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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. You probably saw this ad during the Super Bowl a couple weekends ago. This is Milo. That's our 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. It'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 complications to that. We'll come back to it. Anyway, the backlash to that Ring ad was swift, intense, and effective. The data company PeakMetrics as 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 measure them, were strikingly negative. I mean, you know it's bad when Matt Nelson, who runs WeRateDogs, is posting things like this. Neither Ring's products nor business model are built around finding lost pets, but rather create...
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. He 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 Gentooie. 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. Ring, in the 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 is eliminating crime, not selling cameras or doorbells or floodlights or anything else Ring makes, but getting rid of crime. And 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. 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, they 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, and 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, I just want to be careful. It's like, we're not.
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. A 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, with a 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. And 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. Jimmy 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. Jimmy 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. But 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, this is like, 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 like, 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. 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. And 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'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 that's kind of like, so how do we sort of change that and bring that into the digital world? Can I just ask you a question about that neighborhood specifically? Do you ever stop and consider that that neighborhood might suck?
Right. Like I've 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. I would assume you live in a safe neighborhood. I hope so. Yeah. No, I mean, today I'm assuming it's like I go to 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, you know, stay in their house and can't go out. And 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 privacy. Yeah, it's not cops. I think it's more that you have the ability to understand what's happening. It's not like, but I mean, I think, listen, it's a fair statement, I guess. I think, you know, I want to live in a safe place, so.
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. It's 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. Now 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
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. Like you, 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 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? 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 the 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 be 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. Like 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. So when you think about, okay, we can bring it down, we can bring crime down in 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 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 neighbor. So controlled by the person. And that's like, I'll keep going back to that, which is a hundred percent 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. Like 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 a.
If 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. And you think the AI will sort of accelerate the process of working together? I think AI 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, if you have eight cameras and you're just getting motion alerts all day, you can't, you know, no human being can parse all this data.
And so 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. Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so do your company's security risks and requirements. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. Their agentic trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across more than 400 integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year round. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work.
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This is where we get to Flock Safety, which Ring announced a partnership with last October. Flock 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. Last 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 back-end access, and does not share video with them. For its part, Flock 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. But when you connect a bunch of those databases, right, when you connect particularly facial recognition, there's a turn in the privacy conversation where the stakes ratchet up really high, right, where 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 on Amazon where you have lots of other stores of information. There's a line. What's the line for you?
I mean, there's a responsibility, obviously, just to like build, you know, safe products. So let's just start with that. We did announce facial, like we call familiar faces, but that's not connected. That's just for your, like, that's, you know, how you're, I mean, your iPhone today, if you search your iPhone, it's crazy. Like search for someone's name in your photos and they're 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.
So I think that's the responsibility. But what we're doing with familiar faces is we're just giving you the ability to say, when my wife comes home, don't, don't, don't, you know, because it is silly. Like, why do I get an alert when my wife comes home? I don't want it. Like, I don't need it. 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 an 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, okay, 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? 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 camera. I think it's also that the cameras will alert people in a way that's, you know, 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. Like, how did people break into homes? It's like, they 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 a motion alert. Hi, like what's going on? And so it gave presence to the home. So I don't think you have to go as far as...
that real-time stuff to get to where we're trying. I think it's more of the anomaly detection and allowing people to make it so that if someone comes in, that you're aware of what's happening around the neighborhood. Because right now, there's no awareness of what's going on around it. So I don't think it's as dystopian as where you're going. Certainly, it's not what we're building. And I do think we can impact things to a really high level in neighborhoods, which, again, to the Gen 2 thing, in neighborhoods is what we're talking about, that with AI and what we're doing with a bunch of rings together. And I think even Dog Search Party is a good way to look at it, which is how do these cameras come together for good in the neighborhood? We'll be right back.
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Today, the backlash against surveillance has led Ring to kill that flock deal. The company is also doing damage control about dog search, telling The Verge that the technology that powers the search party is not, quote, capable of being used to find people, and that there's no indication that such features are on future roadmaps. Sure, it seems obvious that Ring has a lot of trust to earn back here, and certainly that we're all thinking about what it means to put internet-connected security cameras on our homes. I think that's good, and it's certainly overdue. But let me complicate this just a little for you.
At the same time this conversation on Ring is happening, we're also watching regular people record the police in ICE with their cell phones, capturing critical documentary evidence about how those agencies are violating the rights of everyday Americans in ways that is leading to change, however slow. Here's Minnesota Governor Tim Walz telling people to hit record when they see ICE so the footage can be used in future prosecutions. And if you see these ICE agents in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record. help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution. And just this week, the FBI released a video that Google appears to have gone and specially recovered from Nest camera systems at Nancy Guthrie's house in order to help identify her kidnapper. That's a lot of video that's been captured and used in ways that maybe don't feel so invasive. In some ways, maybe even feel good. But the systems that create, store, and share that video, they're all the same.
And the guardrails around them are just as weak as whatever makes us feel uncomfortable about Ring. I'm not sure how to feel about all that video, especially in a world where AI makes it easy to fake. And having some source of truth seems more important than ever. I ask you about that too, whether Ring will control all the video and sign it with some metadata so people can ensure it's real. Presuming we have to have an authenticated server, right? There's a crime in my neighborhood and I'm opted in. And we're going to say the cops can only get the video from the Ring server because that's where we know it's true. I might not be as in control of my video anymore. No, because not how it's built and not while I'm here. Because the way it works is that you will decide if you want to or not want to share that video, which is your property, with someone.
Now, once you share it, then it is like up to us to figure out to your point of like, how do we share it? How do we make sure that the digital fingerprint goes all the way through? Or how does that chain of custody work of this video to make sure there's no fake in the process of it? I think this is why it is important to build these systems. It's going to be important. I mean, this is like where also government is going to have to step in. We're going to have to deal with this across the board because we also have video coming off of cell phones. So we do need to figure out how to build. And there's going to be companies, you know, Axon would probably be one of the companies. I don't want to speak for them.
But, you know, they have evidence.com. So to build these evidentiary systems to take in, because Ring is one part of taking in sort of data around call-to-crime scene. You know, cell phone video is maybe even more still today than that. So how do you take that in? How do you make sure that it actually was captured on the iPhone directly and not, you know, tampered with between the two things? We're going to have to figure it all out. I think we do have to work together on it. And it is, you know, the AI stuff is pushing us to sort of have to do it. I am proud with Ring is that we have built it so that you can, you know, take it directly and keep it on the server so you can understand where it was, where it's from, where it was created. And we have that big digital fingerprint.
on it and the audit trail of it. But I think you're going to have to do that more and more as this world is changing. You're just not going to be able to see just because someone sends you a video doesn't mean it's true. You get the feeling we'll be coming back to that idea quite a lot in the years to come. But today, Ring has canceled its deal with Flock. And Flock itself is putting up blog posts flatly saying it doesn't have a contract with ICE and noting that Ring's other partner, Axon, does have a contract with ICE. In the meantime...
Dog Search Party is still active and on by default, although you can just go into settings in the Ring app and flip it off. And the enormous amount of video that we're all generating all the time is still being uploaded to servers run by big companies that have their own dealings with governments and law enforcement agencies far outside of our control. There's a lot of potential solutions to all of these problems, a lot of ways to design regulations that might balance out privacy and civil liberties with the real needs of police. But right now, in 2026 America, I'm not sure we're really going to be able to do that. So in the meantime, we're going to keep pushing the leaders of these companies on what they really mean and keep running the answers so you can listen and decide. I also think it's about time we all started thinking about how the technology we use to make our own lives better affects other people.
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