I love dogs. You love dogs. Amazon really loves your neighbor’s dog.
Specifically, what it looks like when it triggers 17 different doorbell cameras on the way to the park. Launched with a tear-jerker super bowl ad, Ring’s Search Party is the ultimate trojan horse for the surveillance state. It frames 24/7 recording as community service. Don’t want to be part of your neighborhood's facial recognition mesh — what, do you hate lost puppies?
At least that's the messaging. However, let's not get things mixed up, Ring is likely attempting to build crowdsourced surveillance.
And the folks on Reddit seem to agree: “If I had Ring doorbells, I would immediately be removing them after that commercial.”
Though the backend is where things get really interesting. Last October, Amazon partnered with Flock Safety. Which, for the uninitiated, is the company that turned license plate reading into a "Total Situational Awareness" subscription for HOAs and police departments.
Now Flock tracks your car to the driveway and Ring could track your boots to the mat. And it doesn’t even stop at the front door. Thanks to the 2025 'Community Request' partnership this data is fed directly into systems like Axon, which provides video analysis tools and supplies cameras to police departments. What starts as a "Search Party" alert for a missing Beagle ends up as a permanent exhibit in a criminal investigation. It’s a seamless handoff that creates a digital dragnet with virtually no blindspots.
According to a GeekWire article, Ring says “Search Party is not designed to process human biometrics, and that Search Party footage is not included in the company’s Community Requests service, which allows law enforcement to request video for voluntary sharing by Ring users.”
You didn’t agree to any of this? Well, your neighbor did. You can opt out of Ring but you can’t opt out of walking past it. “Love your neighbor as yourself” used to mean keeping an eye out for them, now it means keeping an eye on them.
Short of moving to the woods, we still have levers:
Opt out of Search Party and Neighbors sharing.
Disable “requests from agencies.”
Set aggressive retention limits; purge archives.
(If you must have a camera, be your own cloud and run locally!)
This is speculation but technically speaking, the ability to identify a lost dog or a stolen Honda from millions of hours of footage likely relies on turning video frames into vectors.
Models like CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) can be used to map meaning to a coordinate in high-dimensional space enabling it to understand the relationship between text and images. So for example, a detective types "a woman in a red dress" and the system turns that query into a location in high-dimensional space, then it performs a search for video frames near that location and returns the frames that are most similar. For Flock, this probably involves other models such as Vision Language Models (VLMs) for generating bounding boxes, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) models for reading license plates, and Vehicle Make/Model Recognition (MMR) that can identify a car, even if the license plate is obscured.
Of course, it’s not all dystopian. There’s a reason these companies are valued in the billions. In the first few weeks of the “Search Party” rollout, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy boasted that the tool successfully reunited 99 lost dogs with their owners. Meanwhile, Flock Safety’s cameras reportedly help solve 10% of all reported crime in the U.S. with cities like Indianapolis using the tech to recover hundreds of stolen vehicles and dozens of illegal firearms in a single year (2024). From providing real-time alerts during fast-moving wildfires to ending Amber Alerts in record time, the digital dragnet is undeniably effective at the things we actually care about.
The question is whether that value justifies the searchable paper trail of our public lives.
We’ve been sold the lie that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. I’m pro-privacy not because I’ve done something wrong, but because the intentions of a digital dragnet are never static. The “nothing to hide” argument assumes the system is benevolent, but systems are run by people, and people change their minds.
Today's lost dog may be tomorrow’s picket line. That's why I run my own models and keep my data close to the chest. I’d rather be a digital ghost than a permanent entry in a database that never forgets.
Or, as another Reddit user remarked, you can “lose all your rights and help find a dog.”