Super Bowl Ad for Ring Cameras Touted AI Surveillance Network

By Sharon Zhang

This article was originally published by Truthout

In an ad during the Super Bowl on Sunday night, Amazon’s Ring touted the establishment of an AI-powered surveillance network through their camera systems, which the company whitewashed under a feel-good narrative about finding lost dogs.

The ad for Ring’s free “Search Party” program urges users to “be a hero” by using their surveillance cameras to help identify lost dogs in their neighborhood. It aired to millions of viewers during Super Bowl LX on Sunday night.

“Pets are family, but every year, 10 million go missing,” narrated Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, over uncanny, seemingly AI-generated clips of lost dog posters adhered to poles. A huge proportion of the ads during the Super Bowl were for or featured AI, frustrating many viewers.

“Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs,” he said, while the video showed Ring camera footage in which the software detects a dog in the frame. The company’s website says that the Search Party app can also be used by non-Ring camera owners.

Amazon’s website also touts Ring’s goal of equipping over 4,000 animal shelters across the U.S. with Ring camera systems, a $1 million initiative, claiming this will further help locate lost pets.

However, the attempt at telling a heartwarming story of reuniting dogs with their owners masks Ring’s true intentions of creating a nationwide surveillance system, analysts noted. 

“It starts with searching for a ‘brown dog’ but means the tech is there for license plate reading, face recognition, searching for suspects by description, etc,” wrote surveillance and policing expert and scholar Matthew Guariglia on social media. “We already know they have a form cops can fill out to get access to footage without warrant or permission in an ‘emergency’ as determined by them. What will this mean for new features?”

Guariglia noted that Ring would likely make the AI-powered features on by default, requiring users to manually search their settings to turn it off.

Indeed, Ring has come under intense scrutiny for its collaboration with the criminal legal system, especially through its partnerships directly with police and with surveillance companies Flock and Axon, which grant law enforcement access to an enormous amount of information, including tracking of individuals, license plate recognition, and more.

Flock’s dragnet has been used by federal immigration agents to track immigrants and search for a person who received an abortion. It has also helped corporations make watch lists, following in the history of corporate blacklists of labor and social movement organizers.

While Flock’s hardware is largely in use in public locations, Ring cameras are ubiquitous in neighborhoods today. According to Consumer Reports, 30 percent of U.S. households have a video doorbell camera, with Ring being one of the most popular brands. Access to that network gives Flock and law enforcement eyes in neighborhoods across the U.S., with the ability to track millions of Americans.

A feature that the ad didn’t mention, for instance, is Ring’s “Familiar Faces” program. According to the company’s website, this beta feature “uses Ring Artificial Intelligence (AI) to recognize people.” Users help train the AI system to recognize particular faces over time, it says, so they can then receive a “personalized notification” when that particular person is at the door. The feature also “works with 24/7 Continuous Recording,” the website says, referring to their cameras’ ability to record audio and video at all times.

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