Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

Following intense backlash to its partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that works with law enforcement agencies, Ring has announced it is canceling the integration.

In a statement published on Ring’s blog and provided to The Verge ahead of publication, the company said: “Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made the joint decision to cancel the integration and continue with our current partners … The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.”

The statement goes on to say that Ring’s mission to make neighborhoods safer “comes with significant responsibility — to our customers, to the communities we serve, and to the trust you place in our products and features.”

Trust is the big one there. Over the last few weeks, the company has faced significant public anger over its connection to Flock, with Ring users being encouraged to smash their cameras, and some announcing on social media that they are throwing away their Ring devices.

The Flock partnership was announced last October, but following recent unrest across the country related to ICE activities, public pressure against the Amazon-owned Ring’s involvement with the company started to mount.

Flock has reportedly allowed ICE and other federal agencies to access its network of surveillance cameras, and influencers across social media have been claiming that Ring is providing a direct link to ICE.

While that claim is not accurate, as the Flock integration has never gone live, Ring has a history of partnering with police, and the new partnership quickly came under intense criticism.

Adding fuel to the fire, this weekend Ring aired a Super Bowl ad for its new AI-powered Search Party feature. While the company says the feature is designed to find lost dogs and maintains it’s not capable of finding people, the ad raised fears that Ring cameras were being used for mass surveillance. The ad shows dozens of Ring cameras in a neighborhood scanning the streets.

On top of this, the company recently launched a new facial recognition feature, Familiar Faces. Combined with Search Party, the technological leap to using neighborhood cameras to search for people through a mass-surveillance network suddenly seems very small.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) – a longtime critic of Ring – sent an open letter this week calling on Amazon to cancel the company’s facial recognition feature.

Ring spokesperson Yassi Yarger said in an email that its products are purpose-driven tech, “not tools for mass surveillance.” She added that “Familiar Faces is an opt-in feature designed to give customers more control over the alerts they receive (e.g., ‘Mom at front door’ instead of ‘Someone at front door’) while keeping their data protected.”

Why did Ring partner with Flock?

Ring’s partnership with Flock was announced in October 2025 as part of Ring’s Community Requests program, which launched last September. It was designed to allow local law enforcement agencies that use Flock’s software to integrate directly with the program.

Community Requests launched after Ring ended its controversial Requests for Assistance (RFA) program, which consumer advocacy groups criticized for allowing video to be provided to police without a warrant, calling it a threat to civil liberties.

In its statement about the Flock cancellation, Ring maintains that Community Requests will continue, claiming it helped authorities locate a suspect during the recent Brown University shooting:

“When a shooting occurred near Brown University in December 2025, every second mattered. The Providence Police Department turned to their community for help, putting out a Community Request. Within hours, 7 neighbors responded, sharing 168 videos that captured critical moments from the incident. One video identified a new key witness, helping lead police to identify the suspect’s vehicle and solve the case. With a shooter at large, the community faced uncertainty about their safety. Neighbors who chose to share footage played a crucial role in neutralizing the threat and restoring safety to their community.”

As with RFA, Community Requests still allows public safety agencies to request video footage from users in a certain area during an active investigation, but it differs from the previous program because law enforcement agencies are required to partner with a third-party evidence management system – such as Flock – to use the service. Ring says this is to better maintain the chain of custody. The previous system allowed police to request footage directly from a user.

Flock was the second partner Ring announced for Community Requests, the first being Axon, a law enforcement technology company known for making Tasers. With the new service, only law enforcement agencies that use these companies’ software can submit requests. But the end result is the same: law enforcement gets video from users if they choose to share it.

Ring spokesperson Yassi Yarger says the Axon partnership is unaffected by the end of the Flock integration. Additionally, she says no other integrations are currently being explored.