Amazon's Ring ends deal with surveillance firm after backlash

Ring/Courtesy

Amazon's smart doorbell company is dropping a partnership with a firm known for its surveillance services, after facing scrutiny over its privacy practices.

The decision cancels a deal announced in October between Amazon's Ring and Flock Safety, a firm that operates a network of cameras and license plate readers in the US used primarily by police and law enforcement agencies.

The agreement would have allowed agencies working with Flock to retrieve video captured on Ring devices, if needed for investigations and allowed by customers.

The decision not to move forward came days after a Ring advertisement aired during the Super Bowl sparked widespread backlash for being "creepy".

In its announcement, Ring said it had realised that the Flock partnership would have taken up "significantly more time and resources than anticipated".

It added that the integration of its cameras into Flock's systems "never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety".

A Flock spokesperson said in an email to the BBC that the cancellation of the partnership was "a mutual decision".

"We believe this decision allows both companies to best serve their respective customers and communities," the company said in a statement.

Ring, which was acquired by Amazon in 2018, had previously faced concerns over its privacy policies. Its decision to work with Flock had drawn scrutiny, especially after President Donald Trump ramped up his immigration crackdown in recent months.

The Super Bowl advert, showcasing a new feature called Search Party, sparked a new round of criticism.

It showed a neighbourhood of Ring users working together and using the tool to find a lost dog – an episode quickly slammed by critics as a case of dystopian surveillance.

Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, responded by calling on Amazon to discontinue its monitoring features, urging Americans to "oppose this creepy surveillance state".

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit that promotes people's rights on the internet, said the ad used something "heartfelt" as a disguise for a feature that previewed "a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise".

It sparked mocking on social media, and from rivals such as Wyze, which put out its own online video satirically rephrasing Ring's commercial.

"We could use this technology to find literally anyone, but we only use this technology to find lost dogs," Wyze co-founder Dave Crosby says in the video, which has been watched on YouTube almost 100,000 times.