[News] With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet

Tue Feb 10 10:20:20 EST 2026

With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet Ring's 
'Search Party' is dystopian surveillance accelerationism.
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<https://www.404media.co/r/de8a5590?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83>
With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet 
<https://www.404media.co/r/df55664d?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83>

By Jason Koebler • 10 Feb 2026 	View in browser 
<https://www.404media.co/r/2106f8ab?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83>
View in browser 
<https://www.404media.co/r/6c546204?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83>

//Hey ////there////,//

//At our old jobs, we used to write and edit stories about Ring all the 
time. Ring has flown under the radar the last few years, but it's clear 
we need to start doing that again. If you're researching Ring or know 
anything we should know, please get in touch by responding to this email 
or messaging me on Signal @jason.404.//

//-Jason//

America, it’s time to refamiliarize yourself with Ring.

<https://www.404media.co/r/bb5321ae?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83>

At Sunday’s Super Bowl, Ring advertised “Search Party,” a cute, 
horrifyingly dystopian feature nominally designed to turn all of the 
Ring cameras in a neighborhood into a dragnet that uses AI to look for a 
lost dog: “One post of a dog’s photo in the Ring app starts outdoor 
cameras looking for a match,” Ring founder Jamie Siminoff said in the 
Super Bowl commercial. “Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families 
find lost dogs.” Onscreen, an AI-powered box forms around a missing dog: 
“Milo Match,” it says. “Since launch, more than a dog a day has been 
reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search 
Party. Available to everyone for free right now.”

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<https://www.404media.co/r/8b23120e?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83>

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It does not take an imagination of any sort to envision this being 
tweaked to work against suspected criminals, undocumented immigrants, or 
others deemed ‘suspicious’ by people in the neighborhood. Many of these 
use cases are how Ring has been used by people on its _dystopian 
“Neighbors” app for years_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/3893224d?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83>. 
Ring rose to prominence as a piece of package theft prevention tech 
owned by Amazon and by forming partnerships with local police around the 
country, _asking them to shill their doorbell cameras_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/39c71259?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83> 
to people in their neighborhoods in return for a system that allowed 
police to request footage from individual users without a warrant.

Chris Gilliard, _a privacy expert_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/18d19696?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83> 
and author of the upcoming book /_Luxury Surveillance_/ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/d220b02f?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83>, 
told 404 Media these features and its Super Bowl ad are “a clumsy 
attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: 
widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy 
relationships with law enforcement and other equally invasive 
surveillance companies.”

Unlike, say, data analytics giant Palantir or some other high-profile 
surveillance companies, Ring is a surveillance network that homeowners 
have by and large deployed themselves, powered by fear mongering against 
our neighbors and unfettered consumerism.

After a lot of criticism in the late 2010s over its police contracts and 
its terrible security settings that resulted in hackers breaking into a 
series of indoor Ring cameras to _terrorize children and families_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/d08f063d?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83>, 
Ring somehow found a way to more or less fly under the radar the last 
few years as a critical part of our ever-expanding surveillance state. 
It _did this by scaling back police partnerships_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/d1681042?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83> 
that were so critical to its growth but that received lots of scrutiny 
from journalists and privacy advocates. _Siminoff left Ring in 2023_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/25fd4309?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83>, 
but returned last year; in his absence, Ring explicitly sought to take 
on a softer tone by branding itself as more or less as a device that 
could be used to film viral moments on people’s porches. It turned its 
owners into mini cops who would complain about delivery people who 
didn’t drop a package in the correct spot; who became hyperaware of the 
comings and goings of their friends, spouses, and children, or who might 
catch a potentially sharable moment when someone slipped on an icy porch 
or whatever. Part of this strategy included creating a short-lived 
reality TV show called Ring Nation, which consisted of precious little 
moments filmed through Ring cameras.

When Siminoff returned last year, he immediately sought to re-establish 
many of Ring’s partnerships with police, and set an _explicit goal of 
injecting more AI_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/983f65d6?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83> 
into Ring cameras and trying to “revolutionize how we do our 
neighborhood safety.”

“Ring is rolling back many of the reforms it’s made in the last few 
years by easing police access to footage from millions of homes in the 
United States. This is a grave threat to civil liberties in the United 
States,” Matthew Guariglia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation _wrote 
shortly after Siminoff’s return_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/1ab8e194?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83>. 
“This is most likely about Ring cashing in on the rising tide of 
techno-authoritarianism, that is, authoritarianism aided by surveillance 
tech. Too many tech companies want to profit from our shrinking liberties.”

