How a Cute Dog Commercial Revealed Amazon's Surveillance Network
First off, most people don't even know that Amazon (AMZN 0.00%↑) owns Ring.
On Super Bowl Sunday, Amazon’s Ring debuted a 30-second ad for a new feature called “Search Party.” The pitch was simple and heartwarming: 10 million pets go missing every year, so Ring built an AI-powered tool that taps into a network of opted-in doorbell cameras to help find lost dogs.
The internet didn’t buy it.
Within hours, the ad went viral for all the wrong reasons.
One TikTok calling the commercial “terrifying” racked up over 3 million views. Critics flooded social media, with one person calling it “the quiet rollout of a national surveillance regime.”
Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts posted bluntly on X: “This definitely isn’t about dogs — it’s about mass surveillance.”
Four days later, Amazon quietly announced that Ring was ending its partnership with Flock Safety, a controversial police surveillance company.
What Was this Police Partnership?
In October 2025, Ring partnered with Flock Safety, a company best known for building one of the largest automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks in the country. Flock operates over 80,000 AI-powered cameras across 49 states, performing more than 20 billion vehicle scans per month. Their technology doesn’t just snap photos of license plates, it logs the make, model, color, bumper stickers, and even dents on vehicles, creating a searchable database available to thousands of law enforcement agencies in real time, often without warrants.
The plan was for Ring to integrate Flock’s technology into its existing Community Requests feature, which allows police departments to ask Ring owners to voluntarily share doorbell footage for active investigations. The Flock partnership would have taken this a step further, linking Amazon’s massive consumer camera network with law enforcement surveillance infrastructure.
The integration never actually launched. But the Super Bowl ad showed the world exactly what a networked AI-powered camera system could do making millions of people suddenly realize what was being built.
The timing of the Ring backlash collided with a much larger reckoning around Flock Safety itself.
Throughout 2025, investigations into Flock’s ALPR network revealed a pattern of systemic abuse. After obtaining datasets representing over 12 million searches from more than 3,900 agencies, investigations found that police used Flock cameras to track protesters at political demonstrations, target Romani people with discriminatory and sometimes slur-laden searches, and surveil women seeking reproductive healthcare.
This Isn’t Just an Amazon Problem — It’s a Big Tech Problem
The Ring-Flock debacle is just the latest chapter in a much longer story: as tech companies grow bigger, their capacity for surveillance grows with them, and the line between corporate data collection and government surveillance gets thinner every year.
Consider the scale. An estimated 27% of American households now have doorbell cameras. Google processes 8.5 billion searches per day. Meta collects data not just from Facebook and Instagram, but from millions of third-party websites through tracking pixels. When a Times of London journalist requested her personal data from Meta in 2024, she received back 20,000 pages including thousands of interactions with websites and apps that had no direct connection to her Meta accounts.
The business model driving all of this is what Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff famously called “surveillance capitalism.” These companies don’t charge you for their products because you are the product. In 2023, advertising revenue accounted for nearly 98% of Meta’s revenue and 77% of Alphabet’s (Google’s parent company). They cannot meaningfully reduce data collection without destroying the economic engine that sustains them.
Governments Are Happy to Use What Big Tech Collects
Between 2014 and 2024, Google, Meta, and Apple collectively shared data from over 3.16 million user accounts with U.S. law enforcement agencies and that figure excludes secret requests made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Over that decade, Google saw a 530% increase in accounts shared with authorities, Meta experienced a 675% surge, and Apple’s disclosures climbed 621%.
This isn’t exclusively an American phenomenon. German authorities saw a 2,484% increase in data requests to Big Tech over the same period. France, the UK, and other Fourteen Eyes intelligence-sharing nations have all ramped up requests dramatically.
The pattern is consistent: these companies build massive data collection infrastructure to serve ads, and governments then leverage that infrastructure for surveillance. Ring doorbell cameras were designed to help people see who’s at their front door. License plate readers were sold as tools to recover stolen cars. AI pet-finding features were marketed to reunite families with lost dogs. But each of these tools also captures the movements, faces, and daily patterns of everyone in the vicinity.
In 2022, The Verge reported that police departments could request emergency access to Ring footage without owners’ permission or even a warrant. Amazon faced backlash and announced it would end the practice. Then in 2025, the company partnered with Flock Safety and Axon Enterprises, two leading police surveillance companies, to build new pathways for law enforcement to access the same data.
Meanwhile, the Nancy Guthrie case which broke the same week as the Ring Super Bowl ad showed the other side of the coin. The FBI recovered footage from Guthrie’s Google Nest doorbell camera that she believed had been deleted because she didn’t pay for a cloud storage subscription. FBI Director Kash Patel said the bureau was able to “excavate material” from private companies’ systems. For many Americans, this raised a fundamental question: if you stop paying for cloud storage, is your data actually gone? And if law enforcement can recover it anyway, what does “deletion” even mean?
Where Does This Leave Us?
Ring’s decision to cut ties with Flock Safety is a rare win for privacy advocates, but it’s a limited one. Ring’s Community Requests feature (the tool that lets police ask for doorbell footage) remains active and is described by the company as “core” to its mission. Amazon still has an ongoing partnership with Axon, another major police surveillance company. And Search Party, the feature that started the whole firestorm, remains live and available.
The broader structural problem hasn’t changed. Big Tech companies are building the most comprehensive surveillance infrastructure in human history, not because they set out to create a surveillance state, but because the same technology that finds your lost dog can also track your neighbor. The same facial recognition that unlocks your phone can identify protesters at a rally. The same data pipeline that serves you targeted ads can tell a government agency where you drove last Tuesday.
Every time these companies get bigger, the surveillance apparatus gets bigger with them. And every time the public pushes back, as they did after the Ring Super Bowl ad, the companies make a tactical retreat while the underlying infrastructure continues to expand.
The lost dog was the sales pitch. The network was always the product.
Amazon’s Stock
What’s funny is AMZN 0.00%↑ stock has now fallen for 9 consecutive trading days. The last time it fell 9 days in a row was almost 20 years ago. Between a surveillance backlash and a cratering stock price, it hasn't been a great month in Bezos-land.