This Super Bowl Sunday, Ring, the company behind extremely popular doorbell cameras, left no stones unturned in their new commercial promoting a new and free AI-powered “Search Party” feature for their doorbells. This feature would enable Ring to create a surveillance web of camera footage across neighborhoods, monitored with AI software, to allegedly help find lost dogs and track wildfires.
The commercial, which aired during the Super Bowl and premiered on YouTube on February 2nd, depicted an enthusiastic neighborhood teaming up with Ring’s new Search Party feature to find a girl’s lost dog. The commercial began with a child excitedly hugging her new puppy, soft piano music playing in the background. The ad then dramatically cuts to the girl grieving her dog going missing, after which CEO Jamie Siminoff, while walking his German shepherd, tells the audience to “be a hero in your neighborhood” by enabling their AI Search Party feature to help reunite more families with their pets. The ad finally concludes with the girl happily reuniting with her missing dog.
It’s clear that Ring employed every tactic imaginable to pull on the heart strings of Americans to make them enable their new AI Search Party feature. They crammed together adorable pets, a sad child who lost her dog, and a child’s touching unification with her childhood pet into just a thirty second video, weaving in emotional music and the assuring words of a pet-loving CEO throughout. Furthermore, this AI tracking system to save lost dogs was marketed as being completely free and ready to enable with a single click. The lengths Ring went to present their search party feature in the most positive light possible to millions of Americans made one thing clear: Ring desperately wanted Americans to sign up in droves to give Ring’s AI systems access to their security footage.
However, as was likely unexpected by Jamie Siminoff and Ring’s marketing team, the public’s reception to their mushy advertisement was starkly negative. Millions took to social media to voice their suspicions about the new feature and mock the ad as “dystopian.” The morning after the Super Bowl, further outrage ensued as major media outlets picked up the story and amplified the public’s disdain for the commercial.
It’s not at all difficult to understand why millions of Americans were put off by the ad. If Ring could merge its customers’ personal security footage together to identify individual animals with AI, then it is a stone’s throw away from monitoring and tracking the movements of everyday people across millions of Ring doorbell cameras.
In fact, Ring already possesses the capability to identify individuals. Last December, Ring rolled out an optional “Familiar Faces” feature that used AI facial recognition. When enabled by a Ring user, it would store the biometric data of regularly seen individuals, whether they be family or the postman, and then notify the customer whenever one of these repeat visitors appeared again on their porch. This addition also faced significant backlash, with large numbers of people disliking the possibility of being scanned by facial recognition software without their consent while knocking on someone’s door.
None of this is helped by the fact that Ring, a subsidiary of Amazon, has had a shaky history with protecting customer privacy. In April 2024, the FTC charged Ring over $5.6 million for failing to implement sufficient safeguards to prevent employees from accessing customers’ at-home videos and, without customer consent, training algorithms on users’ feeds. Furthermore, Ring was accused of failing to provide “basic privacy and security protections,” thereby exposing its customers to potential hackers.
Ring’s Support Articles claim that Search Party “keeps [communities] safe” by finding missing pets and tracking potential wildfires. Justifying increased surveillance on Americans in the name of some common good or increased security has become a hallmark of the Digital Age, from the Patriot Act of 2001 to the Biden Administration’s collusion with Facebook to stop “misinformation.” The public’s overwhelming disapproval of Ring’s latest move to increase surveillance in the name of “[being] a hero in your neighborhood” is not arbitrary; it is rooted in our recent, clear experiences with overzealous, un-American oversight.