Let's talk about Ring, lost dogs, and the surveillance state

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1:44This is Milo. Pets are family. But every year, 10 million go missing. And the way we look for them hasn't changed in years. Until now. One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now. Join the neighborhood at ring.com. Since it aired for a massive audience at the Super Bowl, Ring's search party commercial has become a lightning rod for controversy.

2:20It's easy to see how the same technology that can be used to find lost dogs can also be used to find people, and then used to invade our privacy in all kinds of uncomfortable ways, by cops and regular people alike. And Ring, in particular, has always been proud of its cooperation with law enforcement, which has raised big questions about civil rights, especially because Ring had proudly announced a partnership with a company called Flock Safety, whose systems have been accessed by ICE. There's some complication to that. We'll come back to it. Anyway, the backlash to that Ring ad was swift, intense, and effective.

2:56The data company Peakmetric says conversation about the ad on social media platforms like X actually hit a high two days after the Super Bowl, and the vibes, as they measured them, were strikingly negative. I mean, you know it's bad when Matt Nelson, who runs We Rate Dogs, is posting things like this. Neither Ring's products nor business model are built around finding lost pets, but rather creating a lucrative mass surveillance network by turning private homes into surveillance outposts and well-meaning neighbors into informants for ICE and other government agencies. Senator Ed Markey called the ad dystopian and said it was proof that Amazon, which owns Ring, needed to cease all facial recognition technology on Ring doorbells.

3:37He said, quote, This definitely isn't about dogs. It's about mass surveillance. And then on Thursday, February 12th, just four days after the Super Bowl, Ring announced that it was canceling its partnership with Flock in a statement first reported by The Verge's Gen2E. That statement is itself a lot. Ring says, quote, Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration. The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.

4:11Ring, in this statement, also goes on to say that Ring cameras were used by police in identifying a school shooter at Brown University in December 2025. That's an odd non-sequitur in a press release about canceling a controversial partnership that really explains a lot about Ring and how the company sees itself. As it happens, Ring's founder, Jamie Siminoff, was just on Decoder a few months ago, talking about how and why he founded the company, and in detail about why he sees Ring's mission as eliminating crime. Not selling cameras or doorbells or floodlights or anything else Ring makes, but getting rid of crime.

4:45And we actually talked about Dog Search Party, and how people might feel about that kind of surveillance, and how Ring works with the cops quite a bit. In fact, Jamie briefly left Ring in 2023, and the company slowed down its work with law enforcement. But ever since he's come back, the emphasis on crime and the work with police has only intensified. I asked him about it.

5:03Nilay Patel:Amazon said, we're going to stop working with police. You came back. Boy, Ring is going to work with police again, right? You have a partnership with Axon, which makes the taser that allows law enforcement to get access to Ring footage. Did that feel like a two-way door? Like you just made the wrong decision in your absence and you came back and said, we're going to do this again? I don't know if it's wrong or right. I think different leadership does different things. I do believe that I spent a lot of time going on ride-alongs. I spent a lot of times in areas that I'd say are not safe and for those people.

5:33And I've seen a lot of things where I think we can impact it in a positive way. And so we don't work with police in the way of like, it's, you know, I just want to be careful. What we do allow is that we allow agencies to ask for footage when something happens, and we allow our neighbors, which I'll say in this point customers, just to be clear, we allow our customers to anonymously decide whether or not they want to partake in that. So if they decide they don't want to be part of this sort of network and don't want to help this public service agency that asked them, they just say no. If they decide that they do want to, which, by the way, a lot of people do want to increase the security of their neighborhoods.

6:15A lot of people do want their kids to grow up in safer neighborhoods. A lot of people want to have the tools to do that and are in places that are dangerous. we give them the ability to say yes and make that more efficient for them to communicate with those public service agencies and also do it in a very auditable, you know, digital audit. Like that's the other side is that today, without these tools, if you wanted to have, you know, if a police officer wanted to go and get footage from something, they'd have to go and knock on the door and ask you. And that's not comfortable for anyone. It's also there's no digital audit trail of it.

6:50And with this, they can do it efficiently, but there's also an audit trail. It's also, it's very clear and it's anonymous. Jamie actually talked a lot about searching for dogs in this context, because one of the reasons he was so excited to come back to Ring was to use AI to search through the massive amounts of video generated by Ring cameras. In fact, he told me that Ring could not have built Dog Search five years ago because AI systems to do it weren't available. Jamie is nothing if not direct about this, which I appreciate. The man really thinks you can use AI in cameras to reduce or even eliminate crime.

7:21But I had a lot of questions about this. But when you put AI into it, now all of a sudden you have this human element that AI gives you. I think with our products in neighborhoods, and again, you have to be a little bit specific to it, I do see a path to get where we can actually start to get to where, yeah, we take down crime in a neighborhood to close to zero. And I even said there are some crimes that you can't stop, of course.

