Amazon and Flock Safety have ended a partnership that would’ve given law enforcement access to a vast web of Ring cameras. The decision came after Amazon faced substantial backlash for airing a Super Bowl ad that was meant to be warm and fuzzy, but instead came across as disturbing and dystopian. The ad begins with a young girl surprised to receive a puppy as a gift. It then warns that 10 million dogs go missing annually. Showing a series of lost dog posters, the ad introduces a new “Search Party” feature for Ring cameras that promises to revolutionize how neighbors come together to locate missing pets. At that point, the ad takes a “creepy” turn, Sen. Ed Markey (D.-Mass.) told Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in a letter urging changes to enhance privacy at the company. Illustrating how a single Ring post could use AI to instantly activate searchlights across an entire neighborhood, the ad shocked critics like Markey, who warned that the same technology could easily be used to “surveil and identify humans.” Markey suggested that in blasting out this one frame of the ad to Super Bowl viewers, Amazon “inadvertently revealed the serious privacy and civil liberties risks attendant to these types of Artificial Intelligence-enabled image recognition technologies.” In his letter, Markey also shared new insights from his prior correspondence with Amazon that he said exposed a wide range of privacy concerns. Ring cameras can “collect biometric information on anyone in their video range,” he said, “without the individual’s consent and often without their knowledge.” Among privacy risks, Markey warned that Ring owners can retain swaths of biometric data, including face scans, indefinitely. And anyone wanting face scans removed from Ring cameras has no easy solution and is forced to go door to door to request deletions, Markey said. On social media, other critics decried Amazon’s ad as “awfully dystopian,” declaring it was “disgusting to use dogs to normalize taking away our freedom to walk around in public spaces.” Some feared the technology would be more likely to benefit police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers than families looking for lost dogs.
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