Amazon's doorbell and smart home devices arm Ring announced on Friday that it canceled a partnership with Flock Safety that it entered into last year, amid a backlash that reached a crescendo following Ring's Super Bowl commercial on Feb. 8.
The commercial was for Ring's new Search Party feature aimed at helping homeowners find lost dogs. But instead of generating warm fuzzies among pet owners, the ad drew attention and scrutiny to Ring's privacy practices, particularly its partnerships with groups that work with law enforcement.
Flock Safety is an Atlanta-based maker of hardware and software that includes license plate readers, drones and video surveillance cameras. The company works with 5,000 law enforcement agencies, according to its website.
The cancellation of the partnership comes at a moment when there have been mass protests across the US in response to the repressive and violent actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other government agencies, including in cities like Minneapolis.
Flock denies sharing data with ICE, and Ring said it decided to stop the partnership before it began, stressing that it had never sent videos to Flock as part of its Community Requests program. "Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated," the blog post said.
It doesn't mention public pressure as a factor, although there have been reports of users disconnecting their Ring devices or destroying them in response to the Super Bowl advertisement.
The closest the blog post comes to acknowledging a public relations issue is the last line: "We'll continue to carefully evaluate future partnerships to ensure they align with our standards for customer trust, safety and privacy."
While the Flock partnership is dead, Amazon also entered into a partnership with Axon, which makes Taser devices and works with law enforcement agencies. When it comes to legal requests, Ring does not disclose customer information unless required to do so by law or in very specific life-or-death cases.
Smart doorbells in the news
This week, Jamie Siminoff, the founder of Ring discussed the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping case with CBS News, saying that unlike competitor Nest's cameras, the company would not be able to recover a deleted video from a Ring camera account.
He added, however, that the video that was recovered by Nest was "incredible" and useful in a criminal investigation like this one. He spoke about Community Alerts, which law enforcement can issue through Ring's network of doorbell camera owners.
In the interview, a separate video captured by a Ring camera five miles away from Guthrie's home in Tucson that may be linked to the kidnapping was shown. Siminoff did not comment on the video, but he said the technology can be useful to tie information together for criminal investigations.
Police "need systems like ours, like Community Alerts, to be able to talk to and ask neighbors for this," Siminoff said. "And we need neighbors to feel comfortable that their privacy is protected, but also that they can help share and hopefully again lead to a suspect being found and bringing Nancy home."
A Ring representative told CNET that there are no other changes to the Ring Community Requests program.
No 'material change'
While Ring's about-face on Flock may have surprised some who viewed it as a retreat, others saw it as a strategic move.
"It's possible they looked at the current regulatory environment, overall public sentiment and brand implications and associated risks, and made a well-informed business decision," said Erik Avakian, a technical counselor at Info-Tech Research Group.Â
Avakian said that Amazon and Ring likely recognized the risks of associating a home-security platform with a company known for its tools and software widely used in law enforcement.
However, stepping away from the Flock Safety agreement doesn't signal a "material change [in] Ring's approach" to its Community platforms, Avakian said. "Those alerts and law enforcement request mechanisms were already structured around user opt-ins and the voluntary approach to sharing information. The partnership's end doesn't dismantle that model."
What it may do, however, is draw a clearer line in the sand about whether Ring views itself as a voluntary, opt-in platform versus one that sees itself as primarily a provider of surveillance data to entities other than its customers. However, as some have pointed out, not everybody who appears on Ring cameras, including neighbors and passersby, has agreed to be filmed or to have their movements shared by those putting in Community Requests.
While Ring positioned the end of the partnership as having been a decision over allocating resources, Avakian believes the public's reaction had a lot to do with it.