Ring Terminates Partnership with Flock Safety Amid Backlash
Amazon’s Ring has decided to end its collaboration with Flock Safety, a surveillance tech firm, after facing severe criticism for its ties to ICE.
According to a recent report, following weeks of public outcry from privacy advocates and customers, Ring revealed its plans to cancel the integration with Flock Safety, which collaborates with law enforcement, including ICE.
In a statement on its blog, Ring explained the reasoning behind the decision: “After a comprehensive review, we have determined that the planned integration with Flock Safety will require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. Therefore, we have made the joint decision to discontinue the integration and continue with our current partners.” The company emphasized that the integration hadn’t actually begun and that no customer videos had ever been sent to Flock Safety.
The partnership, first announced back in October 2025, has ignited controversy lately, largely due to increasing worries about immigration enforcement. Reports have indicated that Flock Safety has granted ICE access to its network of surveillance cameras. This led to rampant speculation on social media that Ring was directly aiding ICE. Ring insists these assertions are false since the integration never occurred, yet their past associations with police departments have drawn heightened scrutiny.
The public’s discontent has prompted some Ring users to destroy their devices, while others have shared on social media that they’re getting rid of their Ring cameras entirely.
Things became even more complicated with a Super Bowl advertisement for Ring’s new AI-driven Search Party feature. The ad featured numerous Ring cameras scanning neighborhood streets, seemingly in a search for a lost dog. Despite Ring’s claim that this feature is designed solely for pet recovery and not human tracking, it alarmed privacy advocates concerned about potential mass surveillance.
Further exacerbating these worries, Ring recently introduced a facial recognition feature called Familiar Faces. Critics argue that with both Search Party and Familiar Faces in play, the groundwork for large-scale surveillance through neighborhood cameras has already been laid.
Responding to these concerns, Ring spokesperson Yassi Jaeger described the company’s technology as purposeful rather than surveillance-oriented. “Familiar Faces is an opt-in feature intended to provide customers more control over the alerts they receive (e.g., ‘Mom at the door’ instead of ‘Someone is at the door’) while safeguarding their data,” Jaeger noted in an email.
The collaboration with Flock was intended as part of Ring’s Community Requests program, which launched in September 2024 after Ring dismantled its contentious Request for Help program. Previous initiatives faced criticism from consumer advocates, who said they allowed video to be handed to police without a warrant, raising civil liberties issues.
Community Requests aimed to enable local law enforcement using Flock’s software to interact directly with the program, allowing safety agencies to request video footage from users during investigations. However, agencies must collaborate with a third-party evidence management system to utilize the service, a requirement Ring asserts helps maintain proper evidence retention.
Despite canceling the Flock integration, Ring defended its Community Requests program, highlighting its usefulness in recent criminal investigations. The company pointed to a mass shooting near Brown University in December 2025, during which Providence police used community requests to gather footage from residents. Seven neighbors submitted 168 videos, leading to the identification of a key witness and ultimately assisting police in identifying the suspect’s vehicle.
Flock Safety becomes the second partner that Ring has opted out of in response to a community request, with Axon—the law enforcement technology company known for Tasers—being the first. Yassi Jaeger confirmed that the partnership with Axon remains intact and that no other collaborations are currently under consideration.
