Super Bowl Flop: Ring Now Ending Surveillance Deal with Flock Safety

It seems like you can't swing a cat by the tail anymore without hitting some kind of surveillance camera. Heck, we live out in the middle of nowhere, or at least, you can see the middle of nowhere from our house - and we have them. No, I'm not telling you where, but we've got good coverage, even if most of the time the movement they pick up is a moose. These things are a distinctly mixed blessing, as they are a valuable tool for cops in identifying goblins as suspects for various crimes. On the other hand, we're placing a lot of trust in some of the monitoring of these things by the various companies that offer them.

Sometimes, as I wrote on Monday, these companies are asking a little too much.

Now, the Ring Camera people have cut ties over the backlash they received from the spy network ad, and that's probably appropriate. One X user called it a "self-own," and he's right.

This has gotta be one of the biggest self-owns in advertising history. You literally spend millions of dollars for a 30-second Super Bowl spot to tell everyone you're spying on them, immediately destroying your brand reputation and unpending your business model. pic.twitter.com/3xa7jVLmdR
— Isaac Saul (@Ike_Saul) February 13, 2026

Business Insider has more.

Many viewers found Ring's Super Bowl ad more creepy than cute. Days after after it aired, Ring is now canceling a controversial contract that came under scrutiny amid the backlash.
The smart doorbell company owned by Amazon ran a commercial during the Super Bowl featuring its dog-finding feature, Search Party. What was meant to pull at the heartstrings — what's cuter than a young girl reunited with her lost dog? — turned into public pushback as people voiced surveillance concerns.
Some social media brought attention to Ring's coming partnership with Flock Safety, a company with ties to law enforcement agencies. Four days after the Super Bowl, Ring announced that the integration "would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated."
With that, the Ring and Flock partnership was put to bed.

Yeah, that's probably for the best.

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The whole thing was originally intended to help people find their lost mutts, or at least, that's how it was advertised. But the very idea of linking an entire neighborhood's cameras together, or an entire town's cameras, that's probably not going to fly with most people. The questions I raised on Monday still apply: Who has access to this? Who can be trusted with access to this? What other purposes, besides tracking lost pooches, might this tech be put to? It seems like there are a lot of bad actors who may want to pay a lot of money for someone in this Flock Security to have a quick look at a few properties within the range of their coverage.

This was never a good idea. It's a good thing that the Ring people saw the writing on that wall, even if it was through one of their cameras. If a consumer wants to put cameras on their own property, fine. But linking them together into a centrally controlled spy cam network? No. That's Big Brother stuff.

And, honestly, not even Batman can be trusted with this kind of thing.

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