S7, E266 - Good Boy, Bad Data

How a Super Bowl dog commercial accidentally revealed America's surveillance infrastructure

A family loses their dog. Ring runs a Super Bowl ad. America collectively goes "wait… what?"

This week, we're digging into Ring's "Search Party" feature, the AI-powered doorbell camera tool that lit up millions of living rooms during the big game and immediately made privacy experts lose their minds. Because what looked like a heartwarming story about finding your lost lab was actually a live demonstration of a nationwide networked surveillance system most people didn't know they were part of.

We follow the trail from the commercial to the backlash, from a secret police surveillance partnership that quietly got canceled mid-chaos, to an 84-year-old woman's "deleted" doorbell footage that the FBI recovered anyway.

There's a lost dog. There's Amazon. There's a company called Flock Safety that you need to know about. And there's a question worth asking before you go home and look at your front door.

They sold you a puppy. They built a network.

Chapters

• 0:01 The Super Bowl Dog Ad
• 2:42 Ring’s Rise And Amazon’s Strategy
• 4:32 Neighbors App And Police Access
• 6:11 How Search Party Actually Works
• 8:24 The Backlash And Expert Warnings
• 10:49 Opt-Out Defaults And Consent
• 12:15 The Flock Safety Partnership
• 14:10 Axon Ties And Quiet Integrations
• 15:54 The Nest Case And “Residual Data”
• 18:00 Practical Steps To Reclaim Privacy
• 20:06 Can We Have Safety And Privacy

