Ring Has Ended Its Controversial Partnership With Flock Safety.
It’s been a bad week for Ring. On Super Bowl Sunday, the Amazon-owned company aired an ad for its new ” Search Party ” feature, which connects Ring cameras in a neighborhood into a single network to help find lost dogs. However, viewers perceived this as a serious privacy violation—it’s not hard to imagine how similar surveillance technology could be used to find people, not pets.
However, the backlash wasn’t limited to advertising. The scandal reignited criticism of the company’s partnership with Flock Safety, a company that sells surveillance cameras for vehicle tracking, specifically license plate recognition. But the partnership with Ring wasn’t related to vehicle tracking: Flock Safety’s role was to make it easier for law enforcement agencies using Flock Safety’s software to request video footage from Ring cameras from users. Agencies could send a request to the area where a crime allegedly occurred, and Ring users would receive a notification of the request. However, they were under no obligation to consent to the provision of video footage.
Law enforcement agencies could already request video footage from Ring users through the existing “Community Requests” feature. But this partnership will allow agencies to submit such requests directly through Flock Safety software. If a user submits video footage following a request, Ring stated that the data will be “securely packaged” by Flock Safety and transmitted to the agency via FlockOS or Flock Nova.
Ring is terminating its partnership with Flock Safety.
The partnership has officially ended. On Friday, Ring published a blog post announcing the end of its partnership with Flock Safety. The company stated that after an analysis, the integration “will require significantly more time and resources than anticipated.” Therefore, both parties have agreed to terminate the partnership.
It’s important to note that, according to Ring, because the integration never actually launched, no user video footage was ever sent to Flock Safety—despite the company announcing the partnership four months ago. Social media influencers spread the false claim that Flock Safety was directly sharing Ring video footage with law enforcement agencies like ICE. While these claims are inaccurate, they were likely reinforced by 404 Media reports that ICE had access to Flock Safety data for its investigations. Had Ring’s partnership with Flock Safety materialized, there would have been strong grounds to believe that agencies like ICE could have accessed video footage shared by Ring users—even if those users believed they were only sharing the footage with local agencies to solve specific cases.
While privacy advocates will likely welcome this news, the cancellation of the partnership will not affect the Community Requests feature. Law enforcement will still be able to request video footage from Ring users, and those users will still have a say in whether or not to share this footage. Ring views this feature as an objective benefit, allowing users to voluntarily share video footage that can help law enforcement solve important cases. In its announcement on Friday, Ring mentioned the December 2025 shooting at Brown University, in which seven users shared 168 videos with law enforcement. According to Ring, one of these videos helped police identify the suspect’s vehicle, which in turn helped solve the case.