7:45Nilay Patel:Mechanically walk people through what you mean. You put enough ring products in a neighborhood, and then AI does what to them that helps you get closer to the mission of serial crime? The mental model or how I look at it is that AI allows us to have, if you had a security, if you had a neighborhood where you had unlimited resources. So every house had security guards, and those security guards were people that worked the same house for 10 years or 20 years. And I mean that from a knowledge perspective. So the knowledge they had of that house was extreme. Like they knew everything about you and that sort of residence and your family, how you lived, the people that come in and out.

8:23And then if that neighborhood had an HOA with, call it private security, and those private security were also sort of around and knew everything. Like what would happen? Like when a dog gets lost, you know, you'd be like, oh my gosh, my dog is lost. Well, they would call each other and one of them would find the dog very quickly. So how do we sort of change that and bring that into the digital world?

8:44Nilay Patel:Can I just ask you a question about that neighborhood specifically? Do you ever stop and consider that that neighborhood might suck? Right? Just like the idea that every house on my street would have all-knowing private security guards and I would have an HOA and that HOA would have a private security force. You can easily paint that to dystopia, right? Like everyone's so afraid that we have private cops in every corner and I'm paying HOA fees, which is just a nightmare of its own. I would assume you live in a safe neighborhood. I hope so, yeah. No, I mean today, I assume – I mean so like I go to – I mean if you want, I'll take you to a place where people live that they have to – when they get home from school, lock their doors and stay in their house and they can't go out.

9:26Nilay Patel:The model is everybody is so afraid that they have private cops is – I think the model is that doing crime in a neighborhood like that is not profitable. And I think that you want people to move into another job. Like, I don't think that crime is a good thing. I think safer neighborhoods allow for kids to grow up in a better environment. And I think that that allows them to be able to focus on the things that matter. And so that's kind of what we're going for. I just wanted to challenge the premise that, like, the model is there's cops everywhere, right? Like, that level of private security. Yeah, it's not cops.

10:00I think it's more that you have the ability to understand what's happening. It's not like, but I mean, yeah, I think, listen, it's a fair statement, I guess. I think, you know, I want to live in a safe place, so.

10:14Nilay Patel:There's a lot of intelligence in your neighborhood. Maybe it's private security. Maybe it's not. What does the AI do? Does it just make the camera smarter? It lets you do more intelligent assessment of what the cameras are seeing? Right now, we just say like motion detection, motion detection, motion detection. And it's funny, like when I started Ring, it go back, like the book was fun because I get to go back and like actually, you know, go through this whole like story of like how this thing came is like motion detection was like an amazing invention. Like you're in the airport and there's a motion at your front door and you look at it like, wow, this is crazy.

10:45Now it's like with AI, we shouldn't be telling you about motion detection. We should be telling you what's there. Like when should you look at it? Like when does it matter? And we shouldn't be bothering you all the time. That's what I mean about this idea of these sort of like a security guard at your house, security guard in the neighborhood. It's like there should be this intelligence in your neighborhood that can tell you when you should be trying to be part of something, but not always telling you. So it's not just like car, car, dog, you know, person, person. It's like, hey, look at this.

11:14Like you want to pay attention to this right now. As you can see, I really pressed Jamie on this because I still don't think it's entirely clear how Ring accomplishes the elimination of crime through AI alone. And all of that is why people don't trust Ring when it says it won't use systems that can find a dog to do things that would otherwise violate our rights. After all, if your goal is to use AI to stop crime and you've built a system that uses AI to find dogs, well, it's pretty obvious what you're going to do next, right?

11:40Nilay Patel:Do you think when you talk about zero out crime in a neighborhood, the idea that everyone in a neighborhood has one of those illuminated Ring signs in their front yard, is that enough of it? That's a part of it. Is that just enough of a deterrent? Like the bad guys will know, like my face is going to get captured on video and that will be analyzed by an AI and something will happen. Do you have to do more outbound deterrence? I think that's a part of it. I mean, awareness is a big part of it. I think there's ways with lights also, like lighting to do stuff that's a big part of it. I think having just, you know, if all of a sudden someone comes outside because something's an anomaly, that's a big part of it.

12:14Like it doesn't have to be – it doesn't have to be some sort of like crazy thing. Like I think a lot of these – and that's what I was saying is it's a lot of these little things add up to make that work.

12:25Nilay Patel:So when you think about, okay, we can bring it down – we can bring crime down a neighborhood to close to zero in a neighborhood. What are the sort of ratcheting steps, right? Is it everyone just gets the ring camera and your platform does all the work? Is it someone gets caught and they tell all their friends in jail that they got caught? don't go to like what are the steps i think it's really about bringing neighbors together uh for this particular thing so it's about how you individually and we've always thought about how like each house is its own node controlled by the neighbors so controlled by the person and that's like we that we kill i'll keep going back to that which is 100 is that your video is your control everything you're doing is in your control whether you sort of want to take part in anything is in your control.

13:09Like that has to be the first layer of all of it. But then when something happens, do you want to take part in it? So if, uh, if it gets, you get an alert that like this dog looks like this dog that's in front of your house, can you contact your neighbor? You can decide not to take part in it and then no one will ever know. And it's fine. It's just like basically deleted or you can take part in it. And so I think that's how we can do things that can make a neighborhood into this like node where individual neighbors are all sort of on their own, but when things happen, they can work together as they want to.