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

It's Super Bowl Sunday, February 8th, 2026. You've got your drink in hand, the game's pretty decent, and right in the middle of all the commercial breaks between the celebrity cameos and the car ads and whatever Budweiser did with their Clydesdales, a new spot comes on. It's a family. A dad, a couple of kids, and they look worried. Their dog is missing. The dog's name is Milo. He's a yellow lab, big dopey smile, the way labs always have. And the family is posting his photo in their ring app. You know, the doorbell camera, the the Amazon one, the one that's probably on your front door or your neighbors. And something remarkable starts to happen. Cameras start waking up, one by one, across the neighborhood. A bird's eye view of a quiet street. Little ring cameras on garages and porches and front doors, all of them activating. And then AI kicks in. A white box appears on the screen, tracking movement down the sidewalk. The box glows green. It's Milo. The family is reunited. Everyone smiles. Rings founder Jamie Simonoff looks at the camera and says, and I'm quoting here, now, pet owners can mobilize the whole community. Cue the logo, cue the music swell. Aw. Except by Monday morning, a TikTok calling that commercial terrifying had three million views. A senator was writing an angry letter to Amazon. And buried under all that noise, reporters were starting to ask questions about a secret partnership between Ring and a police surveillance company that Amazon really hoped you weren't going to Google. So, today we're going to talk about a lost dog named Milo, about a doorbell company that's been quietly building something much bigger than a doorbell. And about what happens when the most effective surveillance pitch in American history airs during the most watched broadcast of the year. I'm Cameron Ivey, and this is Privacy Please. And this is the story of a search party. Because context is everything here. Ring doorbells are everywhere. I don't mean that loosely. I mean right now, approximately 27% of American households have a doorbell camera. That's roughly one in four homes. You probably walk past three or four of them on your way to get coffee. You've seen the little black cameras above garage doors next to front stoops and pointed at driveways. They've become so normal that we've stopped noticing them. And Ring, owned by Amazon, if you didn't know, is by far the most popular brand. Now, Ring's origin story is actually kind of charming. Jamie Simenoff, the same guy who appeared in the Super Bowl commercial ad, invented the thing in his garage. He pitched it on Shark Tank, the Sharks passed. He kept going anyway. Built the company up in 2018. Amazon bought Ring for what's estimated to be around 1.2 billion. And here's the thing about the acquisition that I want you to sit with for a second. Amazon didn't just buy a doorbell, they bought a network. Millions of cameras already installed in American neighborhoods, all connected to the same cloud infrastructure. From Amazon's perspective, a company that let's remember is also one of the largest cloud computing providers in the world also makes the Alexa home assistant. Also runs a massive advertising business. From their perspective, Ring was an extraordinarily strategic purchase. Now, for a few years after the acquisition, things were relatively quiet. Ring added features, the cameras got better, and then Amazon launched Neighbors. Neighbors is an app, it still exists, that connects Ring users with each other and with their local community to share, quote, real-time crime and safety alerts. Think of it like a neighborhood watch, but digital and powered by footage from your front door. A lot of people liked it. Makes sense. That uh you'd want to know if something sketchy was happening on your block. But quietly embedded in the neighbor's ecosystem was something that got a lot less press at the time. Ring started building formal partnerships with police departments. Hundreds of, eventually thousands, and through a feature called community requests, law enforcements could send a message through the Ring app asking nearby Ring users to voluntarily share their footage to help with an active investigation. Voluntarily is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and we'll come back to it. But here's the part that the Verge reported back in 2022 that kind of broke my brain when I read it, right? Police departments weren't always waiting for users to volunteer. In some cases, Ring gave police emergency access to footage without owners' permission, without asking, without a warrant. Amazon since tightened those policies, but the infrastructure, millions of cameras connected to the cloud, with pathways to law enforcement, that was already there. That is the world we were living in before anyone had ever heard of Search Party. Okay, let's talk about what Ring actually announced at the Super Bowl. Search Party is, on the surface, a genuinely clever idea. Here's how it works. Let's say your dog goes missing. Your actual dog, not Milo. Milo's fine, he's fictional. You open the Ring app, you post a photo of your dog, you write a quick description, and then the features activates. Neighboring ring cameras, outdoor ones enrolled in a ring subscription plan, start scanning their video feeds for a visual match. AI is analyzing the footage in real time, looking for something that resembles your dog's photo. If a camera nearby spots a possible match, the camera's owner gets a notification. Hey, there might be a dog on your camera that matches this description. They can look at it, and if they want, they can share the clip with you. Ring's founder says that since launch, Search Party has reunited more than a dog a day with their families. That's actually a nice thing, right? I want I want to be clear about that because this story is more nuanced than Ring Bad. The feature works. It's found dogs, real ones, and I I don't think Jamie Simonoff went home that night and twirled a mustache about the surveillance state. I think a lot of people at Ring genuinely believe they're building useful tools. I think most companies feel that way. But here's the thing that privacy experts flagged immediately, and that the fine print confirms. Search party is enabled by default. If you