Even in Siminoff’s absence, Ring had always, explicitly been intended to 
assist law enforcement. In a series of investigations we did back at 
VICE, we uncovered thousands of pages of documents, emails, and chats 
via public records requests and leaks that highlighted Ring’s 
surveillance ambitions. The company _threw parties_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/c035b47d?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83> 
for police, _employees wore “FUCK CRIME” shirts to internal parties_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/64fade72?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83>, 
and helped police facilitate the retrieval of footage from its 
customers’ cameras if they initially refused to cooperate. It helped 
police set up elaborate, _completely useless package “sting” operations_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/eaff7d68?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83> 
designed to catch criminals but that did not result in any arrests. Ring 
gave cops devices that they could raffle off to people in their towns, 
gave police “heat maps” of where its customers lived, _used its social 
media accounts_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/139530dd?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83> 
to post footage of supposed suspicious people, and incentivized 
customers to create “Digital Neighborhood Watch” groups that _could earn 
them swag_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/ddc4c6e3?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83> 
if they used their Ring cameras to report suspicious activity to police.

With Ring’s recent partnership with Flock, which will further 
_facilitate the sharing of video footage_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/944fe4c6?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83> 
with police, and its new Search Party feature, the message is clear: 
Ring is still, again, and always will be in the business of leveraging 
its network of luxury surveillance consumers as a law enforcement tool. 
After years of saying it wasn’t doing facial recognition and that it was 
focused more on “object recognition,” it has now explicitly launched 
“friendly” versions of facial recognition and facial 
recognition-adjacent technologies: “Search Party” is essentially 
specific dog recognition (for now), and _a beta product called_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/bfd20c0b?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83> 
“Familiar Faces” specifically identifies people you know when they’re at 
your door. “Alexa Guard identifies who’s who,” the product’s website 
reads. “With Familiar Faces, easily tag your family and friends in the 
Ring app so your 2k and 4k cameras can notify you when someone is spotted.”

Ring has always been a surveillance tool, but adding AI analysis and 
networking the devices together—like is being promised with Search 
Party—turns discrete pieces of tech into massive, automated surveillance 
dragnets.

“Siminoff’s return was a hard pivot back to, in his words, the ‘crime 
fighting’ element and away from the softer tone they had tried to 
establish with Ring as a fun way to interact with people in your 
community,” Gilliard said. “But I think it’s becoming very obvious to 
people how these systems are being deployed against their neighbors in 
oppressive ways, and they are beginning to reject them, particularly 
since there is _no strong evidence that they prevent crime_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/56a66df4?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83> 
or make people safer.”

_The YouTube comments_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/02d4d8fc?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83> 
on Ring’s Super Bowl ad are almost uniformly negative, with people 
noting “this is like the commercial they show at the beginning of a 
dystopian sci fi film to quickly show people how bad things have 
gotten,” “are we really supposed to believe that the main intent for 
this is lost pets,” and “glad people are freaking out. This is dystopia 
becoming reality.”

Ring’s poorly defined partnership with Flock in particular has been the 
subject of various viral posts and public backlash. Many people have 
suggested that this partnership is evidence that Ring camera footage 
will be shared with ICE. At the moment there’s not enough evidence to 
explicitly say that that’s the case.

The supposed vector goes something like this: Ring says it will partner 
with Flock, which is used by thousands of local police departments. As 
we have reported, some of those police _departments have performed Flock 
license plate lookups for ICE_ 
<https://www.404media.co/r/5d29b452?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83>. 
It’s too early to say whether Ring footage will eventually end up with 
ICE, but the fact that people immediately drew that conclusion and 
understood the possible method of information sharing shows that 
surveillance companies can no longer hide behind viral videos of 
delivery drivers dancing. It’s a mask off moment, and people know it: 
“In Amazon’s alliance with this administration, it’s become more clear 
than ever that Ring is an extension of the carceral state,” Gilliard 
said. “An emotionally charged Super Bowl ad won’t change that.”

Comment

Comment

<https://www.404media.co/r/18387874?m=372477bb-ff40-45dd-bf2c-8da2c669ee83>

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