13:38Nilay Patel:And you think the AI will just sort of accelerate the process of working together? I think AI, it is like a co-pilot. It's their assistant. It's helping them to figure this out. Because again, if you're just getting every motion alert, and if you have eight cameras and you're just getting motion alerts all day, you can't, no human being can parse all this data. And so that's where I, that's kind of what I was talking to Jen about is that I do think I see now a way to use AI to help feed better data to us, which allows us to make better decisions and work together better. We'll be right back.

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15:44Get back, Harvey. We're taking a phone. Ah, let's go again, y 'all. With 24 monthly bill credits, finance agreement, 256 gigabytes,$830, eligible trade in example iPhone 13 and new qualifying line, $60 plus per month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees. For well-qualified customers, plus tax and$35 device connection charge, credits end and balance due if you pay off earlier cancel contact us$800 via virtual prepaid card card typically take 15 days after rebate submission no cash access and card expires in six months check out in 15 minutes per line visit t-mobile.com this episode is brought to you by indeed stop waiting around for the perfect candidate instead use indeed sponsored jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast it's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate c according to indeed data sponsored jobs have four times more applicants than and non-sponsored jobs.

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17:13Flock primarily makes cameras and systems to search video for the cops. You've probably seen Flock's devices where you live. They're those little solar-powered cameras and tracking devices affixed to streetlights or placed in the center of parking lots. They vacuum up huge amounts of data that the company claims is anonymized before it's made available to partners, which in most cases is local law enforcement. However, according to in-depth reporting from the excellent 404 Media, Flock's data has often found its way to ICE, the FBI, the Secret Service, and other law enforcement agencies without the use of a warrant, because that data is willingly provided by local police.

17:47Last month, under intense scrutiny about what working with Flock would mean, Ring said its Flock partnership was not yet live, and that quote, Ring has no partnership with ICE, does not give ICE videos feeds or backend access, and does not share video with them. For its part, Flux says the same thing, that it doesn't actually work with ICE, but rather local law enforcement. And it's those local agencies that work with ICE. This is the complication that I mentioned earlier. And if you're a decoder listener, you know where it's going. I asked Jamie about all those databases, who owns them, and what it means to connect them all up with AI.

18:17But when you connect a bunch of those databases, right?

18:20Nilay Patel:When you connect particularly to facial recognition, there's a turn in the privacy conversation where the stakes ratcheted up really high, right? Or maybe it's gone forever. How are you thinking about that kind of decision-making? Okay, we have a lot of intelligence in the AI. It's trivial for the AI to go connect to another store of information. That's a thing you can do with AI, especially at a big company like Amazon where you have lots of other stores of information. There's a line. What's the line for you? I mean, there is a responsibility, obviously, just to build safe products. So let's just start with that.

18:53We did announce facial, what we call familiar faces. But that's not connected. That's just for your, like, that's, you know, how your, I mean, your iPhone today, if you search your iPhone, it's crazy. Like search for someone's name in your photos and like their pictures come up. And so I do think there's a, there's a balance between not allowing technology to exist that should exist, that helps people and gives them more efficiency, gives them safer homes. And then also obviously not creating to where you're going to like this sort of dystopian place that, you know, is, is, is that. And so I think that, that is like, that's the responsibility, but like what we're doing familiar faces is we're just giving you the ability to say like, when my wife comes home, don't, don't, don't, you know, because it is like silly.

19:37Like, why do I get an alert when my wife comes home? I don't want it. Like, I don't need it.

19:41Nilay Patel:I'm asking this for a lot of reasons, but you know, I look at sort of broadly what's happening with surveillance footage out in the world. And I'm not saying Ring is participating in this. I'm just giving you the example. ICE has facial recognition systems, right? And they are arguing that a positive match in their facial recognition system is a definitive determination of someone's immigration status. That's way out there. I don't think you're doing that. But you can get to, OK, we have facial recognition. We have a bunch of evidence coming off of ring cameras. To make it really safe, you want to go from passive surveillance to active surveillance, right?

20:13Nilay Patel:That's what the studies show. Now we can just, the camera will literally identify the criminal by face and tell the cops this person tried to steal a car from this driveway. And that's the thing that would get you to actually zero out crime. There's a lot of risk in those steps. But if I draw the thread from what you're saying, it's all the way to the criminals won't come here because the cameras will know who they are and tell the cops. Are you willing to go that far? It's not about the – I think it's also that the cameras will alert people in a way that's – part of what made Ring and what made neighbors safer with like Ring 1.0, and I think we are in like Ring 2.0, is that there was no presence at the home.

20:52Like, how did people break into homes? It's like, they would go literally knock, knock, burglars. They go like, knock, knock, like no one was home. And then like, it was at three o 'clock in the afternoon. They'd go to the homes next door, find a place that was empty and they'd go in the home. Ring allowed you to now all of a sudden, like when someone comes up to the door, like you're like, oh, I got emotional alert. Hi, like what's going on? And so it gave presence to the home. So it didn't, you know, I don't think you have to go as far as that real time stuff to like get to where we're talking about.