have an outdoor ring camera and a ring subscription, your camera is participating in a search party unless you have gone into your settings and actively turned it off. You didn't agree to it in any obvious way. You didn't get a pop-up. It was just on. And almost nobody has turned it off because almost nobody goes looking for the settings if they don't know it exists. So what the Super Bowl ad was really showing people when those neighborhood cameras lit up one by one on screen was something that was already happening. Not a concept, not a future product, a live, active AI scanning network of doorbell cameras across American neighborhoods that most of the people participating in it didn't know they were participating in it. And here's the question that the comment sections and the privacy researchers and eventually a sitting United States Senator were all asking at the same time. If I can find a dog, what else can I find? Monday morning, February 9th, the internet was doing what the internet does, which is take 30 seconds of something and extract every possible implication from it at max volume. Some of it was hyperbolic, some of it was very, very sharp. One tweet that got passed around a lot just said, government, how can we get Americans to accept constant surveillance? Americans. Puppies. A TikTok calling the commercial terrifying hit three million views before the news cycle had even fully kicked in. People were calling it a surveillance state with a cute face on it. Someone called it Big Brother, but make it adorable. And then the experts started weighing in. Chris Gilliard, a privacy researcher and author of a book called Luxury Surveillance, told 404 media that Amazon was putting, quote, a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality, widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that's been fighting for digital rights since 1990, said that visuals in the ad were, quote, meant to impress, but they were seen as creepy. Their staff technologist pointed out that Search Party being opt-out rather than opt-in was a meaningful design choice. It's not an accident. Defaults matter enormously in technology. Most people never change them. And then Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who has been one of the most consistent voices on tech privacy issues on Capitol Hill, wrote an open letter directly to Amazon. He called the technology creepy. He demanded that Ring turn off its facial recognition features. He said Amazon had, quote, constantly failed to prioritize public privacy with its ring doorbells. Ring's response was what you'd expect. A spokesperson said, and I'm quoting here, these are not tools for mass surveillance. We build the right guardrails and we're super transparent about them. Jamie Simonoff did an interview with CBS News and said the backlash has been a little bit around this concept of is this surveillance? Is it actually not? It's allowing your camera to be an intelligent assistant for you and then allowing you to be a great neighbor. And look, I get the framing, I understand the pitch, an intelligent assistant, a great neighbor. That's genuinely how a lot of ring users experience it. But here's what I keep coming back to. When something is enabled by default, when it's scanning video in real time using AI, when it's connected to a company that has active partnerships with police departments, and when the only way to not participate is to find a settings menu you didn't know existed. That's not really being a great neighbor. That's being conscripted into a network without being asked. And the backlash wasn't even the biggest story that week. While everyone was arguing about Search Party on social media, some reporters started digging into something else, a different Ring story. One that had been sitting quietly in the news for several months, largely ignored. In 2025, Amazon announced that Ring was going to partner with a company called Flock Safety. You may not have heard of Flock Safety, most people haven't, but if you care about privacy, Flock Safety is one of the most important companies in America right now, and not in a good way. Here's what Flock does: Flock Safety makes automated license plate reader cameras. Little cameras usually mounted on poles or attached to existing infrastructure that photographs every car that drives past them, capturing license plates, vehicle descriptions, timestamps, location. And Flock doesn't just sell cameras to one police department, they've built a centralized database, a single system that law enforcement agencies across the country can access. So a cop in Ohio can, in theory, query Flock's database and find out where a car from Texas has been over the past several days without a warrant in real time. Flock has become one of the dominant police surveillance technology companies in the country. They're in thousands of jurisdictions, and one of the growing concerns about Flock is that the local police departments can share Flock data with federal agencies, including immigration and customs enforcement ICE. Cities and towns have started canceling their Flock contracts because of it. Now, the planned Ring Plus Flock integration was specifically around Ring's community requests features. The idea was that Ring users would be able to share their doorbell footage directly with law enforcement through Flock's system. Ring and Flock working together. This partnership has been announced, it was public, but almost nobody was talking about it until the Super Bowl ad accidentally put Ring under a microscope. Within days of the backlash, Amazon announced it was canceling the Flock partnership. Their official statement said it was just a joint decision based on the project requiring significantly more time and resources than anticipated. Very corporate, very nothing to see here, but the timing was not subtle. And here's what I want you to hold on to, because this is the part of the story that I think gets lost in the noise. Amazon canceled Flock. Amazon did not cancel its partnership with Axon. Axon, formerly known as Taser, the stun gun company, has become one of the largest police technology companies in the world. They make body cameras, they make digital evidence management systems, they make drones used by the law enforcement, and Ring has an ongoing active partnership