After intense backlash over its partnership with Flock Safety, a tracking technology company that works with law enforcement, Ring announced it was canceling the integration.
In a statement posted on Ringo’s blog and provided The Verge prior to the release, the company said: “After a comprehensive review, we determined that the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made a joint decision to cancel the integration and continue with our current partners… The integration never went live, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.”
The statement went on to say that Ring’s mission to make neighborhoods safer “comes with significant responsibility—to our customers, the communities we serve, and the trust you place in our products and features.”
Trust is the greatest there. Over the past few weeks, the company has faced significant public anger over its association with Flock, with Ring users being urged to smash their cameras and some taking to social media to announce that they were throwing away their Ring devices.
The Flock partnership was announced last October, but public pressure against Amazon-owned Ring’s involvement in the company has begun to mount following recent nationwide unrest related to ICE activities.
Flock allegedly gave ICE and other federal agencies access to its surveillance camera network, and social media influencers claimed Ring provided a direct connection to ICE.
While this claim is not accurate, as the Flock integration never took place, Ring has a history of partnering with the police, and the new partnership quickly came under heavy criticism.
Adding fuel to the fire, this weekend Ring aired a Super Bowl ad for its new AI-powered Search Party feature. While the company says the feature is designed to find lost dogs and says it can’t find people, the ad raised concerns that the Ring cameras were being used for mass surveillance. The ad shows dozens of Ring cameras in the neighborhood scanning the streets.
Additionally, the company recently launched a new facial recognition feature, Familiar Faces. Combined with Search Party, the technological leap to using neighborhood cameras to search for people through a mass surveillance network suddenly seems very small.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) — a longtime Ringo critic — sent an open letter this week calling on Amazon to scrap the company’s facial recognition feature.
Ring spokesman Yassi Yarger said in an email that its products are purpose-driven technologies, “not tools for mass surveillance.” She added that “Familiar Faces is an optional feature designed to give customers more control over the alerts they receive (eg ‘Mom at the front door’ instead of ‘Someone at the front door’) while protecting their data.”
Why did Ring team up with Flock?
Ring’s partnership with Flock was announced in October 2025 as part of Ring’s Community Requests program, which launched last September. It was designed to allow local law enforcement agencies that use Flock software to integrate directly with the program.
The Community Requests service was launched after Ring ended its controversial Requests for Assistance (RFA) program, which consumer advocacy groups criticized for allowing video to be provided to police without a warrant, calling it a threat to civil liberties.
In its cancellation statement, Flock Ring says Community Requests will continue and claims it helped authorities find a suspect during the recent shooting at Brown University:
“When a shooting occurred near Brown University in December 2025, every second counted. The Providence Police Department reached out to its community for help. Within hours, 7 neighbors responded and shared 168 videos that captured critical moments from the incident. One video identified a key new witness that helped lead police to identify the suspect’s vehicle and solve the case. The community shooter decided that neighbor will be insecure. essential role in neutralizing the threat and restoring the security of their community.”
As with RFA, Community Requests still allows public safety agencies to request video from users in a certain area during an active investigation, but it differs from the previous program in that law enforcement agencies are required to work with a third-party evidence management system — such as Flock — to use the service. Ring says this is to better maintain the supply chain. The previous system allowed police to request footage directly from the user.
Flock was the second partner Ring announced for Community Requests, the first being Axon, a law enforcement technology company known for making tasers. With the new service, only law enforcement agencies that use these companies’ software can submit requests. But the bottom line is the same: law enforcement gets video from users if they choose to share it.
Ring spokesman Yassi Yarger says the Axon partnership is not affected by the end of the Flock integration. Beyond that, he says no other integrations are currently being explored.