Amazon has dropped plans to partner its Ring doorbell cameras with the police surveillance tech company Flock Safety, the companies said Thursday, days after Amazon aired a controversial ad for Ring that some viewed as depicting the technology as a threat to privacy.
The deal, which the companies announced in October, would have given Ring customers the option to share video from their doorbell cameras with police in some instances through a program called Community Requests. It had yet to launch.
Amazon aired a Super Bowl ad Sunday touting a feature similar to Community Requests, called Search Party, that would allow Ring users to share their doorbell video to help find lost dogs. It prompted significant online blowback from people who noted that the same cameras, which can be paired with facial recognition technology, can be used to track people. That program was unrelated to Flock.
Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., wrote an open letter to Amazon about the commercial, calling the technology “creepy.”
Both Flock and Amazon confirmed the planned partnership had been canceled and framed the decision as mutual.
“We can confirm that Flock’s intended integration with Community Requests has been cancelled,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an email. “This integration was never live, and no videos were ever shared between these services. Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made the joint decision to cancel the integration.”
Flock announced on its website that “the planned integration between Flock and Ring’s Community Request tool has been canceled. The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock.
“We believe this decision allows both companies to best serve their respective customers and communities. Flock remains dedicated to supporting law enforcement agencies with tools that are fully configurable to local laws and policies, and we continue to engage directly with public officials and community leaders,” the site said.
Flock has become one of the most dominant law enforcement surveillance companies in the country. It is best known for its network of thousands of license plate reader cameras scattered across the U.S., which record and identify cars and by their license plates in real time as they pass.
Unlike other police tech companies, Flock uses the video to create a centralized database and lets participating police officers around the country track vehicles’ movements without warrants. Controversy over that access — as well as fears that local police can share Flock information with federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has led some cities and towns to cancel their Flock contracts.
Doorbell cameras have steadily become common across the U.S., with an estimated 27% of American households now using them, the consumer technology market research firm Parks Associates told NBC News. Ring is by far the most popular doorbell camera, Parks found.
Amazon still has an ongoing contract that partners its Community Requests feature with Axon, another leading police surveillance company.
