Ring’s Super Bowl Ad Promised to Find Lost Dogs. Viewers Saw a Surveillance Network Instead

Summary:

• Ring’s Super Bowl ad for AI-powered “Search Party” sparked concerns about mass surveillance and privacy implications. Critics warn of potential tracking issues.

• The ad features a lost pet recovery system that uses AI to scan Ring cameras, raising fears of broader surveillance.

• Ring’s history of privacy concerns, partnerships with law enforcement, and AI capabilities raise questions about tracking potential beyond lost pets.

Ring spent millions on a Super Bowl LX ad designed to tug at heartstrings. It showed lost dogs, worried families and a feel-good message: the company’s AI-powered “Search Party” feature can help reunite missing pets with their owners by scanning nearby Ring cameras for a visual match.

Instead of warm feelings, the commercial sparked alarm across the political spectrum — and sent the words “mass surveillance” trending on social media.

What the ad showed

The 30-second spot, narrated by Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, opened with images of lost-dog flyers. Siminoff explained that 10 million pets go missing in the United States each year and pitched Search Party as a modern solution. A Ring owner posts a photo of their missing dog in the Ring app. Outdoor Ring cameras in the area then use AI to scan saved footage for a potential match. If a camera flags something, its owner gets an alert and can choose whether to share the clip.

Amazon says the feature has helped find “more than a dog a day” since its launch and has pledged $1 million to equip more than 4,000 animal shelters with Ring cameras.

The reaction was immediate. Conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller called the ad “propaganda for mass surveillance.” Former New York City comptroller Brad Lander, a Democrat, warned that the same technology could be used to track people, writing, “they can do this to anyone.” GOP strategist Brady Smith called the spot “awfully dystopian.”

Others compared the commercial to an episode of “Black Mirror.” Across platforms, the core question was the same: if Ring’s AI can scan a neighborhood’s cameras for a specific dog, what stops it from doing the same for a specific person?

Ring says Search Party is limited to outdoor cameras, processes only animal images, and does not use human biometrics. Camera owners must decide on a case-by-case basis whether to share any clip. Searches expire after a set period unless renewed.

However, the feature is turned on by default. Ring owners who don’t want their cameras participating must manually opt out through the app’s Control Center for each individual camera — a design choice that privacy advocates say relies on user inertia to maintain high participation rates.

Ring founder Siminoff told GeekWire last year that the company gives “100% control” to customers. “It’s their data. They control it,” he said.

Why critics say it’s about more than dogs

Ring has a documented history of entanglement with law enforcement.

In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission secured a $5.8 million settlement from Ring over privacy lapses, including findings that employees and contractors had “broad and unrestricted access” to customer videos. Ring previously partnered with more than 2,000 police departments, allowing officers to request footage through the Neighbors app without a warrant. The company ended that direct-request tool in 2024 after sustained criticism.

But in October 2025, Ring announced a new partnership with Flock Safety, a company known for its AI-powered license plate readers used by thousands of police departments. The deal allows law enforcement agencies using Flock’s software to request Ring footage through the Community Requests feature. Ring says only local public safety agencies can make those requests, and that homeowners can ignore them.

The timing of the Flock partnership raised red flags. On the same day the deal was announced, 404 Media reported that ICE, the Secret Service and the Navy had access to Flock’s camera network. Flock and Ring have both denied direct partnerships with ICE. But according to research by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, federal agencies have gained access to Flock data by coordinating with local police departments that perform searches on their behalf.

Snopes investigated the claim that ICE can use Ring cameras for surveillance and declined to give it a definitive rating, noting that while no direct pipeline exists, the possibility cannot be ruled out given how data flows between systems.

Ring has also rolled out a separate feature called “Familiar Faces,” which uses AI to recognize specific people registered by the camera owner. Privacy groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU have warned for years that Ring’s expanding camera network amounts to a public-private surveillance grid.

Could the technology really be used to track people?

Technically, yes — though Ring says that is not its intent.

Surveillance experts note that the hardest part of any identification system is building the infrastructure for coordinated, neighborhood-wide search. Search Party demonstrates that capability already exists. Computer vision models trained to pick a specific dog out of thousands of video frames could, with additional training and a policy change, be adapted to recognize faces, clothing or license plates.

Matthew Guariglia, a surveillance and policing scholar, wrote on social media that the technology behind the ad could enable “license plate reading, face recognition, searching for suspects by description.”

The EFF wrote in a blog post after the Super Bowl that the “addition of AI-driven biometric identification is the latest entry” in Ring’s history of what it called disregard for individual privacy.

Ring maintains that Search Party footage is not included in the Community Requests system used by law enforcement and that the feature is not designed to process human biometrics.

About 30 percent of U.S. households have a video doorbell camera, according to Consumer Reports, with Ring among the most popular brands. That installed base means millions of cameras already cover streets, sidewalks and front porches nationwide.

Ring owners who want to disable Search Party can do so in the Ring app by navigating to the menu, selecting Control Center, tapping Search Party, and toggling the feature off for each camera individually.