Amazon's Ring Bends the Knee to Leftist Outrage over ICE, Abandons Partnership with Flock Safety

Amazon-owned Ring has terminated its partnership with surveillance technology company Flock Safety after facing intense backlash over Flock’s work with ICE.

The Verge reports that Ring has announced the cancellation of its planned integration with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that works with law enforcement agencies including ICE, following weeks of mounting public pressure and backlash from privacy advocates and customers.

In a statement published on Ring’s blog, the company explained its decision to end the partnership. “Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made the joint decision to cancel the integration and continue with our current partners,” the statement read. The company emphasized that the integration never launched and no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.

The partnership, originally announced in October 2025, became a flashpoint for controversy amongst leftists in recent weeks amid heightened concerns about immigration enforcement activities. Flock Safety has reportedly allowed ICE and other federal agencies to access its network of surveillance cameras, leading to widespread claims on social media that Ring was providing direct access to ICE. While Ring maintains these claims are inaccurate since the integration never went live, the company’s history of partnering with police departments intensified scrutiny of the arrangement.

Public anger reached a fever pitch in recent weeks, with Ring users being encouraged to destroy their cameras and many announcing on social media that they were discarding their Ring devices entirely.

The situation was further complicated by Ring’s Super Bowl advertisement for its new AI-powered Search Party feature. The commercial depicted dozens of Ring cameras in a neighborhood scanning the streets, ostensibly to locate a lost dog. While Ring insists the feature is designed specifically for finding lost pets and cannot be used to track people, the imagery raised alarm bells among privacy advocates who feared the technology could enable mass surveillance.

Adding to these concerns, Ring recently launched Familiar Faces, a facial recognition feature. The combination of Search Party and Familiar Faces has led critics to argue that the technological infrastructure for using neighborhood cameras to search for people through a mass surveillance network is now in place.

Ring spokesperson Yassi Yarger responded by characterizing the company’s products as purpose-driven technology rather than tools for mass surveillance. “Familiar Faces is an opt-in feature designed to give customers more control over the alerts they receive (e.g., ‘Mom at front door’ instead of ‘Someone at front door’) while keeping their data protected,” Yarger said in an email.

The Flock partnership was part of Ring’s Community Requests program, which launched in September 2024 after the company discontinued its controversial Requests for Assistance program. The earlier program had been criticized by consumer advocacy groups for allowing video to be provided to police without a warrant, raising civil liberties concerns.

Community Requests was designed to allow local law enforcement agencies using Flock’s software to integrate directly with the program. Under this system, public safety agencies can request video footage from users in a specific area during active investigations, but law enforcement must partner with a third-party evidence management system to use the service. Ring says this requirement helps maintain proper chain of custody for evidence.

Despite canceling the Flock integration, Ring defended the Community Requests program in its statement, citing its role in a recent criminal investigation. The company pointed to a shooting near Brown University in December 2025, where the Providence Police Department used Community Requests to solicit footage from residents. According to Ring, seven neighbors responded with 168 videos, and one video identified a key witness that helped police identify the suspect’s vehicle and solve the case.

Flock Safety was the second partner Ring announced for Community Requests, following Axon, a law enforcement technology company known for manufacturing Tasers. Ring spokesperson Yassi Yarger confirmed that the Axon partnership remains unaffected by the end of the Flock integration and that no other integrations are currently being explored.