Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
What does it really mean to be a neighbor? It's just everyday people. You know, it's just people who are retired. They have a couple hours in the afternoon, so they're going to do patrols. And it's people who are, you know, real estate agents driving around, like trying to track how ICE is moving and alert neighbors when things are not safe. The rise of mutual aid in times of crisis.
That's this week on Explain It To Me. New episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.
Today, let's talk about the camera company Ring, lost dogs, and the surveillance state. Hello, and welcome to Decoder.
Chapter 2: How did Ring's Search Party commercial become controversial?
I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. You probably saw this ad during the Super Bowl a couple weekends ago.
This is Milo. Pets are family. But every year, 10 million go missing. And the way we look for them hasn't changed in years. Until now. One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family.
Chapter 3: What are the privacy concerns surrounding Ring's technology?
Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now. Join the neighborhood at ring.com.
Since it aired for a massive audience at the Super Bowl, Ring's search party commercial has become a lightning rod for controversy. It's easy to see how the same technology that can be used to find lost dogs can also be used to find people, and then used to invade our privacy in all kinds of uncomfortable ways, by cops and regular people alike.
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.
Chapter 4: How has Ring responded to backlash against its surveillance practices?
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.
Neither Ring's products nor business model are built around finding lost pets, but rather creating a lucrative mass surveillance network by turning private homes into surveillance outposts and well-meaning neighbors into informants for ICE and other government agencies.
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.
Chapter 5: What role does AI play in Ring's crime prevention strategy?
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.
Chapter 6: How does Ring's partnership with law enforcement impact civil rights?
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?
Like you just made the wrong decision in your absence and you came back and said, we're going to do this again?
Yeah.
I don't know if it's wrong or right. I think different leadership does different things.
Chapter 7: What are the implications of using AI for neighborhood safety?
I do believe that I spent a lot of time going on ride-alongs. I spent a lot of times in areas that I'd say are not safe. And for those people, and I've seen a lot of things where I think we can impact it in a positive way. And so we don't work with police in the way of like, it's, you know, I just want to be careful. It's like, we're not...
what we do allow is that we allow agencies to ask for footage when something happens, and we allow our neighbors, which I'll say in this point, customers, just to be clear, we allow our customers to anonymously decide whether or not they want to partake in that.
So if they decide they don't want to be part of this sort of network and don't want to help this public service agency that asked them, they just say no. If they decide that they do want to, which By the way, a lot of people do want to increase the security of their neighborhoods. A lot of people do want their kids to grow up in safer neighborhoods.
Chapter 8: How can technology be balanced with privacy and civil liberties?
A lot of people want to have the tools to do that and are in places that are dangerous. We give them the ability to say yes and make that more efficient for them to communicate with those public service agencies and also do it in a very auditable manner.
You know, with a digital audit, like that's the other side is that today, without these tools, if you wanted to have, you know, if a police officer wanted to go and get footage from something, they'd have to go and knock on the door and ask you. And that's not comfortable for anyone. It's also there's no digital audit trail of it.
And with this, they can do it efficiently, but there's also an audit trail. It's very clear and it's anonymous.
Jamie actually talked a lot about searching for dogs in this context, because one of the reasons he was so excited to come back to Ring was to use AI to search through the massive amounts of video generated by Ring cameras. In fact, he told me that Ring could not have built Dog Search five years ago, because AI systems to do it weren't available.
Jimmy is nothing if not direct about this, which I appreciate. The man really thinks you can use AI in cameras to reduce or even eliminate crime. But I had a lot of questions about this.
But when you put AI into it, now all of a sudden you have this like human element that AI gives you. I think with our products in neighborhoods, and again, this is like, you have to be a little bit specific to it. I do see a path to get where we can actually start to get to where like, yeah, we're take down crime in a neighborhood to call it close to zero.
And I even said there are some crimes that you can't stop, of course.
Mechanically walk people through what you mean. you put enough ring products in a neighborhood and then AI does what to them that helps you get closer to the mission of zero crime?
The mental model or how I look at it is that AI allows us to have, if you had a security, if you had a neighborhood where you had call it unlimited resources. So every, every house had security guards and those security guards were people that worked the same house for 10 years or 20 years. And I mean that from a knowledge perspective. So the knowledge they had of that house was extreme.
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