You bought a Ring Doorbell to keep your home safe and watch for packages. You probably didn’t realize it’s also keeping tabs on your entire neighborhood - and feeding that information to law enforcement, surveillance companies, and Amazon’s AI.
During Super Bowl LX, Ring aired a heartwarming ad about reuniting a family with their lost dog. The pitch: Ring’s new Search Party feature uses AI to scan footage from Ring cameras across your area to spot lost pets. Upload a photo of your dog, and every participating Ring camera in the neighborhood starts looking for a match.
Sounds nice. Here’s the problem: it’s enabled by default on your camera right now, and it does a lot more than find dogs.
Search Party means your Ring doorbell is actively running AI image recognition on everyone and everything that passes by, checking them against uploaded photos. Today it’s pets. The underlying technology is facial recognition, object tracking, and AI-powered image matching - the same technology used to track people.
As surveillance scholar Matthew Guariglia put it: “It starts [with] searching for a “brown dog” but means the tech is there for lisence plate reading, face recognition, searching for suspects by description, etc”
When you installed your Ring doorbell, you set up a single camera on your front door. What Amazon built is something very different: a distributed surveillance network spanning millions of homes.
About 20% of U.S. households have a video doorbell, and about half of those are Ring. That means Ring has eyes on streets, sidewalks, driveways, and front doors in neighborhoods across the country. Search Party ties all of those cameras together into a single searchable system.
And your Ring doorbell doesn’t even need your Wi-Fi to participate. By default, Ring devices use Amazon Sidewalk, a mesh network that connects to other Amazon devices in your neighborhood via Bluetooth and radio. Even if your internet goes out, your camera can still relay data through your neighbors' devices. Amazon enabled Sidewalk by default too - without asking.
In October 2025, Flock Safety announced a partnership with Ring. Flock is a company that operates a massive network of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) used by thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country.
Through this partnership, police using Flock’s platform can post requests directly in the Ring Neighbors app asking residents to share camera footage for active investigations. Ring says sharing is optional - but the infrastructure is now in place for law enforcement to tap into millions of private cameras with a few clicks.
This isn’t hypothetical concern. Flock’s surveillance network has already been used by:
Ring says it has “no partnership with ICE” and won’t give them direct access. But police departments that do use Flock often have information-sharing agreements with federal agencies, including ICE and DHS. Your footage can pass through a chain of hands that Ring’s privacy policy doesn’t cover.
Ring also has a separate partnership with Axon (the company that makes Tasers and police body cameras), further embedding your doorbell footage into the law enforcement ecosystem.
For more on Flock’s surveillance practices, see DeFlock, an effort to track and push back against Flock’s camera network.
This follows Amazon’s playbook:
The result: millions of people participate in a surveillance network without ever making a conscious choice to do so.
Disable Search Party:
Disable Amazon Sidewalk:
Consider whether you need a Ring at all. There are doorbell cameras that store footage locally and don’t feed into a corporate surveillance network. Your desire to see who’s at your door shouldn’t require participating in a system that tracks your neighbors.