is posting things like this.

Senator Ed Markey called the ad dystopian and said it was proof that Amazon, which owns Ring, needed to cease all facial recognition technology on Ring doorbells.

He said, quote, "'This definitely isn't about dogs.

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.