Feb 16, 2026
When the Amazon Ring commercial aired during the Super Bowl, many people were horrified to realize that Ring can spy on them and their neighbors. Privacy expert Chris Gilliard discusses what people should know about Amazon’s “luxury surveillance.”
- I don’t think there is a better possible ad to get rid of your Ring camera.• With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet (by past Techtonic guest Jason Koebler, 404 Media, Feb 10, 2026): “Ring’s ‘Search Party’ is dystopian surveillance accelerationism.”
- 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.
- I’m glad most people were instantly able to clock how bad this is. Amazon thinks we’re all stupid and will fall for this angle.
- Whoever came up with this ad is a genius. It's like whistleblowing without getting caught
Chris Gilliard, a privacy expert and author of the upcoming book Luxury Surveillance, 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.”• No One, Including Our Furry Friends, Will Be Safer in Ring's Surveillance Nightmare (EFF, Feb 10, 2026):
Amazon Ring already integrates biometric identification, like face recognition, into its products via features like "Familiar Faces,” which depends on scanning the faces of those in sight of the camera and matching it against a list of pre-saved, pre-approved faces. It doesn’t take much to imagine Ring eventually combining these two features: face recognition and neighborhood searches.• Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash (The Verge, Feb 12, 2026):
. . . [Ring cameras] feature microphones that have been found to capture audio from the street. In 2023, Ring settled with the Federal Trade Commission over the extensive access it gave employees to personal customer footage. At that time, just three years ago, the FTC wrote: “As a result of this dangerously overbroad access and lax attitude toward privacy and security, employees and third-party contractors were able to view, download, and transfer customers’ sensitive video data for their own purposes.”
The company has made law enforcement access a regular part of its business. As early as 2016, the company was courting police departments through free giveaways. The company provided law enforcement warrantless access to people’s footage, a practice they claimed to cut off in 2024. Not long after, though, the company established partnerships with major police companies Axon and Flock Safety to facilitate the integration of Ring cameras into police intelligence networks. The partnership allows law enforcement to again request Ring footage directly from users without a warrant.
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. . . . 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.• What Homeowners Need to Know About Smart Home Cameras (gift link, NYT, Feb 11, 2026)
Ring has previously said it's working with both Flock and police body-camera company Axon to share footage for crime investigations. The companies say participation is voluntary and that it can only be accessed by authorized law enforcement.• We Rate Dogs video review of the Amazon Ring commercial (Feb 10, 2026)
But media reports from around the country have shown that departments that access data from Flock, for instance, have at least occasionally shared it with federal immigration officers despite local laws against it.
A Ring camera like this one can now be used to track lost dogs using the company's new "Search Party" feature, which some civil libertarians say raises significant privacy concerns. Other data-privacy experts have demonstrated that it can be relatively easy to access such camera systems using credentials found online or in data privacy leaks ‒ even without the consent of the owner.
Google [Nest] doesn’t offer true local storage that you can access yourself. Newer Nest cameras do have limited on-device backup storage, but it’s only accessible through Google’s cloud. All of this means the footage of the suspect went to Google’s servers, even though Nancy Guthrie did not pay for a subscription.(And don’t forget: even if footage is eventually deleted from Google’s cloud servers, the inferences that Google draws from its analysis can be stored elsewhere – forever.)
. . . if the idea makes you uneasy, you can reduce your risk by using local storage that you control and/or a cloud service that offers end-to-end encryption, which means not even the provider can access your footage.