with Axon. That one's still running. That one didn't get canceled. That one didn't trend on social media. So what really happened here? A surveillance partnership that was quietly in place got caught in the spotlight, and Amazon made the calculation to cut it loose while keeping the other one intact? This is how these things work. Not in dramatic villain reveals and quiet defaults and buried press releases and partnerships that most people never hear about until a dog commercial accidentally makes millions of people curious. I want to tell you about Nancy Guthrie, because her story was unfolding at the same exact time, and it makes everything we've been talking about feel a little more immediate. Nancy is 84 years old. She's the mother of Savannah, the today show host. In early February, she went missing in Arizona under circumstances that were deeply alarming to her family and to investigators. Outside her home, there was a Google Nest doorbell camera. When investigators first asked about the camera, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nano said the footage was unavailable. Nancy didn't quite have an active Nest subscription, he explained. Without a subscription, footage isn't stored. The video, essentially, was gone. That seemed to close the door on that avenue. And then FBI Director Cash Patel went on Fox News and said they'd found it anyway. The FBI had worked with Google to excavate what he called residual data from Google's back-end systems. Footage that was supposed to be gone. Footage from a camera that wasn't recording to any cloud subscription. Footage that the homeowner, and frankly, probably most Nest users would have believed was simply not saved. It was saved somewhere, in some form, recoverable by the right people with the right access. Now, I want to be careful here. Nancy was a missing elderly woman. Using every available resource to find her and ensure her safety is exactly what law enforcement should be doing. I'm not criticizing the FBI for pursuing that footage. What I'm raising is a different question. If footage from a disconnected, non-subscribed NES camera is recoverable from Google's back-end system, what does that say about what any of these devices are actually doing or storing? About what deleted really means when it comes to your home security footage? About how much control you actually have over the data your devices generate. Two stories, same week, same theme. Your doorbell knows more than you think, and you have less control over that information than the terms of service would lead you to believe. Okay, I've thrown a lot at you. Let me bring it home. I don't want to leave you here feeling hopeless. Because that's the trap with most privacy stories. You learn something concerning and the scale of it feels so big that uh it's paralyzing. Like, what am I supposed to do? Throw my doorbell in the lake? Move off the grid? Raise my kids to distrust all technology? No. That's not the point. The point here is that you deserve to make informed choices about the technology in your life. And right now, a lot of these tools are designed in ways that make the default setting the most invasive option. And make the privacy-preserving option something you have to actively hunt for. So here are three concrete things worth doing after this episode. One, if you have a ring camera, check your search party settings today. Open the Ring app, go to your account, then go to the control center, search party. You can toggle your participation. This takes about 45 seconds, and most ring users have never seen this screen before. You might decide you're totally fine participating. That's a legitimate choice, but you should make it consciously, not by default. Number two, understand what community request actually is. If Ring sends you a notification that a law enforcement agency is requesting footage from your camera, you are not obligated to respond. You can ignore it. You can look at it and decide not to share. Ring's own language says participation is always voluntary. But the framing of those notifications, a request from your local police, can feel like you have to, even when it's not. Know your rights before you're in the moment. And number three here, apply what I'm going to call the lost dog test to new technology. Whenever a new surveillance feature is wrapped in something emotionally irresistible, a lost child, a missing pet, preventing crime, keeping your neighborhood safe, that's your cue to slow down and read the fine print. Not because the emotional appeal is fake, sometimes it's completely genuine. But the emotional packaging is often inversely proportional to how to how much scrutiny the underlying infrastructure deserves. Ring didn't invent this playbook, but that Super Bowl ad was one of the most efficient, most honest demonstrations of it we've ever seen broadcast to hundreds of millions of people at once. They showed you exactly what the network can do. They just hoped you'd be too busy smiling at the puppy to ask the follow-up questions. I'm gonna leave you with one line, because I think it's the most important one in this whole story. After the backlash, after the flock partnership got canceled, after the senator's letter, Rings founder Jamie Simonov sat down with the CBS reporter and was asked directly, is there tension between the public's desire for privacy and law enforcement's desire to solve crimes? He said, I think you can have both. And maybe he's right. I I genuinely hope he's right. But you can have both only works if the people whose cameras are involved get to decide what both looks like. Not the company. Not the police department, not the default setting, you. Milo's home safe. The question is whether the rest of us know what we agreed to. If this episode got you thinking, share it with someone who has a ring camera. And if you want to go deeper on any of this, the EFF has a great breakdown of Rings Law Enforcement Partnership at EFF.org. I'll link that in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to Privacy Please. And don't forget to go check out theproblemlounge.com and our other show, The Problem Lounge. Thank you so much for being part of the family. We really appreciate you guys. Thanks for listening to Privacy Please. We'll catch you guys on the next one. Cameron Ivey over now.